If you’re looking at buying a Nintendo DSi or the newest Nintendo DSi XL (Or LL as it’s called in Japan) and don’t know which NDS Flash card you should be purchasing, then look no further than the R4i DSi flash card.   The R4 DS is one of the most popular flash card for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS lite console.  So it only stands to reason that their DSi version would be equally as good as the DS version is.

And that reasoning is sound.  We carry all kinds of flash cards for the Nintendo DSi console, and our favorite here at the office is in fact the R4i DSi.  But that means much less than the fact that 7 out of 10 customers, who purchase flash cards for the Nintendo DSi, purchase the R4i DSi for their Nintendo system.  That, I think, speaks far more about the quality and support of the product than our own in house opinions.  If you’re shopping for an NDS Flash Card, then the R4i for the DSi is the unit you’ll definitely want to look at.

You can find out more about the R4i DSi by visiting our R4i Product page.

We like to run the newest software available. We often encounter problems and things that don’t work because of this, but with open source that just give you the opportunity to contribute and make the package better. Now you can take the fun and daring of bleeding edge to your phone by installing the latest Linux kernel on the Nexus One. [Jon Lech Johansen] wrote up that eight step process to install 2.6.32, which should take you just minutes if you already have the Android SDK installed. If you don’t what are you waiting for?

[Firestorm_x1] put together a tutorial about interfacing an analog joystick with a microcontroller. These analog sticks are easy to find; he got his from Goodwill but we’ve got a couple in our junk box right now. The stick uses variable resistors to report its position so it’s just a matter of reading and interpreting that data. After explaining the concepts he demonstrates how to use the joystick to control a Basic Stamp 2 based robot, the Boe-Bot. This could easily be adapted for use with other robot platforms.

Adafruit Industries has just added an Arduino shield footprint to their EagleCAD library. If you don’t know, the Arduino headers use non-standard pin spacing. Learn to deal with it, there’s too many Arduino shields in production to have any hope for a change in the future. This footprint should make it a lot easier to design your own boards. If you use this package make sure you’re getting the library from their github, they’ve been adding parts regularly. Setting up version control will make sure you always have the latest libraries.

[Thanks pt]

True randomness can be hard to come by in the digital world. [Andy Green] is making it easier to get true entropy by using this random USB dongle. The Whirlygig uses a CPDL to gather data from a set of of oscillators. The oscillators have a constantly fluctuating frequency due to temperature changes; if they run faster they generate more heat which in turn slows them down. This, along with the variable latency associated with polling a USB device, gives great depth of randomness. The device is detected and mounted under ‘/dev/hw_random’ and can then be fed into ‘/dev/random’ using the ring-tools package. [Andy's] done a lot of testing, both on the hardware, and on the quality of randomness. We didn’t see an option to order this but he’s got hardware and firmware repositories so that you can throw one together yourself.

[Thanks Zunk]