brainwagon

What can I say? I was bored on the way home yesterday, and decided to record a 23 minute podcast, reviewing two of my moderately recent gadget purchases:

• The Delphi SKYFI2 receiver for XM satellite radio.
• The Panasonic DMC-TZ1 digital camera, a compact five megapixel camera with 10x optical zoom.

I also gave a brief report about my trip down to the Computer History Museum to see their recently restored PDP-1 and play Spacewar!

And I shamelessly plug Pixar’s upcoming summer release of  Cars.

I still get pinged by lots of podcast aggregators, here is hoping that somebody is listening.

It’s been a busy week for me, wading through piles of SIGGRAPH sketch reviews, so I haven’t had too much inclination to spend more time in front of a computer.   But I did find this article linked on the make blog: little tips about making rc micro_helicopter.  A very cool micro helicopter, which used a CDROM drive motor for the main drive.  Very cool.

[tags]Toys and Gadgets,RC Helicopter[/tags]

What more needs to be said?

[tags]Nuclear Bomb Computer,Slide Rule[/tags]

The Only Pen a Drunk Could Ask For – Gizmodo

So you’re at your favorite sports bar watching the big game with your friends. Before heading out and driving home, perhaps it’d be a good idea to make sure you’re not legally intoxicated. At this point, it’s just a matter of whipping out the Alcohol Breath Test Pen, blowing into the top and hoping that the green LED doesn’t turn red. If it’s red, hail a taxi, buddy, because you’re in no condition to drive. Also included in the pen is a UV indicator, letting you know whether or not you should be wearing sunscreen. Yes, this $35 little pen can help save your life and prevent a nasty sunburn.

What you really need is such a pen which prevents you from writing checks, signing contracts, or most importantly, posting to your blog when drunk.

Via the Make Blog, LinuxDevices tells you how to run linux on a JuiceBox.  I bought one of these a while ago, and haven’t done much with it, other than take one of my flickr pictures and copy it to a memory card and display it as show in the picture.  I’ll have to goof around with this some more.

[tags]Juicebox,Hacking,Make[/tags]

Feel the need to lob tennis balls at those who oppose you? Try checking out these rather nice plans for a small trebuchet. With such a mighty seige engine, none dare oppose your military might!

Seriously though, these things are:

• interesting mechanical devices
• fun to play with
• and excellent for tossing water balloons.

Unless of course, you get hurt, in which case you didn’t hear it from me.

[tags]Trebuchet[/tags]

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

[tags]Science Fair[/tags]

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 I probably couldn’t do better than the HP a1310n, so I just went out and bought one. I’ve purged the windows infestation off it, and installed Fedora Core 4 on it. I’ve got a number of projects that can benefit from its high speed, including goofing around with MythTV and Asterisk. I got the ivtv driver working on my WinTV PVR150 MCE card and even have accelerated X running on it, so progress is being made. Last night I had some difficulty with Asterisk, the ztdummy driver that provides timing information seems not to load for reasons that escape me. But the hardware seems to be quite nice, I only wish the onboard video had NTSC outs, then this machine would be ideal as a front end for MythTV.

Well, I spent $40 for the Windows Mobile 5 upgrade for my Dell, and it’s been a pain in the ass ever since.  Apparently I’m not alone, since now Dell officially lists a downgrade for the Axim: yep, it’s back to 2003 SE for the little guy.  Maybe it will stop blinking its stupid LED, draining its battery, and just being a pain in the butt.

Click here for the downgrade.

[tags]Dell Axim[/tags]

Another link courtesy of the make blog forums, this time for a brand spanking new [tag]Lego[/tag] blog. It’s too new to tell whether it’s going to be of lasting value, but I’m impressed so far. Subscribe to NextBrick or just surf on over and check out their cool Technic knitting machine or the P-38 and Panzer models.

You’re never to old for [tag]Legos[/tag].

I saw this on digg this morning:

A hacker has taken the next step and accomplished the unthinkable, hacking the 2.60 Firmware PSP! It is now possible to play homebrew games on your PSP no matter what firmware it has. Sony, give up on trying to stop us!

I haven’t tried this out yet (the new is still on my PSP, and I don’t feel like screwing it up) but it seems silly to actively pursue a strategy of trying to keep your customers from using their machines in creative new ways. I wish that a console or handheld manufacturer would someday realize that by embracing user modifications and homebrew, they could potentially add value to their products.

I know, I know, they are trying to prevent piracy. They don’t want everyone to be running Wipeout Pure when they didn’t pay for it. I get that. And I must admit, I don’t really know how to establish an iron-clad piracy protection scheme, but then, neither does Sony (obviously). I was thinking the other day that it might be interesting to have programs which are executed from the Memory Stick to simply not be able to access any of the Disk hardware. I can think of lots of ways that might fail, and hardware mods might still work to circumvent such measures, but it would go along way to keeping people from snarfing data off of UMD disks.

Of course, if anyone DOES get it off disc (say by using a logic analyzer on the data bus during execution) you are screwed.

Oh well. I imagine that we’ll see a continuation of this arms race for some time to come.

[tags]Sony PSP,Video Games,Homebrew[/tags]

read more | digg story

One of the somewhat interesting features of Google Video is now that you can put video from Google into your webpage. Here’s a Snowman video from WGBH Boston, and below you can see the player embedded in a web posting.

Deleted the video player

Something about Wordpress insists on rewriting the contents of my post and breaks the formatting. I’ll figure it out later. If you figure it out, let let me know.

[tags]Google,Google Video,Multimedia[/tags]

Last night, I upgraded my Linksys WRT-54GS router to DD-WRT, a more flexible set of firmware with greater capabilities.  It seems to work just fine, and includes many neat additions, such as the ability to adjust the router output power, new security measures, telnet and ssh access, improved QoS routing, and all sorts of other neat things.  If you’ve got one of these routers (check carefully for versions, some recent Linksys routers are incompatible) I’d recommend this distribution as easy to setup and configure.

As Tom Duff put it:

Finally, after years of sitting on their robotic asses, Lego is showing Lego Mindstorms NXT this week at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Check out the announcement. Pretty neat! I could arrange for this guy and my Robosapien to battle to the death!

I was looking for a nifty gadget to embed audio players inside Wordpress posts. This was a nifty Audio player Wordpress plugin that uses flash to play audio files. You can create simple links, and it creates a nice little Flash gadget to stream and play them.

Here’s one that links to my last podcast (which sadly occurred over a month ago):

[audio:http://brainwagon.info/audio/brainwagon-20051117.mp3]