Invendiscovry

  Two of my SP0264-021s next to my SP0256A-AL2 A year or so back, I was wanting to see how I could add voices to my Arduino projects. After some research, I came across the SP0256 series of speech synthesis chips. I decided I needed to get my hands on the SP0256A-AL2 variant, which could produce any word via a set of allophones .   The SP0264 is a chip in the same series, apparently slightly newer. It's pin for pin compatible with the SP0256, so when I saw some with the number "SP0264-021" on eBay, I thought "The number on it is slightly different, but the datasheet says "Natural Speech", so it must be the same, right?". Wrong. After buying one, then two more after I thought I'd blown the first one, I hadn't been able to get any more than noise, static that at times almost sounded like something but definitely wasn't what it was supposed to be. Frustrated and disappointed, I gave up and stuck them in a drawer somewhere. Later, I got...

So a week or so ago, I was watching a video and the person mentioned how dried out moss will "ressurect" when it gets water again, even after a long time being dead.   A few days ago, I found some bits of bone dry moss that had been stored in the hot, dry trunk of our old school bus for at least a few years. So, I decided to see if it was true!   Much to my own surprise, they revived within a minute of being dunked in a bowl of water, and are still sitting happily where I left them on the board I did the experiment on. Maybe sometime if I find a small glass globe, I'll put them in there and start some sort of self-sustaining ecosystem...

   My Sony Ericsson Xperia X8, running Android 4.0   A while back, I stumbled across a 2010 android smartphone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 . I decided to get one, and one was shortly acquired for the extravagant price of 11.00, free shipping, unused in original box. In order to excuse my frivolous spending on this obsolete gadget, I challenged myself to get it to a point where I could use it as a 'daily driver', and have all the features I use daily on my current phone (an iPhone 4S).   First of all, here's a quick spec list (Borrowed from Wikipedia): Screen: 3.0-inch capacitive touchscreen, 320×480 CPU: 600 MHz ARMv6 processor RAM: 175 MB Storage: 128 MB  Android 1.6 (Donut), Android 2.1 (Eclair)   A few notes about memory: Most modern 2016 smartphones have about 2-4 GB of ram, 175MB is about 4% of that. Built-in memory is also minuscule, 128 MB is about 0.8% of 16GB, the standard low option storage amount for modern smartphones. Yikes! ...