The Goldfish Online has an extended treatise on building NOT, OR, NOR, And and NAND gates using everyone’s favorite building toy.
Monthly Archives: December 2004
Cockeyed.com Presents – How Much is Inside Ramen Noodles?
This website is brilliant. Really brilliant. In case you didn’t know, there are 170 feet of noodles in a packet of ramen. But while you are at cockeyed.com, surf around. Lots of stuff that’s good. Photos of laser tatoo removal. Satan, made from Paper Mache. Costumes. Wow.
Self Flagellation
My criticisms don’t just extend to others. Here’s my own attempt at self-flagellation today.
I fired up my ipod this morning and was listening to my latest show as I came in. I like to do this on occasion, mainly to monitor the technical quality as well as whether I sound like a complete dolt. I can’t speak to the second issue, but bleh. My podcast had some low amplitude noise which polluted the background. As the mp3 encoder shifted from frame to frame, the noise jumps in amplitude in a really annoying way. Yuck.
Two questions for myself:
- Why am I not hearing this when I do my post recording checks? (Likely answer: really cheap headset with poor response)
- Was it always this bad? A quick scan back through my recent episodes reveal that this one was particularly bad, but noisy recordings have gone out for the last three or four. Likely cause: change in my sound recording setup, mixer levels are perhaps too high.
Apologies for murdering your ears. I’ll have to work on getting this sorted out before my next podcast.
Frustration with two different podcasting clients
I must admit, I’m a little bit frustrated with the current crop of ipodder clients. I don’t know if it is just me, but I’m finding them to be relatively unreliable, and remarkably difficult to work with.
Before I go off (and people respond in kind with flames), I’ll admit it could just be me and/or my trusty WinXP box. But here’s my experience in trying to use ipodder, version 1.1.4.
It mostly worked, but for some reason I had frequent crashes of iTunes when I would run it. Sometimes, this would mean that individual podcasts which had been downloaded would be marked as downloaded and never retried, but even though they were downloaded, they would never get added to my iTunes list. So, I’d have to go in by hand and add them. Every attempt to get ipodder to redownload and add these skipped files (including uninstalling and reinstalling ipodder) resulted in it thinking it had already gotten it. I grovelled around, and found the history file and deleted that, and still no dice. In frustration, I thought I’d give another client a try:
Witness Doppler. Also a nice looking client, but it occasionally errors out while downloading as well, and fails to retry in any useful way. For reasons which escape me, I’m not receiving Dave Slusher’s podcasts, and even my own Cinnamon Bear Podcast has managed to skip three or four episodes. Sigh.
Here’s my wishlist for podcasting:
- I’d like a client that is invisible. Never fails. Don’t even know it’s there. Works by magic.
- Don’t care if it has directory support. Not even a bit.
- On the rare, unforseen occasion when it does screw up, make it straightforward to fix. Allow you to flag items which it think it has already downloaded, and delete it from its history mechanism so they can be fetched again. When you uninstall the program, delete every trace of its previous installation.
Can anyone suggest a client which fufills these requirements?
You may launch when ready…
What do you have when you put a porta-potty and a surplus Boeing jet engine together?
Answer:
- Too much time and money on your hands, and
- A Jet Powered Outhouse
For further lunacy, including the Jet-Powered Barstool, check out turbinegroup.com.
Google to Digitize Harvard University Library
Google is embarking on a pilot project to digitize and make available a large number of the 15 million books currently at the Harvard University Library. The goal is to make all of the public domain texts available. Wow. That’s awesome.
Claiming my Feedster Feed…
Pot Roast Recipe, Sounds Yummy.
Stepping back from podcasting and intellectual property for a minute, I noticed that Lisa Williams posted a link to her husband’s pot roast recipe.
Pot roast is another one of these recipes that has gotten short-changed in recent years, mainly because people don’t do a very good job of it, despite the fact that it’s pretty easy. The keys:
- Use the right cut of meat. I like chuck for potroast. It has a fair amount of connective tissue in it (more on that later) and lots of really beefy flavor.
- Brown the meat really well. As Evan’s recipe says, don’t pepper the meat prior to this treatment. The pepper will just burn on the outside if you are browning it at the “freakin’ hot” temperature it really needs. I do put kosher salt on the outside of my meat before browning. It helps draw some of the moisture out of the surface of the meat and give it a really good brown.
- Cook it for a long time over low heat. A really long time. A really really long time. The temperature of the meat has to come up to around 190 or so to melt all the connective tissue. That’s when pot roast becomes tender. If your pot roast is tough, chances are it is undercooked rather than overcooked.
- Season it well. I like cumin, thyme and black pepper. Some Worchester sauce isn’t bad either. Carrots and onions will add some sweetness to the dish, which can be nice.
Damn, I’m making myself hungry. I’ll have to put one of these on this week.
Link Rank, courtesy of PubSub
Robert Scoble mentioned how you can get detailed graphs of your blogs popularity from PubSub. Click here to watch brainwagon’s slow slide to oblivion.
Addendum: Here is the way that pubsub link ranks are computed.
Addendum2: Random link as requested by the page above.
Et tu, Marvel?
Fred von Lohmann of the EFF writes an interesting piece about Marvel’s complaint filed against NCSoft Corporation and Cryptic Studios, makers of the enormously popular City of Heros online role playing game.
What’s got Marvel’s panties in a bunch is the fact that using the in-game editors, you can easily recreate characters which are properties of Marvel Comics, such as Spiderman, the Hulk or Wolverine.
The complaint lists claims of copyright and trademark infringement, as well as intentional interference with actual and prospective economic advantage and unfair competition.
I suppose the makers of a good old Ticonderoga #2 are up next, as they were obviously contributing for the ability of millions of kids to sketch unauthorized and damaging representations of Marvel properties on school notebooks.
The 2004 Geminid Meteor Shower
Nasa has a nice website describing the current Geminid meteor shower. It’s overcast here, so little chance of catching any meteors here, but perhaps things are better where you are at. Keep looking up.
Brainwagon Radio: Kudos, Drawing and Helix DNA Server
Wherein your host lists a number of people who have said nice things about us, and mentions the weekend’s projects: a new icon redesign for brainwagon and Helix DNA Server.
Items mentioned in the podcast:
- Chad over at phpmp.com mentioned brainwagon in his podcast. He is also the brains behind podcast247.com which provides podcasts via streaming audio feeds.
- Podcat listed me on their best of show.
- People should heed Lisa Williams’s plea for a universal content-posting widget.
- Dan Lyke on Flutterby! keeps saying nice things about me, and has lots of good things to say about weblogging and the role of markets in creative endeavor.
- Jon Udell’s article on Mobile Webcasting which inspired my investigation of Helix DNA Server. My brother (who runs webranger.net) took only an afternoon before proclaiming it worthy of interest.
- The Gimp: Photoshop for would-be artists who are too cheap to buy the Adobe stuff.
- Some aforementioned brilliant music.
(In the podcast, I strangely said that Udell was working on streaming to phones. That is what I was interested in when I found his connection, but that’s not what John is talking about.)
Boing Boing: Kids’ forensic facial reconstruction kit
Cory at BoingBoing linked to an interesting toy: a forensic facial reconstruction kit for kids. How groovy is that?
Hey, has anyone else noticed that all the TV promos for CSI (the original) are listed as “CSI:”. What’s the deal with the colon?
Useful Firefox Extensions
I love Firefox. It’s a great browser all by its lonesome. But it also has some nicely done extensions which have proven to be really useful and now which I find it hard to live without. Some of the better extensions are:
- Gmail Notifier — Keep track of your gmail account
- Bloglines Toolkit — I use bloglines as my principal RSS aggregator, and having it always a button click away is useful.
- Adblock — I’m no great fan of ads, and between pop up blocker and this thing, my desktop seldom leaves my control.
- Foxy Tunes — Puts media player controls in your status bar. It’s nice not to have to click on other windows to change media settings while browsing.
- Oh! I forgot! Weather Fox — localized weather icons, constantly updated for your locale. Neat!
Check them out. Download Firefox and check under the Tools > Extensions menu, and click Get More Extensions.
9.6, 9.7, 9.4, and from the Republican Judge, a 3.2
To the nice three people who have ranked brainwagon on podcastalley.com, thanks! It’s great to know that at least three people thought enough of this little endeavor to click a button to let others know about it.
Addendum: seven people? Staggering!