brainwagon

What can I say?  Life sucks today, but there isn’t a day so bleak that isn’t improved by a massive plate of brownies.  Over at Cooking for Engineers, those kitchen elves whipped up a batch of “John’s Favorite Brownies”, made with none other than  the excellent Scharffen Berger chocolate.  Yum-mee. Cooking For Engineers – Recipe [...]

Using the multi-shot capability of my nikon, I grabbed sixteen small exposures of the frog croaking, extracted them, aligned them by hand, and made the (rather large, sorry for the dialup users) images on the right. Technorati Tags: My Photos

What’s wrong with Microsoft’s DRM strategy: “We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle.” Really, why [...]

I just finished listening to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code and I can’t help but shake my head and wonder: Why the hell is this book so damned popular? Dan Brown is a dreadful writer.   Not just mediocre.  But bad.  Really bad.   I mean really, let’s open with an evil albino?  Why not [...]

Well, this evening I was staring out the door into the darkness to see if our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy wanted to be let in for some additional kitty chow, and I found this little guy peering in instead. He’s a good sized frog, probably three or four inches in length (just the body, not the [...]

I usually don’t post links to Boing Boing stuff, since everybody in the known universe already reads Boing Boing, but I thought this logo design for Google by the Students for a Free Tibet warranted a bit wider distribution. Sorry Google, but if your motto is to “don’t be evil”, you are seriously off course. [...]

Well, I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but here is what I know: It’s not hard to compile asterisk for the amd64, but… You need to be careful compiling the ztdummy kernel module: in particular, you must define USE_RTC when compiling, because the sourcefile incorrectly only checks for USE_RTC if __i386__ is defined, [...]

Well, I’d hoped to announce the results of some of my experimentation with Asterisk, but the weekend didn’t conspire with me very well. My mom ended up in the hospital (she’s back out, but it was worrisome) and I was nursing a borderline migraine most of the weekend. Yesterday I ate most of a pound [...]

I saw some of these little cars while in Paris, and of course wondered what they would be like in collisions. Check out the video of a little Smart Car mashing into a barrier at 70mph. Smart – Google Video Technorati Tags: Google Video, Smart Car, Collision

If you haven’t mastered the cool Japanese way of folding T-shirts, you could always watch this video (complete with Nintendo soundtrack) on making a jig out of cardboard to help out. Formidable!

Check out these cool landscape photos by Olivo Barbieri. He takes photos of landscapes, and then modifies them to make them look as if they were pictures of tiny models. They give a very curious case of perspective. Addendum: Juan read more carefully than I, and explains that these are shot with a tilt-shift lens. [...]

Bitchin’. The A’s pick up White Sox veteran Frank Thomas for a one year deal. He gets a guaranteed $500,000, plus up to $2.6 million in bonuses if he says healthy through the season. The White Sox cast the veteran adrift in 2005 because of his injuries. That’s really the big question: will we get [...]

Courtesy of superpositioned.com, here’s just about the simplest motor that I can imagine. Only 4 parts (battery, wire, screw, magnet). Too cool. Technorati Tags: Science Fair

I must admit: I love sushi.  Even basic nigiri and sashimi show a degree of concentration that we don’t often see in the west.   Precision.  Freshness.  Balance.  Everytime I have a meal of good sushi, I can’t help but feel better.  The flavors of fish, rice, soy, wasabi and gari are all just… I love [...]

Over the last couple of months, I had gradually decreased the number of computers in my office to just two (well, computers that have X86 architecture anyway), and I decided that I would like to have a new amd64 based machine. I priced out the cost of just building one from components, and found that [...]