brainwagon

I admit to a fascination with Scientific American. I used to have a couple of decades of the magazine which I kept mostly for the Mathematical Games and Amateur Scientist column. Project Gutenberg has begun to digitize some of the 19th century copies, which are mostly of historical interest, but still can be interesting. For [...]

Well, 2008 had its moments, but I’m glad to kiss it goodbye. 2009, bring it on! Tonight Carmen and I decided to stay in and cook: we made some New York steaks, some spinach salad with smoked salmon, and a ratatouille topped with puff pastry. Basically using some of the skills we acquired at our [...]

I’m spending way too much time sitting around this morning, surfing the web. I’m gonna stop, but before I do, here’s a link to an interested TED talk about how statistics can be misused to mislead juries.

Thanks to KE9V for pointing me at this lecture by Randy Pausch: httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but it’s a fabulous lecture. You can read more about Randy here. As the New Year approaches and some of us might be making resolutions, it’s definitely worth watching.

Okay, it’s not really a “kit”, it’s just some directions on how you can wire some commonly available gadgets (like a Nokia 6100 LCD panel or a piezo speaker) to an Arduino board and make a nice little demonstration board. Some good ideas in here. Polyphemus Demonstration and Evaluation Kit | Popular Science.

Carmen and I have reached the point in our lives where buying stuff for each other at Christmas is kind of superfluous. Stuff we need, we already buy, and stuff we don’t need aren’t the greatest gifts. What’s really valuable is the time we spend together. Toward that end, my wife Carmen used her own [...]

Okay, for every slobbery dog video I post, I promise to post something with a little more meat. My friend Tom is interested in all kinds of computer music and interface technologies, and no doubt, has already seen this controller. But just in case he hasn’t, here’s a really nifty controller, and even he has [...]

Okay, I mostly don’t post pet videos on this blog, but sometimes, you just have to make an exception, like when someone decides to give a bean burrito to his dog. Okay, you don’t really need to make an exception. But I did. What can I say, for some reason I never posted anything on [...]

Laura Halliday mentioned this page on the QRP-L while discussing the innards of those Radio Shack “atomic clocks” that you can buy. Seems like there are some good links to helpful information regarding the time services provided by NIST via WWV. NIST Time and Frequency Publication Database. Addendum: Jim Miller, AC3BV gave this link on [...]

A couple of years ago, I blogged about H. E. Dudeney’s Amusements in Mathematics. Today, I noticed that Project Gutenberg had released a copy of The Canterbury Puzzles by Henry Ernest Dudeney – Project Gutenberg. This book has quite a few more nominally mathematical puzzles than its sibling. In particular, it introduces the game Kayles, [...]

Alex wasn’t the first to recommend this article on building a 80m transmitter from parts scavenged from a CFL bulb, but his link was enough for me to elevate it to front page status. It’s a fairly neat project: the 80m transmitter only requires a handful of additional components (most notably, a crystal, but also [...]

While browsing around at the airport before Christmas, I ran across this page by PE0FKO about his program IQRec.exe, which is used to record the quadrature outputs from a Software Defined Radio. It includes an example recording of nearly 30 minutes of the CQWPX contest recorded on 40m at 96khz. In theory, that means that [...]

It’s been quite some time since I’ve bought a book about telescope making: I just have been more absorbed in the world of amateur radio lately. Still, on my trip to Portland, I noticed that James Daley had published a book on an unusual telescope: the Schupmann. The Schupmann Telescope The Schupmann is an unusual [...]

Well, what would Christmas be without a link to that classic of classics: the immortal Dickens’ tale A Christmas Carol. This version is illustrated to boot. Nifty. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – Project Gutenberg.

I’m interested in mapping and in open source, so it’s interesting to see projects which combine both. Such is OpenStreetMap, a project which not only produces software to use maps, but also relies upon user data to create maps that can be used freely. I heard about this a while ago, but today it came [...]