Hmm... I guess I'll be the one who posts the Fauxgeek's Lament on this thread. Reading stuff like this always makes me feel like a second-rate geek! I've had

Hmm... I guess I'll be the one who posts the Fauxgeek's Lament on this thread. Reading stuff like this always makes me feel like a second-rate geek! I've had my fair share of soldering iron burns (for my senior project in college, I cracked open an RC car's remote and connected it to a BASIC stamp, which I controlled via RS-232 and a network socket), but the parts of this article which the author considers "easy" stuff are still a mystery to me. For example, "According to the application note I could use a simple signal diode, so I just pulled a 1N4148 diode out of my component drawer." A simple what diode? A 1N4-what diode? My component drawer? I don't even have a... help! S.O.S.! Man overboard! I'm sure that I could come to feel more comfortable with stuff like this if I went out of my way to learn more about it, but the applicable extent of my electronics hacking day-to-day has been unplugging the rumble packs from my Xbox360 controller. Most of the things I use on a day-to-day basis are not devices that I feel comfortable screwing around with!