brainwagon

Find out how popular your name has been over the years.  “Mark” seems to have peaked in popularity in the 1960s, while my dad’s name “Vernon” probably peaked back in 1918, and now is all but extinct.  Forget about some of my other uncles names: like Clarence, Virgil (never really popular, even in its heyday) [...]

Need I really say more? An implementation of Babbages Difference Engine, capable of evaluating 2nd and 3rd order polynomials with two or three digits of precision. Needs some video demonstrating it in operation, but wow. Bonus links: Wikipedia entry on the Difference Engine Difference Engine in Meccano A nice description of the Difference Engine, with [...]

Fifteen years ago today was my official hire date at Pixar Animation Studios. Because nobody works for a company for fifteen years anymore, I thought it would be nice to commemorate the occasion by asking some of the people that I have enjoyed working with over the years out to lunch at Hahn’s Hibachi, a [...]

According to Phil Plait, James Randi ended up in the hospital for a heart problem that required bypass surgery.     Randi is probably best known for his ruthless skepticism of all sorts of paranormal skullduggery, most famously his attacks on spoon bending Israeli Uri Geller.  In 1973 he worked with the Tonight Show to change the [...]

A while ago, I wrote about how you could unlock a PAP2 and use it on Free World Dialup as a simple, cheap VOIP adapter.  Unfortunately, while playing around with Asterisk this morning, my adapter reset itself, promptly redownloaded some new firmware, and now is back to being locked with Vonage, this time, without the [...]