brainwagon

Allright, allright, I’m getting too fascinated by these tiny computer things, but I was reminded of these guys gumstix.com – all things small. Cute thing: it includes a 400 Mhz processor, a Bluetooth module and an MMC slot for flash. For $214. Neat!

This is mostly just a test designed to try out Flickr‘s Post-To-Blog functionality. Still, it’s a nice picture of my lovely wife munching Dim Sum at the King of Kings in Oakland. I’m not the biggest Dim Sum fan, but this place is among the better I’ve visited. And of course, my wife is spectacular! [...]

CNN is running a story about students’ lack of knowledge about the First Amendment that is getting quite a bit of blog space. Short excerpts: Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only [...]

Garmen just released a new product: the GPS 10, a simple Bluetooth GPS that you can use with your PDA or laptop. A great idea, except that the price is $267. C’mon. You can get a GPS with a nice display for about $100: why so much for the stripped down model without a display? [...]

Those guys over at PVRblog are on top of everything TiVo, and today that includes news that they’ve released TiVo’s Home Media Engine. You can get the developer code at sourceforge, and they are apparently going to run a contest for the best applications that can run on the TiVo. What’s it all about? You [...]

This link is a guide for kids, but us adult podcasters can certainly learn a thing or two from this article. Transom Tools: SHOUT OUT – A Kid’s Guide to Recording Stories Link courtesy of I Love Radio.org.

Wherein your host tries out his new Behringer UB802 mixer (with mixed results) and goes on about his new project: hacking on “the Slug”, a Linksys NSLU2 network storage device. For all the enthusiastic support that I’ve read for the Behringer as a decent mixer for the beginner, I’m still getting a substantial amount of [...]

Science fiction entries in Project Gutenberg are fairly hard to find, but here is one I haven’t read in a very long time:The Moon Pool, by A. Merritt. I’ll have to reread it again, my recollections are that it was vaguely reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft. Check out a more well-informed review.

Interesting link of the day, courtesy of Boing Boing: FM 34-40-2 Basic Cryptanalysis. The truth is this kind of cryptography is pretty much of historical interest only, but I find historic codes to be, well, interesting.

Awesome hack, courtesy of ipodlinux.org. Ran on the front page of slashdot, but they don’t need my link.

Wikipes is a cool site which creates a global cookbook using Wiki technology. There aren’t a whole lot of recipes yet, and they seem to be less sophisticated than those on epicurious, but I like the idea.

Thanks to Doc Searls for pointing me at Jack Shafer’s article Blog Overkill at Slate. I think Shafer makes some excellent points. I do feel that many bloggers have overplayed both the idea of blogs and their own skills in an attempt to promote themselves as being as legitimate and as important as the more [...]

Keeping with a musical theme, Engadget had a nice nice entry with lots of cool links. Try checking them out, including this wacky instrument, complete with Quicktime Video, and the cool sounding homebrew SoundLab Mini Synth, a $30 circuit board that you can turn into a $60 synth. It sounds pretty cool.

Those clever BoingBoing-ers found another cool item for you “music” loves: a Hormel can ukelele. It doubles as a lunchbox. It’s a pity that they don’t include a link to how it sounds. This is just the kind of impromptu folk instrument that I’m beginning to find fascinating.

Well, I couldn’t resist. I went ahead and bought one of the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2 boxes (colloquially referred to as a slug) and began tinkering. It’s a fun little box, and along with the help of guys on the irc channel #nslu2-linux I’ve got it running with a 20gb drive attached. In fact, I even [...]