brainwagon

I’ve long suspected that my cat Scrappy had teleportation powers: Okay, okay, I know he doesn’t really. But it was kind of funny.

The last five or so years has been a remarkable period in computing. About five years ago, I began to fear that computing would be increasingly pre-packaged: that laptops and tablets would totally take over the market and the ability to find computers which were well suited for programming and experimentation would more and more […]

Until Milhouse can play this position out, it really can’t be considered a real checkers program. Right now, even with an endgame database, it’s still clueless about how to proceed. Addendum: Reinfeld’s How to Win at Checkers gives some details on winning positions like this. I recall reading it (my puzzle database includes puzzles from […]

My recent revival in interest in computer chess/checkers/gameplaying was in part spawned by the impression (not particularly support by evidence at the time) that the dramatic increase in computer chess strength must have come from more than just basic hardware improvements. It seemed obvious to me that some fraction of the increase in the play […]

At the risk of name dropping, on my flight out to Vancouver for SIGGRAPH last week, I had the exceedingly high luck of scoring a seat next to Pat Hanrahan. 25 years ago, I was working at Princeton in the Applied Math department, and the single smartest thing I did was make Pat’s acquaintance. Besides […]

While looking for something completely different, I ran across the code and binary images for my old Atari 2600 “Pong Clock”. I realized that my previous post on the matter didn’t have pictures of my final version, so just for fun, here are a couple of Stella screengrabs (in NTSC “TV” mode, for enhanced realism). […]

My previous experiments with a foam core 4×5 camera has whetted my appetite for more camera experiments. In particular, I was looking for cameras that could be built quickly, and where amateurs could construct their own lenses out of surplus optics. I am particularly interested in cameras that use the old fashioned meniscus landscape lens […]

Allright, last night’s experimentation with the RTL-SDR dongle on my Raspberry Pi Model B+ was pretty successful. Incidently, I forgot to mention that this worked fine with the dongle plugged directly into the Pi, I didn’t need a powered hub. That’s pretty cool. Previously, I had experimented with decoding ADS-B signals from airlines. I thought […]

Just a quick note. I have been meaning to try out the combination of the Raspberry Pi with one of the popular $20 RTL-SDR dongles, to see if the combination would work. I was wondering how well it would work, how hard it would be, how much of the available (small) CPU power it would […]

My musings about my earliest memories of computers brought me back to 1976 and the appearance of the COSMAC ELF in Popular Electronics. I was only twelve, and probably had only the vaguest understanding of what such a machine could do, or why I might want one, but I remember reading these articles and it […]

From tiny acorns, giant oak trees grow. Likewise, seemingly trivial events and items can affect our lives. As a kid, I had been interested in computers for a while. I think it must have postdated the appearance of the Altair 8800, which debuted in Popular Electronics in 1974 (I would have been ten or so […]

Over the past few years, I’ve expressed an interest in the AGC, or Apollo Guidance Computer. If you haven’t had the time to look at it, the Wikipedia page is good enough to get a brief overview, but if you want to dig deep, you can find all sorts of information and simulators. I found […]

I haven’t had much of a chance to get to ballgames this year. I normally go to about a dozen or so A’s games during a typical season, but this year I basically haven’t made it to any. Life has just filled up with other things to do. But last night, the mystical forces of […]

On this date back in 2002, I started this blog. Since that time, I’ve published 4019 posts, with a total of 725,146 words. I hope some of you have enjoyed it. I’m slacking off, but still find stuff that I think is fun, and hope you drop in from time to time to read and […]

My recent experiments with large format photography with primitive cameras has me googling and surfing around. In my rampant clicking, I uncovered this very simple camera, which is even simpler than the 4×5 cameras that our class constructed. It’s just a positive meniscus lens with a 120 mm focal length, stopped down to f/90, held […]