brainwagon

Here’s a link to a scan of the page which actually defines the Hellschreiber font that was used on real Hellschrieber machines. It’s not in the most useful form the way it is, but it should be pretty easy to convert it to a real font definition of some sort. I’ll do that when I’m [...]

I normally wouldn’t be so self-serving as to link to movie reviews for one of our films, but James Lileks is a really good writer, and I’ve been a fan of his since I first received a copy of his book The Gallery of Regrettable Food. LILEKS James the Bleat

On the softrock40 mailing list, somebody mentioned the 2N2/6 Transverter, which is a 6m transverter for use with a 40m transceiver. It’s not completely trivial, but it’s not hideously complex either. I’m becoming more interested in 6m, so it seems like archiving this for my later consumption might be useful. My FT-817 already is a [...]

Wall•E Looking at Hal20th June, 2008 Angus McClane is one of Pixar’s animators, and widely acknowledged as perhaps being it’s largest geek. He’s also got a knack for building Lego stuff, as can be seen by his construction of Wall•E, the star of Pixar’s latest release. I think this Lego creation is quite pleasing. In [...]

Well, this weekend is “Field Day”: one of the big contest weekends for amateur radio. Basically hams go off grid, travel to campgrounds and the like, and operate from there. It was perhaps supposed to indicate some kind of emergency preparedness, but really, it’s just an excuse for a contest and a bit of public [...]

A while ago, I used my FM ht to decode telemetry from LO-19. So, I decided to give it a try again (getting bored with SEEDS). Here’s the result: E LUSAT HI HI AO AVA AB6 AAB ADB AAA AB4 A4B AE6 131 176 117 187 111 174 147 156 ———————————————————– Channel Formula Value ———————————————————– [...]

Just a quick snapshot I got using my little Panasonic point-n-shoot camera:

I was trying to remember the name and author of a paper on implementing linear phase bandsplitting. It had applications to noise reduction, and seemed to be reasonably pleasing when I read the paper years ago, but all I could remember was that it was done by a Lucasfilm audio engineer, and mentioned the movie [...]

I’m back from my vacation cruise to Mexico aboard the Carnival Elation to Los Cabos. Needed relaxation, and the cruise provided. Snapped lots of pictures.

From the make blog, here is a pretty cool link to Dennis Havlena’s cool website about DIY musical instruments, including a youtube of him playing several of them. I’ve become fairly interested in folk music and folk instruments thanks to Tom, and Dennis’ web site has all sorts of ideas for instruments of every kind [...]

Learning about turbo codes has been on my list for a long time. Here’s a tutorial that looks like it might be helpful.

Just a link to the papers from the CubeSat Developer’s Workshop 2008. I’ve gotten more interested in satellite design and what’s possible over the last few months, particularly in power management. CubeSat Community Website – Developers Workshop 2008

Link to an interesting paper that I encountered while looking for something else: Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss

I haven’t done one of these in a while, hauled out my Yaesu VX-3R and recorded a pass. I’ve busted the sync corrector in my program again, so it’s not aligned right, but overall, it might be one my better passes, covering a lot of the continental U.S. Addendum: The follow up pass was out [...]

Didn’t catch the Friday win for the Athletics over their Bay Area rivals, but found out that the sprinklers came on during the ninth with two outs and Houston Street on the mound. It didn’t help the Giants. YouTube – Oakland A’s Get Wet and Wild