brainwagon

I’ve been interested in compression technology of all kinds for what seems like forever. Saturday I did some informal testing of the Ogg Vorbis codec, and the new speech only codec Speex. I compress all my music (small collection that it is) using Ogg Vorbis. I’ve found that 96kbps Ogg is either indistinguishable or slightly [...]

When I was probably eight or ten years old, I remember going to the Book Vault, our local bookstore and seeing Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make a World. I remember asking my mom to buy it for me, but somehow I forgot about it, even though I thought it was a really cool book. Well, [...]

Well, I was working on some software to do panoramic image stitching over the weekend. Several hours of work yielded some phase correlation code that seems to work well about 50% of the time, and fail tragically 50% of the time. My brain wasn’t up to the task of further analysis, so I decided to [...]

I’ve been interested in using digital cameras to capture panoramas, and yesterday I had my cheapy $50 digital camera with me, so I shot 19 handheld shots that whirled around me as I stood outside my place of business. This is the result: I deleted the applet, it made loading my main page too slow. [...]

I’m fairly happy with Movable Type, but I am constantly on the lookout for new weblogging software. During one of my surf sessions, I ran accross blosxom, a very simple weblog written in seven pages of perl. It’s a very cute system, and has some terrific ideas. Inspired by its brevity and power, I’ve set [...]

The BBC is announcing the discovery of a squid thought to be larger than any discovered so far. The so-called giant squid or Architeuthis dux may have a mantle which reaches 2.25 meters, but the new squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) had a mantle 2.5 meters in length, and is thought to be a juvenile. Scientists have [...]

A Panoramic Camera is a terrific webpage by Giorgio Carboni. The rest of his website is awsome too, and includes many nifty science projects. His panoramic camera though is awesome, and the construction description is detailed and interesting. But most important, images that he takes with it are awesome, and include some beautiful Italian cityscapes.

Low light CCD Camera Data is just an awesome collection of links. I modified a supercircuits camera to have manual gain control, but now some better cameras seem to be widely available. I’ll have to look at this some more later.

Los Angeles Times – Editor’s Note details the dismissal of Brian Walksi, former photographer for the LA Times. He produced an altered photograph of a British soldier directing Iraqi citizens to take cover by montaging two photos taken several seconds apart. The trouble is, some people appear in the resulting montage twice. Oops! The L.A. [...]