A busy week, and a trend that looks set to continue for the next fortnight at least.

The main part of the week has been spent working on the set-top box project - so far mostly building hardware and installing Linux, followed by lots of fighting with device drivers in an attempt to make it talk out of the TV outputs rather than just to a monitor. As a result the office is resembling a bit of a computer graveyard with machines in assorted states of construction, and as I type, one of the machines is sat in the corner chugging through a Windows install to let me double-check that the hardware is at least functioning.

Mid-week saw me out of the office helping the guys at Tinker.it deliver an intensive day-long hardware hacking workshop. It was a full-on day, starting at quarter-to-eight, but every team had some kind of functioning hardware and software demo by the end, with many also feeding data into or out of Twitter. I also got to meet a collection of Tinker.it's other hardware hacking "friends" and they were all great to work alongside. Hopefully our paths will cross again in the future.

The train journeys to and from London gave me opportunity to work on the slides for a talk I gave on Thursday evening, although searching Flickr over an intermittent 3G connection isn't something I'd recommend. As a result, some of Thursday day was given over to slide preparation as well, and all seemed to go well at Ignite Liverpool; an event I'd helped pull together in addition to kicking off the talks. My slides and some thoughts are over on my personal blog and I even got my name in the local paper (although as usual, Bubblino upstaged me by getting his picture in too).