Recently, one of my credit card numbers changed. This ends up being a pretty annoying process as you never remember to update all the various things that use this card.

This time, I received a nice email from Amazon saying that my Kindle magazine subscriptions would be canceled if I didn’t login and change the credit card number. Fair enough. It took me a few days to log in, by which time they had canceled my subscription. Also fair enough.

Over Easter weekend I was given a Counterpoint SA-20 hybrid audio amp and matching SA-1000 preamp. The list price for the set was $3890 in 1989 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $7412 in 2013. Not bad for the low price of “Get it out of my basement!”

When I got it home, I plugged it in and immediately let the Magic Smoke out. It looks like the driver for one side was damaged before the amplifier was put into storage. According to the former owner of the part, the same thing happened the first time he plugged it in. Internet searches show this to be a pretty typical problem with this amplifier. The power MOSFETs are apparently a bit delicate.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to go to the Maine Botanical Gardens

Here are some pictures:

I’ve been playing with the MSP430 microcontrollers for a while. I’m a fan of using open source tools whenever possible, so I’d like to use mspgcc instead of the TI supplied CCS or IAR compilers. Recently I ran into a thread on the 43oh forum detailing a plugin that a user named XPG wrote for Eclipse.

Everything seems to work fine in the latest version (as of 2012-08-12) of his plugin with the exception of mspdebug. Eclipse seemed to be unable to communicate with the debugger for some reason. The steps that I followed to get the plugin working were the following: