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Thanks William S. for the Gmail invitation!

Got a DVD-ROM drive for my HP, you know those thin PCs with parts you can't buy in a normal PC shop and cost twice as much as normal parts. Now this DVD-ROM drive is a normal 5-and-a-bit. While every HP saleperson would say it's impossible to use such a drive in a HP, my drill and velcro thought otherwise. Most people would say to use the much cheaper ductape solution, but Velcro allows you to upgrade the machine later on in a much cleaner fashion.
Suprisingly this works perfectly. Especially considering I have my cellphone always nearby.

Note that I removed the cover before drilling a hole through it.

Life is odd. 2 of my friends are pregnant, well, one is pregnant and the other his gf is. Feels like I'm being dragged into adulthood as well.
Worse is the good life is almost over. Sometime next month I'll probably be employed, so I'll be no longer paid by the state to stay out of harms way. I'll have more money and no time to spend it.

Sheesh, Last month has been a busy time. Exams are the number one cause of stress in my life during this part of the year. Not to mention they really interfere with usefull projects. Anyway they are over and I've got nothing to worry about until september.
What made this period special is I finaly found my gf. We've met throught the internet, so I guess this proves miracles do happen.
Enjoy the summer and may you all find love as well.

This week has been great. I've spend all of monday evening building a ultrasone distance meter. I had already build the 40Khz oscillator on a standard pcb and build the 2 stage AC-amplifier on a breadboard. After adding a NAND schmitt trigger as a wave shaper the whole thing worked like a charm. Range from about 3cm to about 164cm (probably more, but the ceilling got in the way) accuracy: 1cm. Me happy!

So tuesday I've spend the evening soldering this circuit on the pcb too. When done all I got was noise. So my oscillator floods the receiver with noise. So now I'm going to spend the rest of next week getting the noise out of the receiver. aarrgh!

Lesson learned: don't mix sensitive analog amplifiers and fast digital electronics without proper noise handling.

But I'm not defeated yet! I've shielded the receivers wires, added a quick-and-dirty LC-filter on Vcc and GND of the receiver, and I'm trying to add a bandpass filter before the AC-amplifiers.

I'll get this to work or die trying
(the last is a very possibility. My ancient osciloscoop has a metal frame and wasn't grounded. I tend to wear a ESD grounder. Touching the oscilloscoops frame while wearing this grounder tends to be, well, a shocking experience. Now I've grounded the scoop too. Matter of keeping this a bit safe. Until I discover another ungrounded electric device that is.)!