I am not overly familiar with AVR kit these days but in general you have something of a chicken and egg problem (you can probably reprogram a preprogrammed* device without anything special, you can not program a new device without hardware) - in your case you will need a programmer of some form. The AVR kit does allow a measure of wire it up and press program stuff though using either a serial port (ISP) or a parallel port but this is where I might come unstuck or at least unable to properly vet the designs.
*some devices have their own bootloader to allow you to flash code into the remaining space using the onboard stuff (pretty much by attaching wires and having it go) but chances are you got yours totally blank. Some even newer devices allow simple USB programming too.
I appreciate the efforts of the homebrew builders but for a first chip I am not sure- they work but should they go wrong you are going to be learning far more about such chips and parallel/serial ports than you might care to for a basic project/first go around with such things (we have probably both seen this countless times in flash cart world- someone buys an R4 and while you can beat them into working shape it would have been so much easier to just buy a good card from the outset).
Still if you are sticking with homebrew esque things then
http://www.ladyada.net/make/usbtinyisp/ (they have a kit as well) if you do want to splash out.
If it is is get it done without so much as a bit of stripboard
http://www.instructables.com/id/Ghetto-Pro...with-AVR-micro/ is truly basic and I have seen it work once or twice (the guy who built the programmer was a top flight electrical type though).
The trouble with some of these is the lack for high voltage programming (a kind of complete reset option)- you probably will not need it but if you manage to mangle something it is worth being able to pull it off.
Lastly from that link-
"About 4 hours into your sleep the AVR microcontroller pulse LEDs that shine through your eyelids"
You can knock this out with a basic timer circuit (a capacitor, resistor and transistor- you might need a relatively big capacitor or a big resistor to pump charge time up into the hours range) and a simple pulse circuit (555 timer-
http://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/wavefo...oscillator.html )- indeed depending on how crude you want to get you can probably do it with something like
http://www.cappels.org/dproj/simplest_LED_...er_Circuit.html
