brainwagon

I was directed to a posting about the lawsuit between Geohot and Sony by a twitter from @adafruit. Sony drops lawsuit against Geohot – a maker, hacker and innovator… « adafruit industries blog. I think the article’s title is rather misleading. Sony didn’t drop the lawsuit: the lawsuit was settled. While Geohot admitted to no […]

Like many mechanical skills, soldering may seem fairly daunting if you’ve never done it before, but it’s really not that hard. If you need a basic getting-started guide, you could try out the new Soldering is Easy comic book. I think the only thing it really could use is a better guide to buying a […]

Josh read my earlier article on maze generation, and forwarded me to this cool link via Twitter. It’s an article by Jamis Buck, and details all sorts of cool ways to generate mazes, with examples, applets, discussion… It’s simply great. It even includes an online maze generator for constructing random mazes suitable for construction in […]

Back in 2007, I was looking at the career total bases expressed as miles, mainly to demonstrate what an outstanding career Hank Aaron had. brainwagon » Blog Archive » Was Hank Aaron really that good? I expressed with certainty that Bonds would never catch (and indeed, nobody may ever catch) Aaron’s numbers for total bases. […]

I was playing Minecraft with a few like-minded people the other day, and grew weary of excavating huge, deep holes and falling into lava pits. So, I decided to create my own little island reserve. I scouted a likely location: a small insignificant island off the coast from our main base and began construction. Once […]

I’ve been interested in LOWFER radio (low frequency radio operation) for quite some time. Under Part 15, unlicensed experimenters can transmit signals in the frequency band between 160khz and 190khz, subject to certain regulations on power and antennas. You can read more about it here. I was bored the other day, so I decided to […]

I’m pretty much a city slicker. I’m more comfortable ordering take out than farming, fishing or hunting. My dad grew up on a farm, and went hunting and fishing for food. He used to tell stories of how his bicycle had a mount for his rifle across the handlebars. When I was a kid, he […]

In thinking about the 555 timer AM transmitter that I constructed last night and trying to understand how it might work, I eventually ended up with a basic question about PWM modulation. It boiled down to this: if you are generating a pulse width modulation signal with a rate of (say 540khz) but pulses whose […]

I mostly avoided the siren song of the 555 timer that seemed to echo through the blogiverse during the recent 555 contest, but when I was out and about last weekend, I picked up 10 of them from Anchor Electronics, and they have been taunting me from the shelf ever since. So, last night I […]

Back when I was into building telescopes (something I haven’t done very much of in the last few years) I developed a desire to try some machining. I managed to pick up a 6″ Atlas mini lathe. And… well.. I’ve done very little. It’s sitting on my workbench in the garage. This website demonstrates some […]

William F. Friedman is a name that might not be familiar to you unless you are a bit of a cryptography nut. Of course, I am a bit of one: I have a couple of long technical notes that were authored by Friedman on the cracking of some complex WWI era ciphers. But I must […]

Roger, G3XBM, has been busy experimenting on the Dreamer’s Band: signals somewhere around 8.9khz. These signals are actually in the audio range: so all you need to receive them are an antenna (Roger uses a largish loop antenna) and an RF preamplifier, feeding into a soundcard. Roger demos his system here, and shows reception of […]

While watching TV, I coded up a custom renderer for the HOPALONG orbit fractal, generated 300 frames, and encoded it with FFMPEG. Without further ado:

All this fiddling around with the Lorenz attractor has made me try to think of other simple, easy graphics hacks that I could make. I recalled that A.K. Dewdney had some simple graphics hacks in one of his Computer Recreations column back in the 1980s. It turns out that Wallpaper for the mind was published […]

Doing a bit more reading, I found out that the equations that make up the Lorenz attractor (which are derived from a simplified model of 2D fluid flow with a superimposed temperature gradient) can also be thought of as governing another physical system. Imagine a water wheel, with a number of buckets spaced evenly around […]