brainwagon

It’s ugly! I’m spending some time in Truckee, CA with some of my old college chums, and currently we are getting hammered by rain and wind gusting to 60mph. I-80 is reportedly going to be closed due to landslides for the next two days at least, and the furnace in the place we are staying [...]

William Gurstelle, author of a couple of my favorite books, Backyard Ballistics and The Art of the Catapult, has a new book, Adventures from the Technology Underground and a blog, Notes from the Technology Underground. I ordered the new book via Amazon, and the blog is now in my Daily Read list.

It appears that version 2.0 of WordPress is available for download. I’ll try to give a head’s up when I’ll upgrade.

After a delicious supper of prime rib, mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus, what could top it off? Well, I gave Emeril’s Apple Tart Tatin with Homemade Puff Pastry. I made it with Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry, and Fuji apples, but it turned out real good. Give it a try.

I spent a little while trying to figure this out, apparently the -r argument is significant: ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg \ -title “Superman: The Mechanical Monsters” \ -s 320×240 -b 512 -ar 24000 -ab 64 -r 29.970030 -f psp M4V12345.MP4 The -title seemed fubarred, but the rest seems to work. I’ll refine this more later. Filenames [...]

Check out the the spiffy view of Saturn’s rings and their shadows taken from Cassini.

To all the readers of my little experiment in self-therapy, I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!

A seasonal Gutenberg Gem: A Visit From Saint Nicholas, by Clement C. Moore. Enjoy the classic with illustrations.

For tonight’s dinner plan, I’m doing the same thing that I did last year, a variation of Rachel Ray’s Christmas Pasta recipe. I find her base recipe simply has too much meat in it, mine will be more like a amatriciana sauce, with onions and red pepper flake, seasoned with some sweet and some spicy [...]

Checking in on Dave Slusher’s blog, I found that he was a voice in something called Geek Christmas Carol, which I find you can download from Friends In Tech. Neat. Also, perusing the comments there, I found that someone else had done much the same thing: Podcast Pickle had produced A Podcast Christmas Carol. Check [...]

Sadly, it won’t be visible here in California, but for much of the United States, Christmas morning will feature a rare occultation of Spica by the moon. Thanks to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog for pointing out the rare event which, well, sadly won’t be seen from here.

He’s hopping around the Middle East as I type this. Google Earth is pretty cool for a free download too, so check it out. Ho ho ho.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen a number of eBay auctions for religious figures which appear spontaneously in grilled bread items. It seems to me that the budding young entrepaneur could make a killing with the right laser engraving equipment. Courtesy of the Make Blog.

You know what’s more useless than those tapes and DVDs of a fire burning in the fireplace? How ’bout the same thing, but formatted for your video iPod. Courtesy of those fine gents at WGN.

Well, I wish my experiment in podcasting was going out with a bang instead of a whimper, but for now, I’m closing the saga that was Brainwagon Radio. It may return in some retooled form in the future: I’m thinking that to really revitalize my interest in doing podcasts I need to find an appropriate [...]