brainwagon

We had a screening of the new Joss Whedon movie Serenity in our screening room at Pixar. I have been awaiting the movie ever since I first heard of it, and was not disappointed. This movie is great, with superb performances, acting, dialogue, plot and action. I’m not going to spoil a minute of the [...]

Twice in one day… Scoble responds to lots of criciticism that he’s evangelizing a crappy format, and really misses the forest for the trees. Actually, he misses the trees too. Earlier today I recorded this podcast, which I wasn’t going to post, but if Scoble’s going to go on, I think it actually merits it. [...]

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a neat little astronomy book, published in 1873 by Richard A. Proctor. It lists a number of half hour tours of the sky, each highlighting either a set of constellations or planets. It’s pretty brief, and certainly better modern guides exist, but it’s still a neat little thing to peruse through, [...]

James Robertson doesn’t much like OPML or RSS as file formats, and tells us why: Ye gods, it’s time someone came out and said something. OPML is a really, really crappy format. Really crappy. I had massive headaches implementing OPML support for import/export in BottomFeeder. Why? Because there’s no real specification. Like everything Dave Winer [...]

I’ve been interested in the world of pseudo-science for a long time, ever since reading Chariots of the Gods as a young boy, and then realizing what a load of bullocks the whole thing was. What’s amazing to me is that by age twelve or so, I managed to figure it out, but that some [...]

Well, today is one of those rare days when I miss two days of work: I’m home sick with body aches, a headache, stuffed head, and a bit of a fever. I was also a bit hungry, so I decided to dig through the fridge, freezer and pantry to see what I could make. I [...]

You might know him as the giant squid, and Japanese researchers Kubodera and Mori caught him on film when he attacked a bait trap 900m below the surface of the North Pacific off of the Ogasawara Islands. Size: about 8 meters. That’s a lot of calamari. Link via the Panda’s Thumb. Links: A PDF of [...]

My Cyborg Name: Make your own. Thanks Carmen for pointing this one out.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger Windows isn’t what whas broken. Windows DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES were what was broken. The two are intimately related. Can you honestly say that you have an example of a program which worked well, despite the development process being completely broken? It just doesn’t happen. The article that Scoble quoted quoted Microsoft VP [...]

Well, in this edition of my podcast, I lament the end of baseball season for the Oakland Athletics, talk about the modifications I’m making to my Linksys NSLU2, and then talk about the predicted death of the PC as a platform for innovation. Links from the show: Jonathan Schwartz of Sun talks about how web [...]

The Intelligent Designer’s Prayer, courtesy of the Panda’s Thumb. Our Intelligent Designer, Who art in the unspecified-good-place, Unknown be Thy name. Thy flagella spin, Thy mousetraps snap, On Earth, as it is in the Unspecified-good-place. Give us each day our unchecked apologetic. And forgive us our invidious comparisons, As we smite those iniquitous Darwinists With [...]

In a previous weblog posting, I mentioned that I had bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS (networked attached storage) device that I was hacking away on. I recently dusted it off and started playing with it again, after installing the unslung firmware that lets you run linux on it. What was curious was that I had [...]

The Nintendo DS is kind of a cute little gadget, and what’s cool is that someone is already doing all the heavy lifting of getting TCP/IP to work on its wireless. This uses Adam Dunkel’s lwip implementation. Not quite done yet, but interesting!

I have a special treat in today’s podcast: my wife makes an appearance. We chat about our experience at Friday’s Oakland A’s game which the A’s lost (boo!) but which had great fireworks (yay!), as well as a couple of other geeky topics like Jeri Ellsworth’s hackable gadget, the C64 Direct To TV. The Slashdot [...]

Well, above is a screendump of my latest computer acquisition: a Microvax 3800 which I installed NetBSD on. Wackiness! What’s even more wacky is that it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, maybe that isn’t so wacky, after all, would you pay money for a Microvax? Basically, I’ve been on a bit of a retro [...]