In other news, I finally got all parts for my HTPC. It’s assembled and now I can go on with installation and configuration. Got a little more expensive than I was planning, but I’ll make it worth it. And I already have a lot of plans for additions. Starting with some Wii-Mote utilization (I showed this to Junkie a few weeks ago and now he’s already ahead of me… dang), over to using it to control some other equipment, which, as the final stage, could be triggered by voice recognition. Not sure if I can make any of these plans real, but we’ll see.

Speaking of projects. Next week the HTPC will be running (report coming up) and in a few weeks everything should be fine, so that I can forget about the machine and just use it. There’ll be a space in my project list. Well, maybe there wont. The Dungeoneering Dad, has a list of gaming tables. That inspired me to design one myself (in Blender, so I work at stuff there again). Maybe even build it with the Horde. We’ll see. Would be so cool to play at a table like that.

Speaking of RPG. I’m the gamemaster again for a few weeks. That will be fun for a change. Now I can dig out some ideas from my old Rasundra campaign, which we never finished. Downside is, that it’s so much work… but I’ll manage somehow.

• Building a Home-Theater-PC (HTPC)
  This is a combination of two ideas. First I wanted to hook up my television set to my computer, so I could put some videos, photo shows and stuff onto my TV. Very nice if you have guest and don’t want them all to swarm behind the computer. The second idea was to get a hi-fi system. I can only listen to music when my computer is running. Which is okay, as long as I don’t try to do something that puts some heavy load on the machine. But as soon as I play a game or render some image, it’s over. So now the idea is to set up a HTPC. This also allows me to run a file server, record from TV and do a bazillion other things. I also plan on connecting a wii-mote for some nice IR cam experiments. Of course it’ll run linux. Finding silent, electricity saving and linux-and-htpc-software compatible hardware will be the hardest part. And sparing a few hundred bucks, when I also need to get a car.
• lonks
  This is actually an old project. Two years ago I wrote a link manager, so I can keep my bookmarks online and don’t need to carry around a file for this or use a social bookmarking service (which wasn’t my idea of having my private links online). I stopped after it got usable for me. The original idea was an online service, but since laws are complicate, I didn’t pursue that idea any longer. A few weeks ago I got hooked up again. I will recode lonks and add lots of features. Not sure yet, if I will start a community, but if all goes well, there’ll be an open source edition for personal use on their own server.
• 3D
  Oh, I’ve been slacking on this stuff way too long. I’ve got dozens of ideas, but I really got to get more familiar with Blender again. Hopefully I can work on this soon enough. More when the time comes.
• Universal Aerial Video Plattform (UAVP)
  There’s an open source project to build a quadcopter where you can attach a camera to. This is really a nice combination of tasks. I get to build something, can mess around in the code (unlike other interesting projects these days (Google Android, WowWee robotics, etc) it’s not written in Java), get something to play around with (boys need toys) and can finally do something photography related. Well, this project is months away for me due the other stuff, but hey, maybe in summer.

Well, so much for a quick roundup of the major productive stuff I’m planning to spend time on. More details when there’s progress and/or something to write.