brainwagon

Today’s gem is Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, which is not only interesting because of the subject matter, but also because it has a number of really nice bird prints like the black tailed paroquet reproduced on the right. It’s really great that Project Gutenberg is reproducing more and more illustrated books [...]

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing out An Audio Blogging Manifesto, both in text format and as an mp3 file with inspiring background music.

Sigh. XM Radio pulls PC hardware amid piracy concerns | CNET News.com Guess they aren’t interested in taking my money.

Apple has just released a new iMac G5, and damn, it does look awfully cute. I like the trend of shrinking the footprint of computers, and in the grand scheme of things, the prices aren’t terrible considering it includes a 17″ LCD monitor and a new 1.6ghz G5 processor for only $1300. Very cool stuff.

Sometimes a single sentence is enough to kick your brain into thinking about things in a different way than you have before. This rant was keyed off the sentence “There is no limit to the amount of energy an industrialized society will use per capita”. I’d never really thought of it in precisely this way [...]

Warning: not for the especially squeamish: eMJA: Myxoedema and a lost wedding ring

During one of my many explorations of the net, I found mention of a program called TimeTrax, a program which converts songs broadcast over XM Satellite Radio into mp3 files that you can play on your computer. This is especially nifty since XM radio doesn’t have DJ’s or the like, and you end up with [...]

BoingBoing reports that Joshua Kingberg was arrested at the RNC in New York for operating his bicycle mounted dot matrix printer. It’s an enormously cool hack: you basically ride the bike and it leaves a message in its trail in the same way a dot matrix printer works. The message is written in a water [...]

Thanks to the gents on Metafilter for calling my attention to Kenneth Snelson’s exposition on Tensegrity. He has a nice presentation that shows the relationship between traditional weaving and tensegrity structures. Great stuff!

Well, it’s Monday, and I’m back from my weekend trip to Disneyland. With the wife, son, and two of his friends in tow, we conquered California Adventure and the classic park. I must admit, I had a great time. Despite my 40 year old state, I decided that I would try to go on as [...]

Hamster-Powered Night Light is a really nice school project that the people at otherpower.com helped an eight grader realize. They modified a hamster wheel to be a custom generator, and also rigged an ordinary bicycle computer to give them “telemetry”. Neat stuff, and definitely helps student learn about motors, generators, and magnetism.

Just a quick note after a memorable game. Rich Harden and Bruce Chen battled and each gave up no runs. Chen had a no-hitter into the sixth inning, when it was broken up by a single by Eric Chavez. Chen left without giving up a run in seven innings, relieved by Ryan, who pitched a [...]

Growl. I’m irritated today because I realize that there are magic djin inside my computer, and I don’t know how to harness them to do my evil bidding. Well, or at least my bidding. Or maybe I just haven’t had enough caffeine yet. I’m trying to figure out how I can use video and audio [...]

One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while is this remake of The Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone Episode. An interesting bit of trivia was that Rod Serling was the writer of both. The production notes are actually quite illuminating: the editor read the introductions and closing narrations for every [...]

Those lads at engadget.com have a nice tutorial as part of their How To Tuesday series on producing 3-D anaglyphs using free software. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a nice link.