brainwagon

A question on Quora set me thinking about solving the N Queens problem, which is to list all ways that N queens can be positioned on an NxN checkerboard such that no queen can attack the other. I seemed to have misplaced my implementation of this that I did in Python, so I decided to […]

I was trying to figure out how to screencast to twitch.tv using ffmpeg. A couple of hours of tinkering resulted in the following command line which does a bunch of stuff. It captures the X desktop at 15 fps and 1920×1080 resolution. It grabs frames from my webcam (a Logitech Pro 9000) at 320×240 resolution. […]

Most of my hacking occurs in a vacuum: where I sit in my living room or in my home office and toil away silently on projects which occasionally get documented here, but which all too often are just my way of passing the time. On the way to work, I was asking myself what I […]

Okay, it’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. Not really a lot dramatic going on in life, I just have been spending my free time writing for Quora rather than my own blog. But I still am nerding out from time to time. Last night I dusted off an old project of […]

Today, I finally lost my freaking mind with respect to Comcast. First of all, some background. I’ve have been a Comcast customer since 1999 when I moved into my house. For the most part, the service itself has been reasonably reliable and effective. I don’t have a lot of technical quibbles with them. But their […]

I hadn’t been flying my DJI Phantom 2 since last year (before I herniated two disks in my neck) but I’ve been meaning to take it out and get it in the the air. This week, two different things happened which provided some incentives to get it in the air, for reasons which weren’t entirely […]

Okay, need to archive this for future Christmas dinners, because it turned out pretty nicely. I’m stuff chock-a-block full of prime rib, which was done pretty well, but I am going to add a suggestion or two for next year that I can refer to in the future, and possibly make it even better. I […]

Yes, my fascination with cheap computing devices continues. I’ve got two bits on order at the moment. First is the Pine A64 from Kickstarter. This one won’t be showing up for a while, but seems to be a pretty nice piece of kit. You can think of it as a competitor for the Raspberry Pi, […]

Hey gang… It’s been quite some time since I posted anything here. Apologies. I have had a lot going on for the last sixty days or so, most dramatically a herniated disk in my neck. I am improving though, and have some backed up ideas for blog posts, so stay tuned, and I promise over […]

Got home around 11:00PM, and while there was a lot of high clouds, there was a break that revealed the stars of Cassiopeia and Andromeda which I snapped using NightCap Pro on my iPhone 6. The clouds did scatter a lot of light around, I mangled the image a bit using Gimp to make the […]

While I was dinking around with my binoculars during the eclipse last night, I decided to try to hunt for an application which would allow me to have better control over the exposures etc. on my iPhone. I found the program Manual, which gives SLR like controls (more on that some other time) but I […]

Tonight was a total lunar eclipse… Lunar eclipses are pretty, but not super rare. Tonight’s started before moonrise, and by the time I got out to snap a picture or two, totality was already over. More interesting perhaps than the eclipse was the optical gadget that I pulled out to have a look. Over the […]

A couple days ago, one of my Twitter or Facebook friends (sadly, I forgot who, comment if it was you, and I’ll give you credit) pointed out this awesome page: Reversing Sinclair’s amazing 1974 calculator hack – half the ROM of the HP-35 It documented an interesting calculator made by Sinclair in the 1970s. It […]

I’ve been quiet lately, but mostly because what tinkering I’ve been doing has been relatively limited in scope. But one thing I have begun to play with a lot are various tiny development boards based upon the Espressif ESP8266 WiFi chip. I’ve mentioned them a bit before, but I’ve made some progress since then (and […]

Inspired by the KnitYak Kickstarter, I thought I would code up a simple Python program that could generate the same sort of patterns that are used in the scarves in the video. If you want to learn more about the mathematical theory of these cellular automata, google for keywords like “1D” “cellular automata” and “steve […]