I’m personally declaring that the whole “more cowbell” thing is officially over. It was funny when Walken did it. It was perhaps amusing the next million times it was repeated. But the next day, it was already stale, and it’s only gotten worse. Why not just go back [...]
Last year, I wrote a script to eek out one episode of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear each day leading up to Christmas Eve. I had a few subscribers, but just a few. Still, I think it’s a fun holiday serial, and I was gonna set it up to do [...]
Each of the last two years, I’ve made mp3 files of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear available here. This serial ran from November 29th through Christmas Eve, and I realized today that I haven’t got it queued up yet for this year. Expect it (and a more worthy introduction) [...]
According to digg, pong is celebrating its 34th anniversary today. Feh. I’m older than that.
Sniffle.
Bonus links: Wikipedia has some nice info, including a link to William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two game developed at Brookhaven National Labs.
Oh, and the animated gif on the right? Screendumps from the CHIP-8 emulator [...]
I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog since before Thanksgiving, mainly because I’ve been doped up on expectorants in some attempt to shake this nasty bug. I’ve still got some sinus congestion, and every time I exhale I can feel fluid squishing around in my lungs, but at least the chills have stopped [...]
Earlier in life, I was quite a wargame fan: I had dozens of games by Avalon Hill, and even experimented a bit with miniature wargaming. I still have a few interesting old rulebooks for games, like Fletcher Pratt’s Naval Wargame. I recall reading back then that H.G. Wells had published [...]
Slashdot recently linked to this rather strange article by Melanie Wyne against the OpenDocument standard. She’s apparently executive director of the The Initiative for Software Choice, a group funded by many large and small companies, seemingly to combat recent moves by governments to specify open source solutions as part of their procurement processes.
Her [...]
I’d like to take a moment to thank all of my readers and listeners and to wish them all the very best on this Thanksgiving Day. There are lots of things that I’m thankful for this year, including my beautiful wife and my son, the health of my entire family, and [...]
I always seem to get sick around the holidays. Starting yesterday afternoon, my throat started getting sore, by the time I was home I had the chills, bodyaches and general lassitude (annoying, given that there is lots of cleaning and cooking to do). It’s now 5:11AM, and I’m up with a [...]
Oh, dear, lord.
Could the episode I watched have been any more ridiculous?
In the episode Urban Hellraisers, the plotline featured a gang of young college hoodlums who decide to play a live action version of Grand Theft Auto Urban Hellraisers. It featured the following incredible plot points (I’d normally fear spoiling the plot [...]
If you aspire to be an horologist, you don’t have to done fishnet stockings and hot pants, you merely need to study up on the design and manufacture of escapements. Luckily, there is a nifty illustrated book on the Project Gutenberg website that details some of what you’ll need to know: Watch and [...]
Ben Fry has some cool graphics which visualize the code in several old Atari 2600 video games. Basically, he disassembles code and marks all possible branches with arcs between the lines of code, and changes all data tables to graphical representations of the bit patterns, revealing many sprites and other data tables. [...]
Check these out with the red/blue 3D glasses. Kind of cool, huh?
If you followed my tutorial on how to do this with black and white images, you can probably figure out how to do this.
Basically, the red image is just the red channel of the left image, and the green and [...]
I bought Carmen a video iPod a few weeks ago, and she loves it. You can apparently play video on a regular TV, but you need a special Apple video cable to do so. Or do you? According to the guys at MacDevCenter, all you really need to do is [...]
I admire those people who cook fifteen different dishes from their cookbook that was handed down for ages. I just don’t have the kitchen or frankly the patience to do that. I don’t mind doing a turkey (it’s really a snap) or things like sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, or green beans [...]
