Day 27, A small 10" Sears bandsaw
Trying to get tools from garage sales is a completely hit and miss affair, often where weeks will go by when you see nothing of ...
Blog
Day 26, My simple tool caddy
Another of my home built projects: a simple tool caddy that was one of my first projects that I made when I got my little ...
Day 25, My Japanese-inspired toolbox
Today's garage gem is something I made: a simple toolbox, inspired by the kind of toolbox that Japanese carpenters put together to hold their tools. ...
Day 24, A mystery lens assembly
Back when I was totally obsessed with all things related to telescope and optics, I would often acquire random optics for things, even when I ...
Day 23, My dovetailing/joinery toolbox
This is day 23 of my garage gems series, and 23 is a prime number, so I thought I would give you guys a bonus ...
Day 22, A hand cranked drill
After yesterday's racheting screwdriver from Millers Falls (an excellent working tool) I thought I would show you an instance of a tool that I acquired ...
Day 21, A racheting screwdriver
My third week of garage gems ends with something that I have never actually used, but I still think is pretty cool. It is a ...
Day 20, A tiny vise
This may not quite be a gem, but it's a tool that I have found a use for in my shop. It is a very ...
Day 19, Baxter adjustable wrench
On Day 19, I'm dusting off something that I got that I think was pretty unusual, and may be the oldest tool that I have ...
Day 18, Bolt cutter
Today's gem is a tool I actually have very little need for, but was too cool pass up. (I think I may have a problem. ...
Day 17, a pair of drawknives
Here is a vintage pair of drawknives that came to me during the COVID pandemic. I don't really have much use for drawknives, as I ...
Day 16, A pair of handscrew clamps
I have several wooden handscrew clamps, of which these are a pair that came to me for less than $5 each. (It might be beginning ...
Day 15, A pair of Stanley "Bailey" planes
I do not have a huge collection of hand planes, but I do have a small assortment, of which these two are the largest. The ...
Day 14, My Stepstool
Back to a project that I made: a simple stepstool. I am about six four, so it isn't all that often that I need a ...
Day 13, Pine Knot Brace And Irwin Auger Bits
Today's installment of "my garage gems" was originally going to be something else, but in digging that item out, I ran across this pair of ...
Day 12, Tandy 102
I am going to be spending a lot of time at the North Bay Python 2025 Conference in Petaluma over the weekend, so I'm releasing ...
Day 11, My kerfmaker
A lot of woodworking is about making jigs. This one is perhaps one of the smallest, but also one of the most useful, a kerfmaker ...
Day 10, My Moxon vise
Today's garage gem is something that I made myself: a Moxon vise. This type of vise owes its name to Joseph Moxon, whi was an ...
Day 9, A double beam marking gauge...
Today's nifty McGuffin from my garage is another garage sale acquisition: a dual beam marking gauge. Marking gauges are used for layout in traditional woodworking. ...
Day 8, Disk Belt Sander
Sometimes you happen upon a tool that you don't really think you need, but it's a "good deal" and you have to take it home ...
Day 7, Walnut Mallet
Today's entry in #mygaragegems is a woodworkers mallet that I made a couple of years ago as one of my introductory woodworking projects. It is ...
Sun Halo
A beautiful bit of atmospheric physics, taken from Sacramento. ...
Day 6, A pair of genuine Crescent adjustable wrenches
I am a bit of a sucker for adjustable wrenches of all types. Nothing brings me quite as much joy as finding an old, rusty, ...
Day 5, A Union combination plane
I have a modest collection of wood planes. This example is a so-called transitional jack plane made by Union Manufacturing Company of New Britain, Connecticut. ...
Day 4, A Stanley Sweetheart level
More properly a garage gem, here is my 24" Stanley Sweetheart Level, a No. 0. I'm not an expert on Stanley tools, but my understanding ...
Day 3, Antique binoculars
I am stretching the definition of "garage gem" a bit to include this item, but they are cool and worth sharing. This is a pair ...
Second light: testing my 12.5" primary (unfinished)
Okay, having tested an aluminized mirror, I thought it would be good to try something more in progress: namely my 12.5" f/5 mirror that I ...
First light for a new Ronchi tester
One of the goals in improving my garage is to get back into building telescopes. I have a 12.5" f/5 Newtonian mirror that I just ...
Day 2, A home made spherometer
Some of you may know, I build telescopes as a hobby. Well, recently it's more like I think about building telescopes, but... well... now that ...
Day 1, A pair of oil cans
What better way to lead off what I hope will be a series of posts about stuff I find in my garage than a pair ...
Moving brainwagon.org to a different server…
I think I’ve had it. I’ve been using bluehost to provide WordPress hosting of brainwagon.org for years, but I think that’s going to come to ...
Link of the Day: VT320 fonts…
I’m old enough to have used original VT-100 terminals to access mainframe computers like the DEC-1091 we had at the U of O, although we ...
Looked up a Risk variant: Ozymandia
I’ve been pondering the classic board game Risk for a bit, and wrote a few chunks of code to help evaluate the odds of dice ...
Notes re: WordPress vs. Hugo
Back on May 2, 2024, I was aboard a plane heading toward a real vacation: ten days spent on a cruise and visiting friends and ...
Re: the $1 notebook
It’s kind of amazing when things that you have been thinking about for a while come together and make you think that the world is ...
Baby steps toward bookbinding…
I have always been a fan of books, and the craft of bookbinding has been particularly interesting. I have been trying to gather the necessary ...
Link to an SSTV decoder for the Pi Pico
In years past, I had developed some (largely academic) interest in slow scan television, and had implemented encoders for a variety of standard modes, using ...
Cracking the Cryptic, January 2025 Patreon Challenge
I’m a bit of a puzzle fan. My wife and I do a daily gauntlet of puzzles, including Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, Stepdle, Worldle, and the ...
Goodbye to 2024…
Hey readers, this post will be a bit unusual, as instead of being about some kind of cool tech or gadget, it’s going to be ...
Trying to understand the drama around WordPress…
I’ve used the open source version of WordPress for some twenty years. In general, I’ve been pretty happy, although not without some misgivings, mostly technological, ...
Another chapter in the “I’m dimwitted” theme from Advent of Code, 2024…
Warning, spoilers ahead for those who are still interested in doing the problems themselves. Part 1 of Day 19 was pretty simple, really. You could ...
I’m dimwitted, or Day 13 of the Advent of Code challenge…
As part of my daily puzzling in December, I’ve been engaged in the Advent of Code 2024 challenge. This is the kind of thing that ...
An hour of Meshtastic traffic on the Bay Area Mesh…
This will be a bit of a rambling technical ride on a particularly nerdy topic, so buckle up (or bail out now while you still ...
Another 3D stamp: QR codes
After tinkering with making a 3D stamp yesterday, I thought that maybe I would tinker together a stamp for the QR code that would send ...
3D printing an ink stamp, or “Welcome to Stampy Town, Population Five!”
Apologies to Hermes Conrad. Further apologies to those who won’t get this Futurama quote. During COVID, I spent some time in my shop doing more ...
Felines win in the battle between astrophotography and cats…
I posted this picture of my little friend Patchouli to the Facebook Seestar group, who decided to settle into the case for that smart telescope. ...
Practical uses for 3D printers…
I’ve been an on-and-off enthusiast for 3D printing for quite some time, but in the early days, it wasn’t what I would call “practical”. They ...
Strategies for coping with problems…
I’ve found that there are three basic strategies that have helped me in the past. They are probably not comprehensive, or even the best, but ...
Astrophotography for those without huge budgets of time or money…
So, in an effort to get back to blogging about things that may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but which provide some ...
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice…
Or does it? It’s not like gravity attracting bodies together. It’s not a force of nature. It’s something that we all have to work toward ...
Mom’s Pickled Salmon Recipe
When I was a young, one of the things that frequently had was pickled salmon. Sadly, it was also a recipe that I never bothered ...
April 8, 2024 Total Solar Eclipse From Mazatlan
Annoying: the videos which I inserted in here late last night seemed to not be working this morning. Granted it was late and my COVID ...
Restarting the brainwagon blog?
I wonder if i trained a large language model on the contents of this blog and used it to generate new posts, whether it would ...
brainwagon is 20 years old today!
It was twenty years ago today that I first posted something to my brainwagon blog. While I have sort of fallen out of the habit ...
Experimenting with ESP8266/Tasmota Firmware…
Hey gang, I know it’s been quite some time (since last May apparently) since I posted anything new on the blog. It is not that ...
A cornucopia of updates…
Sigh. The new version of WordPress is doing stupid things with images. I’ll fix them later. Okay, so roughly a month ago, I said that ...
Welcome back…
Okay all, it’s been a while. If anyone is reading this, then welcome back to the brainwagon blog. I’ve been blogging off and on for ...
Updating themes…
I am a fairly basic guy, with fairly basic graphic design tastes. I haven’t done a great deal to customize the appearance of my blog ...
Overhauling my Creality CR-10 3D printer
A couple of years ago, I decided to try to get into the entire 3D printing “revolution”. I liked the idea of being able to ...
Back to telescope making…
Part of my recent interest (obsession) with getting my shop equipped for wood working is that I want to return to an activity that I ...
Thinking outside, or rather about, the box…
You would think that with the shelter-in-place orders that we are all under, that I would have had a lot of time and energy to ...
AREDN project update…
So, I’ve had a minimal AREDN network running at my house for the past few week or so, and it is working well. To recap ...
Another minor networking discovery of the AREDN network…
So, I have a spare computer out in my shop which I have used to host various small bits of networking. Previously I used it ...
Stale services on the AREDN network
Okay, minor lesson learned about AREDN. I had tried creating a couple of additional services and reserved a couple of DHCP devices on my node ...
More progress on my AREDN experiments…
I didn’t have a lot of time to do further experiments with my tiny AREDN network, but I did figure out a few things. To ...
First steps toward making an AREDN node from isolation…
For anyone reading this from some more distant point in the future, I’m in my fourth week of self-isolation to help halt the spread of ...
Another project: an ESP32-CAM based timelapse…
I’ve got an opportunity to potentially loft a small camera module on a high altitude balloon launch next month. I had written some very simple ...
First T-Trak Module in progress…
Okay, I had some scrap 1/4″ plywood in the shop, so I decided to go ahead and see if I could make a T-Trak module ...
T-Track: a modular system for N scale model railroads…
Okay, I’m super busy at work these days at work, but I do still have time to muse about projects that I’ll be getting to ...
Mystery problem with my Harbor Freight router… or is it with me?
So, I earlier this week I was working on making a wooden box as part of my skill building in woodworking. Actually I made two ...
Testing a simple garden light circuit…
Over the holiday I was watching my usual raft of videos on Youtube, and got interested in the circuitry that is inside the common garden ...
Testing some small solar cells…
Readers might recall that I’ve been interested in small solar energy projects. In the past, I’ve played with a 25w solar panel, a Chinese PWM ...
More evening skill building: a small wooden tote…
In my garage, I’m trying to do some simple skill building exercises to increase my precision and knowledge about how to construct useful objects. The ...
Model Train throttles…
On one of the Facebook model train groups I was in, I read an article about someone who was building a transistorized throttle based upon ...
Making a kerfmaker…
I am still an absolute rookie woodworker, which means that time spent in the shop doing the most basic skill building exercises can be fun. ...
How do you like ‘dem apples?
A friend of mine pointed out an interesting website today: applesearch.org . This is well and truly off my normal set of blog topics (as ...
Experiments with an L298 DC motor control module
I’ve had a couple of DC motor control modules lying around unused for quite a while. I think that I bought them for a simple ...
Today’s skill-building exercise in the shop…
Carmen thought I should spend a little more time in the shop today. I didn’t have anything in mind, but while poking around we found ...
“It’s just a block of wood.”
Yesterday I did some work in the shop, finishing up a couple of small projects and prototyping a small display shelf for Carmen. The result ...
What is it about the holidays that makes me think about model trains?
I’ve got a week off before crunch time really begins at work, so I’m home enjoying the company of the missus and just relaxing. And, ...
Bringing back my Atari 400…
Brace yourself for old guy reminiscing about the past. Back in 1980, I was a sixteen year old kid with a goal: to buy my ...
First test of the Nano VNA on my beacon antenna
Everyone I know in the twitterverse/blogosphere seems to be getting a cute little $50 piece of kit called the NanoVNA, which is a small vector ...
POKEY timing information
I’ve been working on a bizarre little project which involves the very first computer that I ever owned: my trusty old Atari 400. I bought ...
Dabbling in tool restoration…
I’ve been watching too many YouTube views lately about tool restoration, and as part of my ongoing efforts to equip my home workshop with more ...
Woodworking Weekend
I’ve been on a bit of a woodworking binge lately, no doubt fueled by all the creative and talented woodworkers who have made a place ...
Wrench is out of the Metal Rescue de-rusting bath…
Just some pictures of the wrench after it came out of the bath. I just scrubbed the loose black oxides off with a Scotch Bright ...
How should I finish my old Verona Toolworks alligator wrench?
The wrench as I got it from the garage sale… Last weekend, I got this rather dirty and rusty wrench at a garage sale in ...
Mystery Wrench Manufacturer Identified…
Okay, that turned out to be easier than I suspected. I haven’t gotten around to derusting the mystery wrench, but I did do a little ...
A weekend of woodworking and garage sales…
I took Friday off to make it a four day weekend. Part of the reason was so that I could prep some wood for my ...
Post Field Day Report on K6HX Beacon Operations…
So, part of my incentive on working on my WSPR beacon was one of my coworkers decided to try to do some operating from the ...
Shaking off the rust…
As part of my attempt to get into woodworking and develop some actual skills, I have been keeping an eye out for what would best ...
A new beacon is beckoning…
I’ve been mostly working in my workshop on various projects related to woodworking, but last week one of my coworkers reminded me that Field Day, ...
Rust removal by electrolysis: a first attempt
Yesterday I wrote up my (successful and positive) results at using the commercial product Evaporust to remove rust from some of my smaller rusty auger ...
Rusty skills, and a 3 day weekend in the garage…
It is Monday morning, and I’m enjoying my coffee before heading off to work. All in all it was a pretty productive three day weekend, ...
The hole (whole?) boring business…
Acquisition from an estate sale… This week, I picked up an ancient, decrepit box of rusty auger bits at an estate sale. The label inside ...
The joys of a five minute project…
When cleaning the garage a while back, we discovered our old pink “Fight Breast Cancer” edition Roomba. For some reason, we had put it away ...
More adventures in the shop and around the house.
Okay, it’s not really a “shop”. It’s really just my garage. But then again, it’s hardly ever had a car in it in the last ...
I can delay the simplest tasks with endless questions…
Cheap fencing boards, after Carmen hit them with the sander. So, last night I didn’t actually get any woodworking done. Carmen actually did more than ...
Monday night sawdust creation…
I got home from work today, and decided that the best way to lower my stress level was to go into the garage and make ...
Update on tool caddy, with a few lessons learned on designing and order of operations
Got home from work after seven last night, so didn’t have a ton of time in the workshop. I was also impatient to actually get ...
Building a tool caddy…
A few weeks ago I was at a garage sale, and picked up a few old tools for just a few bucks. One of the ...
My first real table saw jig: a cross cut sled
After yesterday’s success in building a little garden stool, I wanted to get back into the garage to do a little more woodworking. Sadly, today ...
How to turn pulling weeds into a wood working project…
Okay, after all the drought-ending rain we’ve been having, our yard has turned into a lush jungle of various kinds of weeds. Part of it ...
My Dust Collection “Cart”
I have been trying to do a bit more wood working in my garage, with the net result that a fine layer of sawdust is ...
A rolling stand for my Harbor Freight Router Table
I’ve slowly been trying to do some woodworking projects. I have very little skill and experience. In the past, I had (barely) enough skill to ...
Template Program that uses a DS3231 RTC to wake up an Arduino
So, my idea is to use a cheap but reasonably accurate RTC chip module based upon the DS3231 chip to periodically wake a sleeping Arduino. ...
Baby steps with the DS3231…
Last night, I did a small amount of work on two projects. I applied some Wood Bondo to a couple of bad defects in my ...
Brain Fail: How to waste several hours trying to get an NRF24L01+ working on an Arduino…
I must admit to a certain amount of jealousy about people who demonstrate an ability to start and finish large projects. Granted: I have a ...
Making a Knob…
So, I’m trying to get a little more adept at wood working, and one of the things that I’m doing as a “skills building” exercise ...
Arduino Mini, using Micro Amounts of Current…
Last night, the weather was pretty rainy. I woke up a couple of times during the night (once, when my little cat friend Bailey decided ...
3D Printed Gadgets for Woodworking…
I’ve been slowly working toward getting a reasonably equipped garage for woodworking, and have been watching a metric ton of Youtube content made by woodworkers. ...
Brent’s Sharpening Pages…
My experimenting with plane sharpening has (like so many other things) caused me to research stuff on the Internet. I’ve been working on grinding the ...
30 minutes in the workshop…
So, last night about 9:30PM I decided to spend a little time in my garage workshop. I cleared some items off the top of my ...
Making a cross cut sled for my table saw…
Okay, a few weeks ago I bought a little Dewalt DW745 table saw for use in my garage. I’ve never actually owned a table saw, ...
My prototype data logger experiment: bunyan
A couple of days ago, I found out about thecavepearlproject.org through a link on hackaday, and an article which gave an interesting idea about how ...
Antique handsaws from a friend’s estate sale…
I heard some friends of mine that I haven’t seen in some time were having an estate sale, so I drove over to say hi ...
Temperature sensing on an Arduino w/o additional hardware…
Last night I began dusting off my solar project a bit. It still seems like we are at the bottom of the atmospheric river, so ...
Brief experience (failure) printing with Sainsmart TPU
I’m still heading toward changing my Creality CR-10 over to use a BLTouch bed leveling sensor, but I still need a few parts that I’m ...
Steps toward getting a BLTouch Bed Level Sensor on my CR-10…
I’ve had my Creality CR-10 for quite some time, and fairly early on I decided that I needed a bed leveling sensor. It wasn’t just ...
Pondering the 18650 Li-Ion Battery…
Back in October, I attended Pacificon, the local ham radio convention. While I was there I picked up a couple of wacky things that were ...
A few thoughts on 3D printing and the Creality CR-10
A name plate, printed in two different colors of PLA filament on my Creality CR-10. Over the last couple days, I’ve been pondering my journey ...
My Computer Controlled Etch a Sketch…
I’ve been wanting to make a computer-controlled mechanical gadget for quite some time. When I finally got a 3D printer a little more than a ...
I sense a disturbance in the fo… err… current to my Litter Robot…
Okay, here’s a strange little project that is pushing the limits of what I understand in a couple of ways, and I thought I might ...
Litter Robot data acquisition, or “how I made things complicated for myself”
Okay, as per the previous installment, I carted my new current transformer tap upstairs, and plugged in the Litter Robot. It entered its startup sequence, ...
My Rise and Fall on Quora
Back around 2016 I had a tough time. A vertebrae in my neck began to pinch on the nerves that run down my left arm ...
Added LED shop lights…
I didn’t accomplish much in the garage on Sunday, but I did manage to take down some old, flickery and generally unreliable flourescent lights and ...
Weekend in the garage…
So, today I had a list of a few simple tasks in my garage that I thought would be good to get to. It’s now ...
People building Gingery Lathes…
I think maybe twenty years ago when I was in the height of my telescope-building mania I started acquiring books about lathe work and machining ...
An Old Interest Rekindled: Model Railroads
When I was a kid, I went through a phase where I was really interested in model railroading. Like most boys, I had an inexpensive ...
Update on My “Solar” satellite station…
Previously I had written up a bit on my project that I have called my “solar satellite station.” I used quotes around the word “solar” ...
Fixed: Switch on Old Rigid Shop Vacuum
My dusty old Rigid Wet Dry Vac Okay, this doesn’t really count as a hack or anything, but it is a tiny bit of virtuous ...
Mission Accomplished: New Rolling Cart for my workshop
Okay, I never have been much of a woodworker, and haven’t done anything significant in a decade or so. But as I’m trying to clean ...
Found Item: Elgin Model No 2-12, Serial Number 9120
Okay, as part of my ongoing attempt to clean my garage (“Project Virtue”) I called up some friends from the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop. I ...
New tools, new projects…
Merry Christmas to all, and best wishes for the New Year! I’m in the middle of the “Winter Break” at Pixar. The studio mostly empties ...
Recommended Reading: AA7EE’s Boris Beacon…
I’ve been interested in low power beacon transmitters for a long time. If you’ve followed my blog, you’ve probably read about my experiments with WSPR ...
Debugging my cordless lawnmower, with an side of musing about Torx screws…
As part of my attempt to become slightly more virtuous, I’ve been trying to do four hours of work cleaning and organizing my garage workshop ...
How not to code an simple IOT sensor, and a new task list.
This weekend I mostly did work on further organization and cleaning of my garage workshop. This included taking out the old dog door and cutting ...
Found Item: Kodak Aero-Ektar Lens
It’s not uncommon for me to find unusual, nerdy objects while cleaning or organizing. I’m a bit of an eclectic pack rat, and have all ...
Jeri demonstrates some interesting polarization phenomena…
I’ve been interested in optics for many years, ever since I started building my own telescopes at age 11 and began writing ray-tracing software in ...
Debugging ESP8266 units remotely using Jeelabs esp-link firmware…
I was hoping to be a little further on writing up and making video of my solar energy project, but a blown power steering pup ...
Weekend Update…
Okay, I began this weekend with every intention of doing a video about my solar energy project. But in true usual “brainwagon” fashion, my attempt ...
#NerdThunder coming in December…
If you follow @HackAWeek (Dean Segovis) on Twitter, you may have seen this tweet announcing a new series of videos, shockingly including my name and ...
Solar Project Inspiration
I haven’t got a lot of details about my solar project available, but Project Curacao has all the details of a much more impressive version ...
Fun (and a question) with a solar energy project…
Yes, it’s me, back after a far too long hiatus. Sometimes life intervenes, and you just have to reset your priorities. But rest assured, the ...
Creality CR-10 updates…
So, I got a new 3D printer about ten days ago, a Creality CR-10 . While this printer requires a bit of assembly, it is ...
Successful Launch / Recovery of the Falcon Heavy
Totally amazeballs. I had goosebumps. ...
Weekend Update…
This is just a short set of updates for my weekend projects, meant to keep me in the habit. I’ll write up a more complete ...
More progress on the ISS clock project…
I haven’t posted an update here recently, but I am (mostly) living up to my New Year’s resolution to spend at least 30 minutes a ...
A short audio book review: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes
I often get nearly an hour and a half of commute time in my car each day, so I have lots of time. Rather than ...
Brief Update on my ESP32 ISS Clock
Several days ago, I cobbled together a short bit of code to make an NTP enabled clock out of an ESP32/OLED module. I had previously ...
Other weekend projects, including a new cat tree!
I had a bunch of chores that I wanted to get done this weekend. Our gardener has disappeared off the face of the earth, and ...
Quick tinkering of an NTP clock with the ESP32
I spent a little time today trying to make the bare minimum code necessary for the ESP32 to connect to my WiFi network and synchronizing ...
A few quick thoughts on the Inky pHAT
Okay, I got it working. See! But I had a number of really annoying problems, none of which really had to do with the hardware: ...
Inky pHAT arrives: a 3 color E-ink display for the Raspberry Pi
For some reason, I’ve always been attracted to E ink displays . They combine a number of interesting features like low power (none when not ...
Interactive Programming… in C
I’ve been kind of interested in a type of “livecoding” where changes to a code base are immediately reflected in a running program. I’ve seen ...
Yes, I crochet (and knit, although less well.)
In addition to my geek hobbies, I have resurrected a skill that was taught to me by my Grandma Busch when I was seven years ...
Connector resistance matters: the Anet A8 PCB heated bed…
My previous entry talked about the problems that I’ve been having with the Anet A8. I haven’t had the time to actually do some rework ...
Debugging my Anet A8 hot bed…
As in most things, whether you achieve success has a lot to do with what connections you have. And this is true of my somewhat ...
SSD1306 drivers for the ESP-IDF framework…
If I was going to port my ISS code to the ESP32 using the ESP-IDF framework, I’d need a driver for the SSD1306 OLED display. ...
The ESP32 vs. the ESP8266
Over the last year I’ve spent a small amount of money and a larger amount of time accumulating a bunch of development modules from banggood ...
Fun, but Frustrating: the Anet A8 3D Printer
3D printing is a big topic, and I’ve done a lot of work with this printer. There is no way for a short blog post ...
Things that go bump in the night…
I’m tired this morning, because at 2:39AM I was awoken by a magnitude 4.5 earthquake centered in Berkeley. It was over before I gained full ...
An inexpensive, open source, two factor authentication USB token: the U2F Zero
If you are like me, you have lots of accounts, and lots of passwords. Keeping track of them all is a bit of a pain, ...
A brief review: Google WiFi
Over the last year or so, more and more of the video content that I consume is coming by way of streaming over the Internet. ...
On the allure of Quora and plans for a new brainwagon future.
For several years, this blog was my major creative outlet on the Internet. Facebook was founded in February of 2004. Twitter was founded in March ...
brainwagon.org should now redirect to use HTTPS
I set up a plugin so that trying to access http://brainwagon.org should now automatically redirect to use https and the HTTPS protocol. If anybody has ...
Happy New Year!
Well, I have decided to do a little well needed maintenance on the blog. I installed an SSL certificate so my blog will now be ...
Some new addition to the brainwagon labs…
Okay, I bet that hardly anyone comes to this blog anymore. I’ve been slack, and there hasn’t been any reason other than the simple fact ...
pinMode v. digitalWrite: what’s with this use (abuse?) of internal pullups?
This post is the kind of round about post you get first thing in the morning. I’ll get to the title question at the end. ...
How making an ISS clock turns into researching an optimization problem involving spherical Voronoi diagrams…
A few years ago, I got seriously interested in amateur radio and satellites. I would often haul out a small Yagi antenna and my trusty ...
Musing about a 2 dimensional delta robot…
First of all, if anyone is still swinging by this blog, yes, I’m still alive. While I haven’t exactly been prolific in my leisure activities, ...
Simple tests using the WeMos D1 R2…
I didn’t have a ton of time to tinker when I got home, but I did play a tiny bit more with the WeMos D1 ...
New WeMos D1 R2 boards have arrived…
I just got a trio of WeMos D1 R2 boards from Banggood this morning. I haven’t had a chance to do anything with them yet, ...
Dorodango cracks again…
Sigh. My second attempt has also cracked, although it is beginning to look pretty shiny. ...
A new theory of dorodango…
Okay, I’ve done two, with nearly identical outcomes: a fine network of relatively shallow cracks in the “capsule”, the thin layer of fine particles which ...
Ordered some ESP8266 boards in an Arduino form factor…
The ESP8266 is an amazing little processor: cheap and capable and (most interestingly) WiFi enabled. I have some of the older “nodemcu” boards that I ...
FFMPEG overlay needs “repeatlast” argument…
I use ffmpeg to add some information overlays to the videos that I often upload to YouTube. I’ve documented these before, but I had a ...
No! My precious dorodango!
Eek! I was getting a bit impatient with my dorodango, so I decided to leave it out in the open air when I went to ...
Dorodango: Having (or rather making) a ball with just mud
On Sunday, I started a new project which on the face of it, seems like an enormous waste of time, but if you’ve been reading ...
Hooded Oriole at my hummingbird feeder…
Last year, I bodged together a motion detecting camera to photograph hummingbirds at my hummingbird feeder. But it was always a temporary hack. We had ...
J1a system on a Lattice ICESTICK40
Long time readers of this blog might remember that I received a Gameduino board designed by James Bowman. I used it to construct ANGST , ...
My Fizz Buzz solutions…
Joel Grus blogged about a job interview where he was asked about the ridiculous Fizz Buzz question that apparently some companies use to weed out ...
Shower (or should I say “cow-er”) Thought of the Day…
I just recently found out about the /r/showerthoughts subreddit, where people vote on pithy sayings. I thought this might be a fun thing to have ...
Some random pictures from the Maker Faire…
<dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-7-9632'> Creepy animatronics… </dd> <dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-7-9629'> A 3D printed Jeep! </dd> <dd class='wp-caption-text gallery-caption' id='gallery-7-9626'> Seriously, a 3D printed Jeep. ...
Code for generating a random Latin square…
The other day I mentioned that generating random Latin squares was a bit more complicated than I thought, and that an algorithm by Jacobson and ...
Atinlay Aresquares…
My last post dealt with a solver for KenKen puzzles. Once you have one of those, then the obvious thing to work on next (in ...
KenKen puzzle solver…
Lately, my lunch hours have been spent working on the NYT Crossword with my lunch companion Tom. While I find that the Thursday crosswords are ...
A couple of cool solar powered FPV planes…
Just a pointer to a cool project which appeared on Hackaday: a solar powered FPV plane that can fly forever (or at least until the ...
A story from SIGGRAPH past…
I’ve been meaning to write down this story for a while, because it represents a time when I was booed away from a microphone by ...
Solving the N queens problem, again…
Backtracking is a better technique, obviously. The version from earlier today was actually not very clever, and took half an hour to find the 73,712 ...
Solving the N Queens Problem…
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 ...
Streaming to twitch.tv with ffmpeg…
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 ...
Recommendations for tech to create a virtual hacker space?
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 ...
More on Caxton Foster’s Blue Architecture…
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 ...
New experiment… Life beyond Comcast…
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 ...
Quadcopter Survey with my DJI Phantom 2/GoPro
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 ...
Christmas Dinner: Prime Rib == Yum.
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 ...
Two bits of hardware on order…
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 ...
I’m not dead…
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 ...
Another quick iPhone astrophotograph
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 ...
Astrophotography with just my iPhone 6…
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 ...
The lunar eclipse was just an excuse to haul out my binoculars…
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 ...
On calculators, Space Invaders and Binary Coded Decimal Arithmetic…
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) ...
The ESP8266…
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 ...
One dimensional cellular automata code in Python..
Inspired by the KnitYak Kickstarter , I thought I would code up a simple Python program that could generate the same sort of patterns that ...
The Kim-Uno — a Kim-1 simulator
Ken Boak had mentioned on twitter that someone was creating a blinken-lights front end for the simh simulator of the PDP-8, called the PiDP-8 , ...
The NOAA Magnetic Field Calculator
Just bookmarking this for now: The NOAA Magnetic Field Calculator This website can accept a latitude longitude (or, conveniently, a Zip code) and will give ...
A brief overview of my recent magnetometer experiments…
If you follow me on twitter (@brainwagon) you’ve undoubtedly seen a few mysteriously short tweets about experiments I’ve been performing on magnetometers. It’s hard to ...
On quadcopters…
I’ve been having a bit of fun with my DJI quadcopter lately, but there is something that is annoying me and stressing me in the ...
HOWTO: Print a cheap Ronchi Screen…
If you are going to test your telescope mirror, you will sooner or later need a Ronchi screen. The best Ronchi screens are usually made ...
Another lap around the telescope workshop..
For the second week in a row, I carted my body down to the Chabot Science Center and attended the Chabot Telescope Makers workshop. My ...
For a 6″ f/12 Newtonian, a sphere suffices…
I mentioned that I was searching for my 6″ f/12 that I made years ago. Still have not found it, but I was wondering: how ...
Treasure hunting in the garage, along with some mirror test analysis
As I mentioned before, I’m trying to get back into telescope making, a hobby that I haven’t been involved with for a few years. The ...
Ronchi code now on github…
I updated my old 2001 Ronchi test code to support arbitrary conic surfaces, and then uploaded the code to github . My current 12.5″ project ...
Dusting off old Ronchi Testing Code…
At the Chabot Telescope Maker’s workshop, we make a lot of use of the Ronchi test. It’s great for figuring out gross defects and problems ...
Flying at Lime Ridge Open Space…
It was a warm and reasonably calm day, so Carmen and I decided to take the Phantom 2 out to Lime Ridge Open Space, where ...
Checking my own Ronchi test code…
It was a long time since I wrote the code that I used for Ronchi code, and while I had some confidence in it, I ...
Nifty telescope idea…
Since I stopped actively working on building telescopes, there have been numerous bits of technology that are now widely and cheaply available, and that can ...
An Arduino Powered HF Beacon…
LB3RE sent me a link to this awesome HF beacon by Anthony, F4GOH and Christophe, F4GOJ that has many of the same features as my ...
Gert’s 2015 Jupiter Campaign
I forgot to mention my chat with Gert, another telescope making regular up at the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop. He’s a skilled astrophotographer and all ...
Dusting off some old equipment…
If I am going to get going on this mirror again, I need to dust off and/or build some new test equipment. I never really ...
Telescope Making: a new return to an old passion..
Even recent readers of this blog may not know of one of my old passions: building telescopes. Back when I was ten or eleven years ...
More on my 8 digit clock, now with GPS synchronization…
Yesterday I just had a few minutes to hack around, and I decided to marry a sketch that used the TinyGPS++ library to the clock ...
A simple clock, running on the Arduino Uno…
In a previous post, I wrote some interrupt driven code to refresh a multiplexed 8 digit, 7 segment display. Every 2 milliseconds, the Arduino triggers ...
Modulo: A simple, modular solution for building electronics
A former colleague of mine, Erin Tomson, has been running a kickstarter that I’ve been meaning to talk about, but here it is, only a ...
How much time is spent refreshing my 8 digit LED display?
A couple of days ago, I wrote about experimenting with a little Chinese 8 digit, 7 segment LED module that is driven by some 74HC595 ...
More flying, with a couple of close mishaps…
I’m getting more confident flying the DJI Phantom 2, which means that I’m closer to having my first crash as I try to do more ...
Driving an 8 digit, 7 segment display based upon the 74HC595…
A few weeks ago, I was scanning the Deal Extreme website, and ordered a few different LED displays, not because of any pressing need, but ...
Another day of flying… this time with the working gimbal…
At lunch today, I managed to get a quick flight in before the field was taken over by soccer players. Unlike my early attempt, this ...
Some reliability problems with my DS3231…
I was working on some additional software to power my nascent WSPR project. I’ve been thinking that rather than using an Arduino, it would be ...
Farewell…
You’ve probably heard the expression that somebody is a “man of few words”. I’m not that guy. I’m a man of many words. I love ...
A 4 digit, 7 segment display board based upon the TM1637 chipset…
Yesterday, I got a small 4 digit, 7 segment LED display board in the mail from dx.com. Cost was around $3 shipped, and the module ...
Teensy LC hooked to an Adafruit Ultimate GPS…
One of the things that I really like about the Teensy LC (besides its low price) is that it has three hardware serial ports. Hardware ...
Progress Report: Big Box O’ RF
Previously, I wrote about a project I called the Big Box O’ RF . I’ve shifted goals a bit, and done some experimentation, and have ...
Phantom Bad Boys…
I mentioned that during yesterday’s aborted attempt to fly quadcopters from a regional park resulted in a visit from the “Can’t Possibly Have Fun Police”, ...
First (and second) flight with the DJI Phantom 2…
Carmen bought a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter for my birthday, which I’ve been a little too chicken to put into the air so far. But ...
Testing the DS3231 module… I’m impressed!
I hooked up my new DS3231 clock module to an Arduino that was being fed with the one pulse per second input from a locked ...
New (more accurate) clock module…
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was not enormously satisfied with the accuracy of the DS1307 clock module that I got from China. ...
Accuracy of the DS1307
My tinkering with using the Adafruit GPS as a time base has yielded some results. I’m still getting a few spurious interrupts when I feed ...
Capsule Review: The Adafruit Ultimate GPS Module
I picked up an Adafruit GPS module while at the Maker Faire. It’s a cool little module. I had a couple of old GPS modules: ...
Rheoscopic Fluid (mica in suspension)
I mentioned in my Maker Faire wrap up post that I had spoken with Ben Krasnow, the science guru behind the Applied Science Youtube channel. ...
Weekend Update: Maker Faire, new gadgets, and I ground myself…
Greetings readers. I’m hopefully wishing there is still more than one. This weekend was the Bay Area Maker Faire 2015, the 10th incarnation of an ...
Time from the ESP8266…
Yesterday, I mentioned the idea of using the cheap ESP8266 as a clock source for a WSPR beacon transmitter. My initial idea was to basically ...
It’s about time… (with some WSPR updates)
Yesterday I finally found a copy of the code that I wrote years ago to figure out the tone sequence for messages used by the ...
Anyone want to meet up at the San Mateo Maker Faire?
Just a head’s up that I’ll be at the San Mateo Maker Faire this Saturday, May 16th. If anyone if exhibiting or attending, either drop ...
Playing with a buffer amplifier for a DDS…
I tinkered together a circuit for a buffer amplifier that I thought would be good to use with the AD9850 DDS board I have. In ...
Help wanted for new project… The Big Box O’ RF
As I’ve mentioned over the last few months, I have piles of different development boards, and lots of little display modules and the like. I’ve ...
An Arduino by any other name…
I was trying to make some headway on my robotic platform project, so I went digging through boxes in my office to find the large, ...
Interested in the history of my callsign: K6HX
I was originally licensed under the callsign KF6KYI (Kenwood-Yaesu-Icom, or what I prefer, Kiss Your Iguana) but when I upgraded to Extra a few years ...
Exciting AMSAT-NA opportunity…
I read this today: AMSAT is excited to announce that we have accepted an opportunity to participate in a potential rideshare as a hosted payload ...
Monkeying around with the Lytro Camera…
A couple of people on my twitter feed yesterday (aside: I tweet using @brainwagon, and passed 5000 tweets yesterday) had questions about how this light ...
Got a first generation (obsolete!) Lytro Camera…
I spent a couple years of my life working on a light field motion picture camera (and got named on two patents) as part of ...
Using a SainSmart LCD panel with the Arduino 1.6.3 IDE…
Yesterday I experienced some frustration with the SainSmart I2C LCD Module that I bought to help Pete and Bill uncover the problems that they’ve been ...
New arrivals from Adafruit, and minor updates…
I think Bill and Pete have been having way too much fun with the radio projects centered around the Arduino and the SI5351, so I ...
A (not entirely simple) LCD display for the Arduino…
I am a big fan of Bill Meara N2CQR and Pete Juliano N6QW, hosts of the really great Soldersmoke Podcast. Together, they chat about homebrewing ...
New I2C peripheral: 6 DOF IMU, $5.89
This little gadget arrived via Amazon Prime today: a three axis gyroscope/accelerometer that can be programmed via the I2C bus. I didn’t really have any ...
Tinkering with individually addressable LEDs…
While digging around looking for an LCD module I thought I had stashed somewhere, I encountered a bag with some of 8mm individually addressable RGB ...
More camera experiments…
Tonight’s tinkering was inspired by the script by spikedrba that I mentioned in yesterday’s post . I took down the hummingbird camera for a little ...
Motion detection in my hummingbird camera…
My goal in experimenting with the Raspberry Pi camera was to try to make an efficient and effective camera which can detect motion. Previous incarnations ...
StarStack… Astrophotography with Cell Phones?
Tom pointed me at this awesome article about an experiment run as part of the BBC programming Stargazing Live . Basically, they asked their viewers ...
SSTV from the ISS…
Well, it’s not pretty, but I was just using a 17″ whip antenna on my VX-8GR, recorded it with Audacity, and then decoded it with ...
More on hummingbirds…
I imagine that some of you are getting bored with this, so I won’t post another 20 minutes of hummingbird video. But I will post ...
Slow Scan Television from the ISS this weekend…
Note: This post was adapted by an email that I sent out to our ham radio club. If anyone is interested in a fun little ...
Skeleton of a motion detecting video capture program for the Raspberry Pi + Camera…
Last week I was playing around with using “motion-mmal” to capture pictures of hummingbirds feeding at my feeder. That was fun, but if I wanted ...
Beginning to look at MQTT…
My weekend experiments lead me eventually toward flashing nodemcu , a Lua based firmware that runs on the ESP8266. Having a simple programming language (albeit ...
Changes to the hummingbird camera…
Okay, I got it realigned to better center the frame, and expanded it out to 4×3 aspect ratio. Minutes later, I had got a new ...
More ESP8266 Experimentation: Giving it the Boot…
Got a chance to play around a bit more with the ESP8266 tonight. I dug out a nice little dual output power supply board that ...
A few more snaps of hummingbirds…
A couple more quick snaps from my hummingbird camera. I’m going to try to work on some improvements over the weekend, but shockingly we are ...
The Clickspring Youtube channel
I’ve tinkered a bit with metal working over the years, but never really developed any skill. I’ve always been fascinated by precision machining, particularly those ...
Another hummingbird cam, this one of a hummingbird nest!
Shelby noticed that hummingbirds had made a little nest, so she got a webcam and now you can view it via live streaming. At the ...
The “official” ESP8266 Wiki…
This morning I’m still drinking coffee and waking up, but I was pointed at “the ESP8266 wiki”, which appears to be this Wiki page . ...
Morning visit by a hummingbird…
I know, I know, it’s probably getting a little repetitive and boring. But I’m still getting a kick out of my motion capturing hummingbird camera. ...
In brain related news…
Carl Zimmer tweeted this ad for the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute: I’d ask for a second opinion. ...
First electrons for the ESP8266…
In the telescope making world, we call the first time that a telescope is used to look at the sky “first light”. I’ve decided to ...
Not all is easy-peasy with the ESP8266, with a short addendum
Okay, after I did my quick video record yesterday re: the ESP8266, I continued to play with it a bit more. And, it must be ...
More on Arduino v. Arduino…
Make just published this interview with Arduino founder Massimo Banzi about the internal schism that’s currently embroiling the Arduino community. It is true that this ...
Another hummingbird shows up on the camera…
When I got home today, it appeared that I had a few more images from my hummingbird cam. Luckily, I got several nice frames of ...
Minor tweaks to Arduino Morse Sketch…
Commenter Andy wanted a version of my classic code that could generate a tone instead of just blinking an LED. I mentioned that I had ...
Arduino? Perhaps we need OurDuino…
It’s no secret that I’ve been a fan of the Arduino. More than any other board, it’s got me into hacking little bits of hardware ...
Minor tweak to my Hummingbird Camera…
One thing I didn’t realize when I setup the Raspberry Pi camera to monitor my humming bird feeder was that it has a bright red ...
Motion Detecting Hummingbird Camera: Prototype
I like to see hummingbirds. They seem completely incredible to me, like little hyper Swiss Watches, buzzing around the garden. I’ve seen a few of ...
Tiny BASIC on a Tiny Display…
Early in 2012, I posted a small version of Tiny BASIC that I had adapted to run on the Arduino. It is based upon code ...
My version of minilife2 for the Arduino…
Without a lot more explanation, I did a bit more work on my implementation of Conway’s life, reducing the overhead so I can implement the ...
Using the Parallax PING))) ultrasonic distance sensor
I intended to play around with some of the NRF24L01 radio modules I have around, but my brain didn’t feel up to it after a ...
Tiny Implementation of Conway’s Life…
I had a few minutes, so I thought I’d try making a graphics demo that runs on the tiny little 0.96″ OLED display I mentioned ...
A few more notes on my implementation of Conway’s Life…
I received a couple of email and twitter queries about various aspects of the code, so I thought I would add a followup to yesterday’s ...
Discovered a new tool for embedded development: platformio
I’m pretty old school when it comes to development. To me, writing code is something I like to do with vi (the editor that I ...
Replacing the LCD Panel in a Samsung 303C Chromebook…
In what quite possibly might be the most boring video ever produced, I recorded myself changing the LCD panel out of my Chromebook. It’s 17 ...
Need π to 100 or so digits precision?
Use the “bc” arbitrary precision calculator you can probably find (or install easily) on your Linux box. > bc -l bc 1.06.95 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, ...
My first try at an inexpensive 0.96″ OLED display…
As my recent video showed, I have a lot of development boards. I also have a fair number of little boards that are useful to ...
3/14/15
Happy Albert Einstein’s birthday! And we are just a few minutes away (in our time zone anyway) from 9:26. Huzzah! I’m going to celebrate by ...
A New Development Board: the ODROID-C1
One of my recent posts highlighted the big pile of development boards that I have lying around. This week, I actually added to that pile ...
A 6M beacon using the NT7S’s Si5351 board…
This morning, the Tweeti-verse (I can’t believe I just used that word) informed me that Thomas, LA3PNA had constructed a VHF beacon using the Si5351, ...
Increasing pyephem’s accuracy for satellite rise/set calculations…
A few years ago, I created my own Python implementation of the Plan13 satellite prediction code written by James Miller (G3RUH). The Plan13 algorithm isn’t ...
Old Radio Publications available online…
I like reading old books and old magazines. Luckily, the Internet is making a lot of that kind of material available online for free. A ...
A Big Bin Full O’ Development Boards at BrainWagon Labs…
I have an odd obsession with small, relatively cheap hardware development boards. Over the last few years, I’ve acquired a bunch of them, from Arduino ...
Task completed: Evil Mad Science ISP Shield soldered together…
Last night, the absent-far-too-often urge to fire up the soldering iron and make something hit me, so I warmed up the Weller and did this: ...
Another bit of programmable hardware: the WRTnode
I’ve got a weak spot for cheap, programmable hardware. In my junk drawer I’ve got a collection of Arduinos, Parallax Propellor boards, a couple of ...
Ship in a Bottle: Traditional vs. “Modern” method…
Every since I was a young lad, I’ve been fascinated by miniatures and model building. Like many of my obsessions, I did more reading than ...
The opposite of Pinterest Fail: The Alinea Project
One of the more interesting online communities that has sprung up in recent years is Pinterest . It serves as a kind of Internet inspiration ...
A pair of geeky Advent calendars…
Advent is the season observed in many Christian traditions that is a time of expectant waiting and preparation for Christmas. When I was young, we’d ...
Orion Launch!
I didn’t get up early enough. But here’s the video of the launch. Is it just me, or is this rocket tossing off a lot ...
The Big Sunspot, with a sense of perspective…
Earlier this week, I snapped a couple of iPhone photos of the partial solar eclipse with my iPhone, through coworker Eric’s mighty spiffy little Questar, ...
FTDI-gate…
My hardware hacking friends have been all a-twitter (and all a-pick-your-favorite-social-platform) about recent actions by FTDI . In case one of my three or so ...
Partial Solar eclipse underway….
Snapped with my iPhone, held to the eyepiece of a Questar equipped with a solar filter… ...
I got my boarding pass!
Okay, it’s mostly just a lark: sending your name aboard the first test flight of the Orion space vehicle (scheduled for Dec 4.) but it’s ...
You reeky, motley-minded mammet!
Without further explanation: [sourcecode lang=”python”] #!/usr/bin/python from random import choice # ,, , # ‘ || || A Shakespearean insult generator # \ \/\ _-_, ...
The Si570 and the Si5351
Thomas’ talk about the Minima at Pacificon has got me thinking about building one of my own. I actually have quite a few of the ...
A day at Pacificon…
Pacificon is the local yearly hamfest, which took place at the Santa Clara Marriot this weekend. I couldn’t go for the entire weekend, but I ...
You can’t learn some things from the Internet…
The Internet is awesome. For instance, this morning I found a link to this amazing Nixie Tube clock , which uses neon bulbs (no transistors ...
Schrödinger’s Cat
I’ve long suspected that my cat Scrappy had teleportation powers: https://brainwagon.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/04-20140910133347.mp4 Okay, okay, I know he doesn’t really. But it was kind of funny. ...
Why are tiny systems so big?
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 ...
Milhouse still doesn’t know the first thing about FIrst Position…
White to move and win, position analyzed by Payne in 1756 in the first English book on checkers… Until Milhouse can play this position out, ...
Are improvements in computer chess due mostly to hardware or software?
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 ...
Pondering computer chess…
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 ...
My Atari 2600 Pong Clock
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 ...
Two more “primitive” cameras…
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 ...
An antenna for receiving ADS-B…and velocity factor of RG-6
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 ...
RTL-SDR on Raspberry Pi…
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, ...
More musings of computers past: Popular Electronics, the COSMAC ELF
My musings about my earliest memories of computers brought me back to 1976 and the appearance of the COSMAC ELF in Popular Electronics . I ...
My programming career began with this magazine article…
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 ...
Learning the ropes…
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 ...
I got it! I got it! I really got it!
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 ...
Happy Birthday, brainwagon!
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 ...
Large Format Shoebox Camera…
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 ...
Another image from my foamcore 4×5 camera
Another picture from my foamcore 4×5 camera. Roughly 150mm landscape lens, f/24, 3:50 second exposure onto Ilford Multigrade RC paper, could have probably developed a ...
Ken tinkers with DTL, and SV3ORA’s transistorized 4-bit digital computer made out of discrete DTL
Ken stumbled on one of my earlier posts about DTL (diode transistor logic) and was interested enough to do some basic exploration. He reduced the ...
Some example python code to fetch weather forecasts…
Need to get some weather information? The website forecast.io has a nice web based service you can use up to one thousand times a day ...
Two more pictures from my foamcore 4×5 camera…
Here are two more photos I took at last night’s camera workshop. I wanted to take something slightly more beautiful than a selfie, so I ...
An Experimental 4×5 Camera with a ridiculous lens… and a ridiculous selfie
Over the years that I’ve been interested in computer graphics and telescopes, I’ve managed to pick up a bit of knowledge about optics in general, ...
Nifty Arduino/AVR hack: measuring VCC
In my previous article pondering sensors for my garden , I shamefully neglected a viable and interesting choice, the JeeNode <a href="n(thanks to @mvdswaluw from ...
DIY FPV Micro Quad…
Building my full sized quadcopter is going rather slowly (sigh) but in the mean time I picked up a little Hubsan X4 to play with. ...
Pondering some sensors for my garden…
We’ve started a garden at our house in a pair of raised beds. I’ve been pondering about possibly creating a set of sensors to monitor ...
Drone Lunch…
At work, we have an informal group that is interested in drones and quadcopters. Every third Thursday, we get together and fly. Today we went ...
Making a simple RC switch…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a little bit of time making fixed wing aircraft from Dollar Tree foam. The results have been ...
Probabalistic Models of Cognition
This week began with a visit from Pat Hanrahan, currently a professor at Stanford and formerly at Princeton, where I was lucky enough to meet ...
Best thing at the MakerFaire: a relay computer that calculates square roots…
Long time readers here should know that I have a bit of a fascination with strange, retro computing devices. While I haven’t done anything significant ...
The Marriage (or Secretary) Problem
Over on Facebook, fellow Pixarian Arun pointed out this story on a problem I encountered in my undergraduate schooling as “The Marriage Problem”, which I ...
London and Its Environs by Baedeker
The other day I was watching the 1939 movie The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , a rather fun film staring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. ...
Hellschreiber Update…
Scott Haley mentioned my old Hellduino post on Facebook: a simple project that used an oscillator powered by an Arduino to send Hellschreiber , a ...
Digital ATV resources…
I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about digital ATV operations lately. I was originally motivated by hearing about the HamTV project aboard the ISS. ...
On early camera lenses…
I like it when my life’s experience and interests toss me an opportunity, and out of the blue last week I received an invitation to ...
Some continuing short bits on SSTV….
Nothing too exciting going on, but minor bits of code and play have been done, so I thought I’d update. First of all, there is ...
Analyzing an SSTV recording…
Inspired by this webpage , I decided to write a simple zero-crossing analyzer, just like his. The code turns out to be remarkably simple, and ...
A brief introduction into color spaces, as used in SSTV…
Rob (AK6L) was interested in my recent experiments in slow scan television, but didn’t know much about color spaces. It’s an interesting topic on many ...
Additional Experiments with SSTV, with some ideas….
Previously, I had written an encoder for the Robot 36 SSTV mode . I chose this for a simple reason: it appears to be the ...
SSTV travels through the Ether! A minor success!
So, this morning I played around a bit more with my Raspberry Pi code to try to see if I could make an SSTV beacon. ...
Some thoughts on SSTV and the Raspberry Pi…
Today I found an interesting Instructable on running SSTV on the Raspberry Pi . It uses an interesting bit of software which uses the Pi ...
The Baofeng BF-888S as an SSTV beacon?
Yesterday’s musings about SSTV using the Raspberry Pi has me thinking about creating a little SSTV beacon using the super-inexpensive (less than twenty dollars with ...
Puppet Making, and Mathematics…
I’ve been taking a puppet making class, and I must admit, it’s been a lot of fun. Too much fun, in fact. I’ve been thinking ...
Products of Primes and the Primorial Function…
A friend of mine was working on a programming exercise, and it turns it out was based on a chunk of math which I thought ...
The Minima — A General Coverage Transceiver
A while ago, Bill Meara from Soldersmoke brought Ashar Farhan’s new design, the Minima to my attention. The Minima is a general coverage transceiver which ...
Raspberry Pi Camera NoIR…
I’ve been playing around with the Raspberry Pi Camera for a number of different purposes, but one thing is pretty apparent right off: while the ...
Streaming Video From the Raspberry Pi Camera…
First of all, let me get this off my chest: video over the web is a hideous Tower of Babel. With that basic complaint, let ...
An $8.88 WiFi adapter for my Raspberry Pi…
I was out running errands the other day, and found myself at Fry’s Electronics. I needed to pick up a VGA extension cable to replace ...
JT65/JT9 not impervious to false positives…
I haven’t had a lot of time to operate JT65/JT9, my preferred digital mode at the moment, but I often leave my receiver hooked up ...
On Computer Chess, including Stockfish and SmallFish
Off and on I’ve been pondering some changes to my computer checkers program called Milhouse. Most of these changes have relatively little to do with ...
IRLP/Echolink. Raspberry Pi. Baofeng. Cheap.
I love cheap hacks and cheap gadgets. Don’t get me wrong: I also like the expensive good stuff, but if you don’t have a clear ...
Combinations…
This is a math/geeky/computer post of something relatively simple, but it arose in the wild in a program that I wrote several years ago, and ...
JT65 vs JT9 (vs WSPR?)
For the last several days, I’ve been running the latest version of wsjtx using my RFSPACE SDRIQ software defined radio, and just logging the results. ...
Some Musings on Crossword Puzzles…
When I was growing up, my Grandma Busch used to spend time each morning doing crossword puzzles. Off and on through my life, probably in ...
Visual Cryptography
I read an interesting article the other day. I’ll skip to the end to show you the result. Check out this pair of binary images: ...
Deconstructing the Classic Atari Game: Star Raiders
Gasp, I know. It’s been some time since I posted here. A combination of life and work events have conspired to sap me of my ...
Google Chromecast: First Impressions…
It’s cool. It’s cheap. You might want to get one. Okay, for those of you who haven’t heard of them, the Google Chromecast is a ...
Factoring numbers from Ivar Peterson’s _The Mathematical Tourist_...
I’m a bit of a math geek. I have been periodically fascinated by the factoring of large numbers, which plays such an important role in ...
My comments re: RM-11699, a propsal to allow encryption on amateur radio frequencies…
This is probably boring to a great number of you, but a recent FCC proposed notice of rule making has been getting a lot of ...
More weekend radio…
I didn’t get a whole lot more amateur radio done. I spent some time running JT65, mostly on 20m, but sometimes skipping up higher to ...
A week of listening to JT65…
I’ve been leaving my radio monitoring JT65 frequencies for the last week, largely on 20m, with occasional diversions to 40m, 30m, and 17m. JT65HF can ...
RTLSDR decoding of ADS-B signals…
A few days ago, I wrote about the EZCAP EZTV645 dongle that I got which could be used with RTLSDR software to implement asoftware defined ...
Lesson learned… Check your coax!
Okay, I knew that my radio was acting deaf, and I thought I’d know what was wrong. I use a low doublet antenna made from ...
I seem to be a bit deaf to WSPR…
For the first time in a couple of years, I got all my equipment back online in the WSPR mode. I used to run WSPR ...
More on the ESD protection diodes for the EZTV 645, and a couple of reception tests…
Lots of people have said that RTL-SDR dongles that they have been receiving don’t have ESD protection diodes on the antenna inputs, which makes them ...
A taste of Field Day audio…
I haven’t been doing much work on ham radio lately. In fact, I haven’t even had my IC-735 hooked up since before Thanksgiving. But today, ...
More on the ezcap ezTV645 dongle…
Just a brief note: this website has some pretty extensive pictures of the inside and outside of the same model of RTLSDR dongle I bought. ...
More on “no knead” bread…
Readers of my blog and twitter feed know that I’m a fan of Jim Lahey’s “no-knead” bread. If you haven’t heard of it, just do ...
RTL-SDR: A cheap USB Software Defined Radio
I’ve already got a couple of software defined radios: a nice SDR-IQ from RFSpace which covers up to 30Mhz, and an original Funcube Dongle Pro ...
Seeking ideas for VHF/UHF fun on the ham bands…
The other day I was in Ham Radio Outlet, and while strolling around I noticed a new VHF book published by the RGSB. And for ...
Soapbox: A Story and a Request on Behalf of Your Pets
Over on Facebook, I read a rather disturbing story about an Ohio humane officer who shot a litter of kittens within earshot of children . ...
Chris Fenton’s Amazing Electro/Mechanical computers
I remember reading about Chris Fenton’s homebrew Cray , which was impressive enough. It was implemented on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA board, and eventually he ...
3D Printed Motor mounts for Mark H.’s 1 Hour Quadcopter
A few days ago I pointed at Mark Harrison’s Instructable on a 1 Hour Quadcopter . I thought it was cool, not so much because ...
Mark H.’s Instructable: Cheap, Sturdy 1-Hour Quadcopter
My mentor in all things remote-control, Mark Harrison has written a pretty cool Instructable on how his flying buddy Andreas built a simple but reasonable ...
A nice little explanation of the PA0RDT Mini Whip antenna…
Like many people, I live in a development with a fairly restrictive HOA. This means that I have to be fairly careful to use largely ...
A trip to the Bale Grist Mill in Napa…
This weekend was kind of a loss for computer/geek/rc airplane/ham radio, but it was off the charts fun for me and the missus. We did ...
On Theo Jansen’s walking mechanism…
If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out: His work is ...
The JAM 187khz LowFer Beacon..
In my previous post about the virtues of microcontrollers in homebrew radio, I had a comment from Lee, who mentioned that he operated a LowFer ...
On microcontrollers in amateur radio, or “QRP computing”…
As anyone who has followed my blog for any period of time knows, my interests straddle a lot of different disciplines and hobbies, and often ...
My First Thingiverse Item: A motor mount for the Axon…
Last year, Mark H (who blogs at Eastbay RC got me into the world of building RC airplanes. While my early attempts were limited in ...
Why you should really upgrade to a General…
Or not. I find a lot of editorializing about amateur radio to be, well, curiously off the mark. For instance try checking out Dan, KB6NU’s ...
The legendary Ray Harryhausen dies at 92…
It is with a sense of deep sadness that I heard of the passing of Ray Harryhausen this morning. If I were to pick two ...
A day at the Official Propeller Conference
Even casual readers of this blog know that I’ve enjoyed playing around with the Arduino and the Atmel AVR chips. I really like them, and ...
Neat little beacon using an 8 pin Atmel AVR…
Previously, I have read about a wireless Morse thermometer designed by Steve Weber, KD1JV. I played around with the basic idea in a YouTube video ...
Bill, N2CQR uses my Morse-sending code for the Arduino…
I’ve been busy lately, and have done almost nothing radio related. But John was kind enough to point out to me that Bill, N2CQR of ...
Apologies for the lack of updates…
Tap… tap… tap… Is this thing still on? Apologies to my loyal readers (reader?) for the lack of recent updates. A combination of work pressure, ...
My Arduino bumper, with actual prints!
Okay, our Replicator 2 went back online this week, and I decided to give printing my Arduino bumper another try. Since the last time, I ...
Another stab at an Arduino bumper…
Earlier this week, I tried to print out the first version of my Arduino bumper. Sadly, our Replicator 2 had a malfunction mid print, and ...
Arduino Bumper Shell, created with OpenSCAD
Last week, I got a chance to experiment with a Replicator 2, and printed some brackets for my robot project. I designed them using OpenSCAD, ...
PIR sensor from TAUTIC.COM
A few days ago, I heard that Jayson Tautic (@tautic), manufacturer and purveyor of a interesting electronic prototyping goodies, had put up an interesting offering: ...
Using the Raspberry Pi as a wireless webcam server…
The other day, I was walking around in Fry’s Electronics, and noticed that they had HP HD-2200 webcams on sale for a mere $6. I ...
The Raspberry Pi, and the WiPi USB dongle, with questions about power…
I’m having lots of fun with my Raspberry Pi, and I’ve decided to launch one of my crazy spare-time projects: inspired by this article detailing ...
More OpenSCAD tinkering…
The other day, I was at Harbor Freight, and picked up an inexpensive set of digital calipers. While goofing around, I decided to try to ...
Tinkering with OpenSCAD…
It seems like I might have access to a 3D printer, so I thought it might be fun to see what I could design. I ...
My weekend…
I lost 1.8 pounds this week. I went on 2 mile walk with Carmen. I soldered some clip leads onto pennies to make a touch ...
Resources on the IBM 1401
Okay, I was trying to find more information about the IBM 1401, and the bitsavers website again came to the rescue. If you surf over ...
An IBM 1403 font…
A few days ago, I was playing around with my Raspberry Pi, trying to get a new, freshly compiled version of the TOPS-10 7.03 monitor ...
Simulation experiments with LT-Spice…
Yesterday, I mentioned Rory’s excellent introduction and exploration into DTL logic. He covers some of the basics here , including circuits for all the basic ...
Tiny-Tim: A DTL computer (in progress)
Previously, I had linked to Rory Mangles’ experiments with relay based computers. He had an incredible build of a relay logic computer called Tiny-8 which ...
A new little computer: the Raspberry Pi…
Sorry it’s been a while since I wrote anything here. The simple fact is that I haven’t done a lot that’s very interesting lately. But ...
What’s today’s Mayan Long Count date?
I wanted to know. I read up on the Mayan calendar. It was easy to code up in Python: [sourcecode lang=”python”] #!/usr/bin/env python # This ...
Another swappable fuselage from Busybee TV
The guys over at flitetest have a great series on building airplanes around a swappable fuselage. The basic idea is to house the receiver, esc, ...
My son at the drive through…
I don’t think he was at the local Sonic drive-through window. Okay, this doesn’t have much to do with my normal blog topics: it’s just ...
Some small experiments with Arduino sound…
Last year, I spent a little bit of time to create a set of blinking Christmas lights that I could mount in a hat. It ...
An “So” series foamflyer…
Today I spent a lot of time making bread and pumpkin cheesecake for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving day feast, but in between I decided to build some ...
A few simple foamboard wings…
Okay, I haven’t had much time to work on RC airplanes. I’ve been meaning to try to find something a little tamer than my Nutball ...
An interesting foamboard airplane with a single aileron…
I’m constantly on the lookout for interesting and simple airplane designs. This design from foamflyer is interesting in a couple of different ways. First of ...
More on airfoils…
As I was staring at the cross sectional diagram of the Armin wing I constructed yesterday, I began to think about airfoil shapes in general. ...
The Clark Y airfoil…
I snapped awake at 5:30AM this morning, and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I started a loaf of bread to bake later tonight, and ...
Ponderings on the Armin Wing…
Ed over at the Experimental Airlines Youtube channel has a nifty way of constructing wings for RC airplanes out of cheap Dollar Tree foamboard. Last ...
Papers on Miniature Aerial Vehicles and Vision-based Obstacle Avoidance
I’m pretty interested in autonomous vehicles, and because of the wide availability of cheap electronics and compute power, experimentation in this realm is increasingly within ...
Thoughts go out to all my readers on the East Coast…
If you or your loved ones are in the areas affected by Sandy, you may not be able to read this, but my thoughts are ...
Mini balloon tracker…
I was listening to Amateur Radio Newsline to a story about a lightweight balloon payload that crossed from Great Britain to Sweden carrying a payload ...
New tail for my experimental trainer prototype…
Okay, yesterday I admitted that I could not do math. According to Sean Foster’s hints on trainer design, the horizontal stabilizer should have had an ...
More experimentation with foam and foamcore…
I haven’t done much flying this week, in part because we’ve begun to get some rain here in the SF Bay Area, but also because ...
Experiments in foamcore…
As I was watching Vogelsong pitch a gem against the Cardinals, I thought it might be cool to try some additional experiments with paper/foamcraft and ...
Simple code implementing the SmoothLifeL cellular automata…
Without further ado… if you want code to implement this: You can download this this zip file . Do with it what you will. ...
Watch Out! Mark attempts to fly his Nutball once again…
Carmen suggested that we try to go out and fly my Nutball, since she hadn’t seen it in the air before. Our local park seemed ...
The Larger than Life variant: Bugs…
Having written the previous FFT based implementation of Conway’s life, we can easily implement life variants with larger neighborhoods which run just as fast. This ...
Crazy programming experiment of the evening…
I was struck by the lunatic programming muse again today. While reading my twitter feed, I encountered a description of SmoothLife , a generalization of ...
My own launch wasn’t as smooth and care free as it might have been…
Ouch… Okay, my last blog mentioned the over-pressure situation aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. Today, I experienced my own launch failure: flying my homebrew ...
SpaceX launch wasn’t as smooth and carefree as it might have seemed…
Yesterday was an important day in the history of space flight: for the first time a commercial entity launched a resupply mission to the International ...
Deciphering the Turnigy 9X “trainer” mode…
I’m waiting for new props and the like to arrive for more RC fun, but in the mean time I tried to satisfy some curiousity ...
Up up and away…
I apologize for not updating my blog recently, but sometimes life intervenes, and it seems like you just aren’t doing too much that would be ...
Fare thee well, Endeavour…
Here in the Bay Area, the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a victory lap, passing over Sacramento, the Golden Gate and many other Bay Area locations. ...
Making headway on the Axon…
Earlier today, I tweeted: Okay, all major parts assembled.Now I just need the innards from Hobby King… twitter.com/brainwagon/sta… — Mark VandeWettering (@brainwagon) September 17, 2012 ...
Another Friday Fly Day, another crash of other people’s planes…
For reasons which continue to escape me, Mark decided to let me try to take up another of his planes this morning. Last week, I ...
Wings ‘n Things
Early on Sunday I was out at Home Depot and acquired some additional raw materials for my RC plane construction projects. I got a 4×8 ...
Experimental fuselage made from Dollar Tree Foam
I was feeling pretty lazy today, but I still wanted to do something working toward an eventual new scratchbuilt RC plane project. I’ve been watching ...
Maiden Flights of my F-22 Foamie…
Mark H. over at Eastbay RC and I finally got together to test out my first attempt at scratch building a radio controlled aircraft: an ...
It’s quiet… too quiet…
I received my second email inquiry yesterday (yes, two whole emails) asking me why I hadn’t been posting to brainwagon lately. It’s gratifying that both ...
Fourier Volume Rendering
Three years ago, I wrote a short post about volume rendering . I always meant to follow up, because I finally sorted out the problems ...
Realization: I’m a dinosaur…
I’m one of these… About once a year, I get the urge to push my programming skills and knowledge in a new direction. Some years, ...
Curiosity down safe on Mars!
Today, around 10:31 Pacific Time, Curiosity successfully landed in the Gale crater on the surface of Mars, and has already sent back a couple of ...
Minor progress on my F-22 RC flyer…
Okay, I haven’t made a lot of headway, but I did at least print out the pattern for my F-22 and cut the pieces for ...
ArduinoSudoku – sudoku on arduino
Just a quickie Arduino project that I ran across this morning: Sudoku on the Arduino. It’s pretty cute, since it uses the Arduino tvout library ...
My first tentative steps into RC: a scratchbuilt F-22 Raptor in foam…
Do I really need another hobby? Sigh. Oh well, it appears that whether I need one or not, I’ve taken my first tentative steps into ...
Ultimate QRSS kit arrives…
I have an on-again, off-again love affair with beacons. I spent many a day monitoring QRSS beacons on 30m, and have built a series of ...
About “Where are the Positive Hams? And How to Tell?”…
Steve, K9ZW wrote an interesting post on his blog: Where are the Positive Hams? And How to Tell? – Part I « With Varying Frequency ...
Notes on no-knead bread…
I have previously mentioned Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread (posts here and here and here . I’ve continued to make this at least once a week ...
brainwagon.{org/com/net} lives!
After 12 hours of rockiness, I believe that I have brainwagon moved to new hosting. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble, but if you ...
brainwagon.org/com/net will be undergoing some maintenance…
It’s about time I did some long overdue maintenance on my website, including some name service changes, which may bring brainwagon off the net for ...
Progress on my Worked All States on JT65…
I’m down to 10 states remaining for a JT65 WAS: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Nevada, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. ...
Rings ‘n things…
Last night, I took the scope out again and tried to get a few quick images of Saturn. My focus was really soft, but this ...
First astrophotography with the Microsoft Cinema HD webcam…
A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I had gotten a Microsoft Cinema HD webcam to convert for use in astrophotography. Today, I got ...
Happy Birthday Alan Turing…
Today would have marked the 100th birthday of Alan Turing . Turing’s contributions in artificial intelligence and computing alone would have guaranteed his place among ...
Adapting a webcam for telescope use…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been a bit more intrigued by one of my old interests: telescopes and astrophotography. During the transit of Venus, ...
A few more notes on the OpenBeacon…
A few days ago I wrote about my experience building the OpenBeacon, and Jason Mildrum, NT7S, it’s creator was nice enough to happen by my ...
Still from a video snap of the Venus Transit
I did try to take some video of the transit, but the higher magnification created by the rather small imager in the video camera, combined ...
iPhone photos of the Venus transit…
Yesterday, I setup my Meade ETX-90 outside with a solar filter in the courtyard between buildings at work so that my coworkers could have a ...
First reception report for the K6HX OpenBeacon…
The honor goes to Chris, WB5FKC. Chris and I exchanged signal reports occasionally back when I last was on the QRSS kick a couple of ...
My OpenBeacon is on the air…
Sometime last week, I got my Etherkit OpenBeacon kit in the mail. Like many of my projects, it was probably destined to sit on the ...
No Saturn, but how ’bout the moon?
I thought I’d give my video camera a test. I considered Saturn, but by the time I got outside the weather was getting colder and ...
Prepping for the upcoming transit of Venus…
I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog, but I’m trying to get some projects going. This week marks a rather rare event: the Tuesday (for ...
Working toward Digital JT65 WAS award…
I’m currently working toward something something which I don’t normally do: an achievement award. For about two months, I’ve been trying to log contacts via ...
The Beaglebone: an $89 Time Machine…
A DEC SYSTEM 10, just like the computers of my past. At the Maker Faire, I splurged for a little bit of computing hardware called ...
Photos from the eclipse…
Okay, these are the best of the photos that I snapped during yesterdays annular solar eclipse (well, it was really only a partial eclipse here). ...
A Maker Faire Post Mortem…
Phew. My legs are sore, and my voice is just returning to normal after a whirlwind two days at the Maker Faire in San Mateo. ...
Countries heard (not worked) on JT65 in the last 7 days…
Not a bad list, really, given how crappy my antenna is. Most of the DX was heard on 20m. Alaska, Argentina, Asiatic Russia, Australia, Austria, ...
States heard in the last week on JT65
I’ve got something like 30 states worked via JT65 over the last month or so, but I’ve obviously heard a lot more than that. I ...
Beating the dead horse: the search for “quality” in radio amateurs…
Last night the mailbox contained the latest copy of QST magazine, which always means at least a few minutes of interesting reading. I usually read ...
NJQRP’s “Chat With The Designers”
I’ve often thought that the various ham radio podcasts that I like don’t really cater to the technical side of the hobby. Sure, you can ...
One month of experience with JT65
On the last day of March, I started using the JT65-HF program to do some digital operation on the HF bands. In the roughly month ...
K3MGY, the Titanic Special Event Station
On this past Saturday, April 14th, I was tuning around to see if I could pick up one of the stations which was activated to ...
A cool JT65 QSO…
Last night I got home from a day spent with new-baby-relatives, and decided to power up the ham radio setup and see if I could ...
fldigi now includes WEFAX reception…
Okay, nothing really more to say: fldigi now has WEFAX reception. I decided to try it out on transmissions from Norfolk, VA tonight. Not bad ...
Russ Cox muses about Fields and Reed-Solomon codes
I’ve been pretty interested in codes of all sort, both the cryptographic codes and the codes that are used to provide error detection and correction. ...
My first week of JT65..
Over the last week, I started playing around with JT65-HF . JT65-HF is a digital mode, which is good for only the most basic of ...
My first crude DCPU-16 simulator…
A few days ago, I mentioned that @notch, the creator of Minecraft, had a new idea for a space game that he was beginning to ...
My First True Boat Anchor: A Collins R-390A
My boss is retiring, and as part of his downsizing made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse. I’m now the owner although have not ...
Free to Play (F2P) games
I follow @notch (author of the near legendary independent game Minecraft, where I have spent more than a few hours). I think Minecraft showed considerable ...
A Tale of Two Gadgets: the TonidoPlug 2 and a Bus Pirate…
A few days ago, I mentioned that one of my servers had died. I spent some time thinking about how I would replace it. I ...
The first Internet of Things Bay Area Meetup and the Air Quality Egg…
Last night, I met with Nanode creator Ken Boak and Chris Jefferies from tinajalabs.com at Cafe Actual in Berkeley for the inaugural IoTBayArea meetup. IoT ...
The Little Engine that Could…
In my home office, I have a machine called “fishtank”. I realized that I first bought it back in 2002, and since then it has ...
24 hours, 73 unique stations on WSPR
For the last couple of days, I’ve let my FT-817 and the WSPR software monitor 40m, 30m, and 20m (shifted as time permits, and as ...
On bread…
This morning I was in a rush to get out of the house, and didn’t have time to make a big breakfast, so while I ...
Listening to WSPR-ing…
I was interested in the WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) system for quite a while, but have not recently been running it from my home ...
QRPP backissues available on the Internet…
This morning, while listening to the latest SolderSmoke podcast , Bill mentioned that back issues of the Norcal journal “QRPP” were available for free download. ...
Happy π-day!
Today is π-day (3/14) as well as Albert Einstein’s birthday. I was trying to get inspired to produce something pi related, so I scanned my ...
Arduino Hole Dimensions Drawing
I’ve been kind of busy and distracted lately, so I haven’t had much time to get any embedded microcontrollers. I did dust off an Arduino ...
Breadboarding a Tellymate for the Arduino…
The microcontrollers of today are in many ways superior to the simple eight bit computers that I learned to program as a teenager, but one ...
Earthquake!
About 5:30AM, I woke to find my bed slightly shaking, and maybe a hint of some noise. Just as I was about to drift off, ...
The battle with weight begins anew…
Back in 2004, I blogged that I was joining Weight Watchers . Over the next year or so, I shed about seventy pounds, but then ...
MLB.TV still stupidly refusing to offer me a product that I want to buy…
Two years ago, I complained that MLB.TV’s black out rules basically robbed them of a chance to get $120 of my hard earned cash in ...
Why I am not going to play Skyrim any more…
Okay, a diversion from my regular topics. And that’s what computer games are for me: a diversion. I play them because I like to be ...
50th anniversary of Glenn’s orbit aboard Friendship 7
50 years ago today, American astronaut John Glenn completed three orbits of the earth aboard Friendship 7 . Glenn would later become Senator, and would ...
Examining the output of a simple remote-keyless-entry transmitter…
Yesterday I was looking (sadly unsuccessfully) for some BPW32 photodiodes that I know I have somewhere, when I ran across some of 434 Mhz transmitter ...
A simple beacon keyer for the ATtiny13
Roger, G3XBM built a simple beacon for light communication using a K1EL beacon keyer chip and a handful of other components. I didn’t have any ...
Spray-on Antennas? I say “Spray-on Bunkum”
Thanks to John, who pointed out that this post was mangled. Fixed now. I wasn’t going to mention this one, but Dave, Chris and Jeff ...
More on ATtiny programming…
Last night’s hacking adventure was inspired by a couple of recent posts from Roger, G3XBM having to do with light based communication. The first was ...
Web-based control of an RGB LED via the Nanode, an Arduino compatible microcontroller
Okay, I finally got some time to record a video about a simple little webserver project I hacked together earlier this week. My wife Carmen ...
Boring statistics re: brainwagon
Okay, today is February 6, which means that my revolvermap that you can see over in the left margin has been up one entire year. ...
maniacbug is an Arduino wizard…
Ken Boak was nice enough to gift me with a pair of Nanodes when he was out visiting last month. Much to my embarrassment, I ...
Interesting “feature” re: _delay_ms in avr-libc
A couple of my projects have used the tiniest of the Atmel ATtiny chips: the ATtiny13. I have written one or two programs in assembler ...
ksim 8080 simulator released
Fellow hacker Eric Smith has released the code for an 8080 simulator. I spent a few hours hacking my own 8080 emulator a few months ...
A $.33 MAX232CPE, or a $0.01 2N3904?
In response to my previous post, @xek replied: https://twitter.com/#!/xek/status/163442298456260608 Well, the fact is I had heard of doing that. It’s not really hard to rig ...
Tinkering with an old GPS receiver…
I used to be an electrical engineer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee. (If you don’t get this, google for “arrow ...
Unequal Resistor R-2R Ladder Optimizer
I was reading up on resistor ladder DAC circuits on Wikipedia, and came across the Unequal Resistor R-2R Ladder Optimizer . It’s very neat! You ...
New 6502 processor at Mouser.com?
Dave Jones (@eevblog) tweeted: https://twitter.com/#!/eevblog/status/162530266513014784 And indeed, he’s right! WDC (the Western Design Center) has made a new version of the 6502 available at mouser.com. ...
AVR-based FM-transmitter
This is a very cute hack that does something which I thought was impossible: an implementation of an FM transmitter that has exactly two components: ...
Creating source material for Narrow Band TV…
I’ve often thought that creating a replica of an early Baird mechanical television, or televisor would be a fun project. But when starting, you immediately ...
High Frequency Precision Sine Wave Synthesis for the Arduino by Adrian Freed
While researching something completely different, I found Adrian Freed’s very cool page with code to generate high quality sine waves using PWM on the Arduino. ...
New addition to the brainwagon lab: a Rigol DS1102E
This week, I splurged and bought myself a new piece of test equipment: a Rigol DS1102E 100Mhz oscilloscope, and compared to my old 25Mhz Philips ...
An Arduino powered IBM PS/2 Morse Keyboard
I’ve been trying to do a bit more Arduino programming and interfacing lately. Nothing too difficult, but just trying to expand my junkbox and my ...
Interesting discovery regarding a junkbox piezo element…
I was tinkering with a small electronics project (article and video to come) and needed a sound output. Digging around in my junkbox, I found ...
On Relay Computers…
I share an interest in old computing technology with several of my friends and readers. An interesting sub-topic within this vast area is the world ...
Nice new breadboard and power supply from TAUTIC.com
This is just a plug for a cute little pair of gadgets that I got the other day.. If you are like me and use ...
A phrase I don’t like: “Dumbing down.”
We’ve all heard it (and most of us have said it): “X is just a dumbed down for the masses.” Heck, I came dangerously close ...
The downside of Arduino…
First of all, I really like the Arduino. There are lots of reasons: great community, relatively inexpensive, wide hardware availability and variety, and often a ...
Hellduino: Sending Hellschreiber from an Arduino
Update: Welcome Hack-a-day readers! If you are looking for the schematics for this “transmitter” (really just a simple oscillator, send some love to radio guru ...
A micro-power Arduino Morse radio beacon
My G0UPL QRSS beacon is working pretty well, but is only putting out about 40mw of power, when it probably should be putting out 100mw. ...
Late night pondering about the micro-power Morse beacon…
Before toddling off to bed last night, I did a bit more tinkering, and a bit of thinking, and then a bit of research. The ...
Oscillator with super low supply voltage
I’m beginning to correct some of my misunderstandings re: JFETs and for some reason, oscillators are beginning to become something that I think of as ...
Seeing double on QRSS grabber…
Here is a snapshot from my QRSS grabber earlier today. You might want to click it to see it full size: I’m curious: what phenomenon ...
On junkboxes…
I’ve recently begun to try to systematically (if somewhat erratically) equip my home office (it aspires to be a lab) with the necessary parts and ...
The “Hello World” of Arduino Programming: Fading RGB LEDs
Allright, I was playing Skyrim most of the day, and didn’t really have my brain firing at it’s highest level when I sat down and ...
WA0UWH’s Propeller Beacon received at K6HX…
I could of days ago, I blogged about WA0UWH’s Propeller Beacon . Over the last couple of days, I worked on fixing a few small ...
My own lightly modified Arduino Basic
I’ve received a couple of requests for my own Arduino Basic modifications. They are pretty straightforward and small, but might be of some use, and ...
Building a distributed satellite ground station network (or not…)
My twitter intro says that I am an “enthusiast for enthusiasm”. When I wrote that, it was simply because there are some questions that I ...
Lunch with Ken Boak, the Nanode, and the evolution of the Arduino platform
Today, through a bit of serendipity involving twitter and the web, I managed to have lunch with Nanode designer Ken Boak , who happened to ...
WA0UWH experiments with the Propeller/QRSS.
This link will make my various Propeller loving readers happy: Eldon, WA0UWH received a Propeller microcontroller board for Christmas, and decided to try to use ...
QRSS Beacon assembled, but not quite right…
I ordered myself one of Hans Summers’ QRSS beacon kits before Christmas, and it arrived a few days ago. Yesterday, I started tinkering it together, ...
K6HX QRSS Beacon ON AIR…
Well, this morning I did a bit more work on my G0UPL beacon kit. As I mentioned yesterday, I got was having difficulty with the ...
Nanode on the Web!
Well, to test my nanode ‘s Ethernet capability, I put it on the web! Check it out by clicking this link . Hurrah! Not too ...
Christmas Kit: The Nanode
My wife is the best. She listens to me even when I yammer on about the most boring and geeky of topics, and does so ...
Mineways
Okay, I’ll confess: I’ve spent a bit too long playing Minecraft , both on a shared server, and even by myself in single player. I ...
Extending Tiny BASIC on the Arduino
I was intrigued by @monsonite’s challenge to extend Tiny BASIC for the Nanode . I don’t have a Nanode , but I do have some ...
Merry Christmas!
I’d like to thank each and every follower and friend of the brainwagon blog for their encouragement, for their attention, and for their continued participation ...
Tiny Basic running on Nanode – Christmas Challenge
As a followup to my post yesterday regarding Arduino BASIC, here’s a contest challenge to extend the Arduino basic to drive the Nanode , an ...
Arduino Basic
Edsger Dijkstra, Dutch computer scientist and winner of the 1972 Turing Award wrote: It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have ...
Nice article on making an Arduino DDS…
My experiments with generating RTTY signals yesterday made me begin to think about generating RTTY signals with an Atmel/Arduino setup. The obvious way is to ...
More on the crazy ITA2 encoding…
So, this morning, I was trying to test my understanding of the ITA2 code used in amateur radio teletype communications. I wrote up an encoder, ...
Question regarding the ITA2 “Baudot” code…
While looking at the hadie high altitude balloon project, I got to thinking about making a microcontroller that could send RTTY. I knew that traditional ...
Hadie High Altitude Balloon Project
While listening to the Amateur Radio Newsline podcast this week, I was interested to hear that a group of hams from Ireland had launched a ...
Cook’s Illustrated Almost No Knead Bread
My early success with making tasty no knead bread has sent me off on the Internet looking for additional recipes. As a complete breadmaking newbie, ...
Back to QRSS…
For some reason, I’m getting back into the universe of QRSS , or very slow Morse code. I goofed around with this for a while, ...
Alan’s Advent Calendar of Circuits 2011
A couple of years ago, I was big into QRSS and wrote some software to do unattended captures of the portion of the 30M band ...
Project Completed: My $.99 Christmas LED hat, with ATtiny13 controller
Well, it’s done! Here’s my ATtiny13 controlled Christmas LED hat. It consists of an 8 pin, ATtiny13 microcontroller, a pair of 2N3904 transistors and some ...
Christmas Lights powered by an ATtiny13
While waiting for my bread to rise the other day, I moved my breadboard ATtiny13 circuit that blinked two leds to a small Radio Shack ...
More on no-knead bread…
Tonight I baked up my second loaf of no knead bread. The first batch was promising, but was a bit dense. I used ordinary all ...
Lightweight Web servers
Don’t you hate it when you see something that you want to investigate further, but then you can’t remember what the project is called? That’s ...
No-Knead Bread from the New York Times
Frequent readers of this blog might be shocked to learn that I’m not entirely consumed by the usual geeky topics that I post about. Among ...
Microcontroller cheat sheet
I needed to know the pinouts for various AVR chips and the 6 pin ICSP cable they used. I found this cool little one page ...
Carmen makes an Arduino Stoplight
Today, Carmen decided that she wanted to give Arduino programming a try. She’s an experienced programmer, but had never tried any of this small embedded ...
The “Hello World” of Servo Programming on the Arduino
This morning I woke up around 5:30AM to catch the lunar eclipse. It was pretty nice: totality began around 6:05AM and the moon became incredibly ...
The Lunar Eclipse…
Okay, I did wake up for the lunar eclipse this morning. At 5:30 my alarm went off. I pulled on some clothes, wandered out to ...
More Wisdom on LEDs…
More important help for the budding young electronics designer: https://twitter.com/#!/EMSL/status/144546376624250880 Note: this also works in computer graphics quite well. Just specify a negative intensity for ...
More on $.99 Christmas lights…
I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything significant tonight, but I wanted to test a few things about this strand of Christmas ...
Upcoming Total Lunar Eclipse
Yep, there is an upcoming total lunar eclipse this Saturday, on the morning of Dec 10. It will be the last total lunar eclipse visible ...
“Sub Micro” R/C Blimp
I’ve been a fascinated observer of indoor model airplanes for years, so this little RC controlled blimp strikes me as one of the most awesome ...
Dissecting a set of $.99 battery powered Christmas lights…
I was over at the CVS repository today, and saw that they had some small strings of fifteen LED Christmas lights on sale for a ...
Correction: Schematic for $.99 Christmas Lights
I was in a hurry yesterday, and didn’t draw the LED connections in my schematic for the $.99 Christmas lights properly. Mike pointed it out ...
A Blast from the Past: The Cinnamon Bear
When I was a kid, my brother and I used to listen to old time radio shows quite a bit. During the Christmas season, KEX ...
How to make a CheerLights controller with Arduino and ioBridge
As the holiday approaches, it seems like making some kind of blinkenlights project would allow some fun hacking, but also be within the spirit of ...
How to lose $2400 in 24 seconds… with a story of my own
We have a bunch of photography enthusiasts where I work, and on Friday it is common for people to exchange their photographs and photography-related stories ...
The art of capacitive touch sensing
I didn’t get a lot of electronics hacking done, but I found myself again playing with capacitive sensing. I found this interesting article on the ...
The Sparkfun Serial LCD
I was driving around various Silicon Valley electronics and surplus stores (like HSC and Anchor Electronics) and decided to stop in at Microcenter. I remembered ...
Diode temperature sensor update…
Lee mentioned that the there was a way to change the analog reference used on the analog inputs to the Atmel AVR to an internally ...
Using a 1N4148 diode as temperature sensor…
I had an application where I wanted to detect temperature. No big deal, lots of good temperature sensors exist. But of course, I don’t have ...
Apologies for slow website this morning…
You might be experiencing slow response to my website this morning. I think it is merely the perils of using inexpensive shared hosting, but I’ve ...
A cool little computer: FIGnition
I keep looking for cool projects where people build small computer and microcontrollers, more or less from scratch. Today, I ran across FIGnition: FIGnition is ...
A Low Power 477Thz beacon
I mentioned that Roger, G3XBM was shifting from the very low frequencies to much higher frequencies. His interest has already uncovered some links that I ...
Arduino PPT Solar Charger
A conversation I had recently got me on the topic of solar energy, and introduced me to something I hadn’t heard of before: maximum power ...
Codec 2 at 1400 bits/s from David Rowe
I’ve mentioned Codec 2 a few times in the past, but for those who don’t rememember, David Rowe has been working on a very low ...
A nifty partition of 1..16
Courtesy of Phil Harvey’s Puzzle « Programming Praxis , I discovered that the numbers from 1..16 can be partitioned into two 8 element sets, with ...
ANGST: the Arduino n’ Gameduino Satellite Tracker
I’ve stopped hacking on my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker for now. Here’s the final video demonstrating it running: I’m currently working on the final schematic which ...
JeeNode v6 Kit from Modern Device
I’ve been playing a great deal with Arduinos lately, and have acquired a couple of Xbees to experiment with wireless. But Xbees, cool as they ...
Xv6, a simple Unix-like teaching operating system
I like operating systems. My first exposure to Unix was a revelation. Unix was a complex operating system that provided useful facilities for programmers, and ...
VK3YE’s USB port powered 40 metre milliwatt transmitter on air
I was looking for beacon circuits, and ran across VK3YE’s USB powered 40m transmitter. Unlike most simple beacon transmitters, this one transmits double sideband, which ...
KD1JV on boost and buck converters implemented with an ATtiny13V
Legendary QRP hacker Steve “Melt Solder” Weber has some awesome stuff on his website, particularly if you are interested in homebrew ham radio gear. (Indeed, ...
Some simple circuits with solar cells…
My tinkering with my ATtiny13 based pumpkin circuit had me thinking that perhaps I should try to make something similar, but solar powered. Luckily, Windell ...
STM32L-Discovery: What should I build with it?
I got one of these boards the other day for free: STM32L-DISCOVERY – STMicroelectronics . Even if you didn’t get one for free, they seem ...
Nyle Steiner finds and demonstrates a memristor
Nyle Steiner, of the Spark Bang Buzz blog has been at it again, demonstrating cool electrical/electronic devices that are homebrewed. This time he constructed his ...
Making some wallpaper with the sum of cosines…
I was inspired by some Haskell code written by keegan , so I had to write a version of it in C. I didn’t do ...
Has anyone noticed just how boring and useless Amateur Radio Newsline is?
Like nearly everyone in the Bay Area, I spend too much time in my car, and one of the ways that I endure it is ...
BeagleBone, a new ARM-powered embedded platform
I really like the Arduino, but even I must admit that performance-wise, it can be a little, well, disappointing. A 16Mhz 8 bit processor can ...
A Constant Current LED Driver…
While tinkering with my ATtiny13 Pumpkin Project, I ended up using a fairly inefficient circuit: the same amount of power is dissipated in the current ...
A Halloween Treat: What to do in a Zombie Attack
Happy Halloween everyone! I’ve kind of got zombies on the brain, which is better I suppose than having zombies munching your brain. I blame it ...
Making an ATtiny13 Powered Pumpkin!
Happy Halloween! Here’s a little project I’ve been working on for Halloween… I’ve created a separate page with the details: it’s pretty rough right now, ...
Electromagnetic Propulsion of Ships and Submarines
The other day, I was watching The Hunt For Red October on TV. Through some odd coincidence, today I found a link to an article ...
Baseball and Pascal’s Triangle
I was standing in Tom’s office, and asked him a simple probability question (and a timely one, given the World Series): If the odds of ...
St. Louis hangs in, there will be a Game 7 tomorrow!
Absolutely the most amazing World Series Game I’ve seen. I’m speechless. My words aren’t sufficient: I’ll post some links when I find someone better than ...
CQWW SSB Contest This Weekend!
I’m not much of a contester (not any kind, in fact) but this weekend is one of the biggest: the CQWW SSB Contest. Expect the ...
Nifty paper on Batting Average…
For some reason, I never do much reading about baseball during the season itself. But as the World Series approaches its end (still hoping for ...
Approaching 100K views this year… Thanks!
This morning, I consulted the little revolving map over there in the left column, and found that I had passed 99,000 views. I reset that ...
“MOAR POWER!” … Wait… I mean, “LESS POWER!”
My electronics experimentation has brought a couple of comments from people I’ve met who have much greater experience and knowledge than I. For instance, in ...
I make things too hard… Thanks Lee…
Nothing is quite so humbling as someone coming in and showing you that you are making your problem way more complicated than it really is. ...
On using an IRF510 as a switch…
This posting begins with a caveat: while I’m pretty experienced as a programmer and software engineer, I’m actually a bit of newbie when it comes ...
Using an Arduino as a programmer for the ATtiny13
I’m pretty much near the end of where I wanted to be for the Arduino/Gameduino project: all the major functions that I originally wanted to ...
My IC-735 makes it’s first contact: T32C on 17m…
A few months ago I acquired a used IC-735 from my boss, and other than getting it hooked up and using it for the occasional ...
Altimeter Module MS5607
Once I get my current project off my table, I’m going to start working more on the payload for a high altitude balloon launch. Today, ...
Shake, Rattle and Roll!
Wow. Pretty good jolt today. I was sitting in my office when I began to feel some high frequency shaking, starting weak, but then growing ...
What’s Up: A Visual Database of Satellites and Debris
I’ve pondered creating something like this a bunch of times: a way to visualize all the satellites currently in Earth orbit. Somebody beat me to ...
High-Low Tech – Programming an ATtiny w/ Arduino
I had an idea for a project that doesn’t require a full Arduino: a small 8 pin processor would work just fine. But how to ...
My Sat Tracker, using Fritzing…
I was going to tidy up my breadboard layout for the satellite tracker I’ve been working on, and I thought it might be nice to ...
Movie Review: Moneyball
I must admit, I had my misgivings about the prospects of a movie based upon Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball . After all, Moneyball is a ...
Arduino playground provides the WireLibraryDetailedReference
In seeking some more details on the inner workings of the Wire library for the Arduino, I chanced across this rather informative link on the ...
Strange code in I2C code…
I noticed something while reading code that uses the Wire library for the Arduino, such as you might find below… Arduino playground – I2CEEPROM Check ...
Forbes on Steve Jobs as a Role Model…
Forbes.com contributor Kyle Smith posted a provocative editorial today, which I thought deserved some commentary: Steve Jobs Was A Lousy Role Model – Forbes He ...
A couple of interesting links for materials on librivox.org
I really like librivox.org . For those of you who may not have heard of it before, it’s an effort to take works in the ...
First shot at using Xbee…
Yesterday, I got delivery of my Xbee modules from sparkfun, and decided to try to see if I could do something with them. My ultimate ...
Pacificon 2011
While I’m still trying to shake a respiratory infection, I’m hoping that by the weekend I’ll be hale and hearty enough to attend this years ...
Stallman: Jobs exerted ‘malign influence’ on computing
Several people have forwarded this article on to me, where free software advocate Richard Stallman had this to say about Steve Jobs: Stallman: Jobs exerted ...
I2C Pull Up Resistors Needed?
The great thing about doing a real project like my satellite tracker is that it makes you learn a lot, in a whole lot of ...
MHVLib- An Efficiency Oriented Runtime Library for AVR Microcontrollers | Make, Hack, Void
There is a lot to like about the Arduino, but I can’t help but think that the existing library system removes some of the power ...
Qu8k – BALLS 20 – Carmack Prize Attempt – High Altitude Rocket On-board Video
Qu8k – BALLS 20 – Carmack Prize Attempt – High Altitude Rocket On-board Video – YouTube ...
Still more on my Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker…
I need to think up a better name for this project. Calling it the “Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker” is just too damned cumbersome for words. Progress ...
iPhone 4S Disappoints? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I’ve had this rant percolating in my head for the last few days, and can’t let it carry into the weekend, so you all with ...
Scrappy introduces my Arduino/Gameduino Satellite Tracker
My cat Scrappy decided it was time to film a brief progress video of my Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker. I completed the basic port and testing ...
Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
Yesterday, I was sitting at my desk at Pixar when a Twitter alerted me to the passing of Steve Jobs. I remember feeling mostly shock. ...
More progress on the Arduino/Gameduino satellite tracker…
Okay, I got about half of the Plan 13 code ported to C++. It’s a fresh port of the original BASIC code, but modularized into ...
First ever image of fourth-order rainbow
Long time readers of my blog may remember that I’m interested in rainbows (not unicorns, just rainbows). A while ago, I wrote a simple simulation ...
ISS tracking on the Arduino/Gameduino
Well, tonight I had some mild success! My Gameduino satellite tracker is up and running! It’s not got much in the way of a user ...
See How It Flies
It seems that lots of people I know have been working on radio and computer controlled drone aircraft. I just recently found Mark Harrison’s blog ...
High-Low Tech – Paper Speakers
Another cool link in my blog searching: constructing speakers out of paper and strips of copper foil. High-Low Tech – Paper Speakers . ...
Creating graphics for the Gameduino…
I had a project in mind for the Gameduino , part of which requires the display of a world map. But the Gameduino has a ...
Homemade GPS Receiver
This article was linked from hackaday , and seems very, very cool. Sure, GPS receivers are cheap, but building one is cool. I am not ...
Apologies to Ken and Eric re: SSTV Challenge…
My face is red. I had claimed yesterday that nobody had tried to decode my SSTV challenge, when in fact both Ken and Eric decoded ...
An impractical classic SSTV decoder…
A few days ago, I posted a .WAV file for a classic 8s SSTV image and asked if anyone could decode it. Nobody replied (I ...
Difficulties with the Hilbert Transform…
Well, it wasn’t so much a difficulty with the Hilbert transform as a difficulty with my understanding. But with the help of my good friend ...
Classic Black and White SSTV timings?
I was trying to determine the exact timings for the classic “8 second” black and white SSTV mode. Copthorne MacDonald suggests 15 lines per second, ...
“Classic” Black & White SSTV…
I haven’t had much time for actual experimentation, but I have spent some time researching and some more time thinking about how to properly implement ...
Experiments with SSTV in the presence of noise…
Last night while watching television, I decided to code up an SSTV modulator for the most popular US mode, which is reportedly Scottie 1. I ...
Thoughts on SSTV…
My recent playing with SSTV images coming from ARRISSat-1 have made me think a bit more about SSTV. I used two different applications to decode ...
Word Foto
Courtesy of a new $1.99 app called Word Foto, I give you: ...
NOAA 19 recording, and atpdec…
Some of you may remember that I wrote my own APT satellite decoder. I ran across someone else who did the same: ATPDEC by Thierry ...
Shortwave Pirate Radio
I got pointed at this rather large collection of shortwave recordings which are archived on the archive.org website: Shortwave Pirate Radio : Free & Unlicensed ...
Can we go beyond WSPR? An idea for beacon operations on amateur radio.
I was interested in WSPR and visual MEPT oeprations for quite some time. I operated both a beacon and a QRSS aggregator on 30m for ...
Digital Research CP/M ® Operating System Manual
I found this manual to be informative as I continue my quest to making a properly functioning 8080 emulator. I’m learning lots, but still not ...
Morning ARISSat-1 SSTV
I overslept this morning, and woke up a scant 10 minutes before this morning’s good pass of ARISSat-1 was to begin. Still, all I had ...
8080 bottles of beer…
Okay, not 8080 bottles, but 99 bottles of beer anyway… [proof:~/adad] markv% ./adad ::: brainwagon 8080 emulator version 1.0 ::: 637 bytes of code loaded. ...
Emulator progress, and envy…
I’ve made a tiny bit of headway, but also encountered a link which makes me envious of much greater hacking skill. Óscar Toledo did an ...
Intel 8080 CPU Emulator (in Javascript, no less)
After getting a version of Tiny BASIC running on my emulator, I was scanning around to try to find something else to run. And, of ...
More on my 8080 emulator…
I spent some more time hacking on my emulator today. The key to getting an emulator to work is to have good, clear references on ...
Yours Truly on the Zombie Tech podcast
One of the more gratifying benefits of blogging is that it provides an opportunity to meet people who share your interests and enthusiasms. A few ...
On ARISSat-1 SSTV images…
I’ve been trying to get out and record more ARISSAT-1 passes, in the hopes of getting some nice SSTV images. If you follow @brainwagon on ...
An 8080 emulator…
A couple of days ago I got intrigued by this cool project which ran CP/M on an AVR . The basic idea was to equip ...
RIP: Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg
Dan alerted me to the fact that Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart passed away. On the Project Gutenberg site, Dr. Gregory Newby wrote a very ...
Are ‘ham’ operators going the way of 8-tracks and VCRs?
Jeff, KE9V pointed at the following article via Twitter: Are ‘ham’ operators going the way of 8-tracks and VCRs? The author actually meanders a bit ...
Roger G3XBM recommends Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets
Roger has found another real gem of a link: a great book called The Boy’s Book of Crystal Sets . Flipping through it, it seems ...
Sprites mods – CP/M on an AVR
I’ve always been fascinated by emulation and virtual machines, as well as retro-computing: resurrecting the old machines of my past. I never owned an old ...
More ARISSat-1 recordings…
Got a short recording of ARISSat-1 this evening. Not 100% sure, but it may have transitioned into low power mode at the end of this ...
ARISSat-1 and the ISS over California
I got a tweet from twisst, the ISS pass prediction robot yesterday indicating that I’d have a good pass around 8:25PM. While I am fighting ...
Wireless Bluetooth RS232 TTL Transceiver Module – Free Shipping – DealExtreme
No commentary, I just found a reference to this module in this cool article on making a VGA scoreboard . The author intends to send ...
Donald Michie, Alan Turing, Martin Gardner, and Tic Tac Toe
As anyone who reads my blog with any regularity will tell you, I like to read and learn new things. The problem with being self ...
Don Henley on the PROTECT IP Act
Today I noticed an editorial by founding member of the Eagles , Don Henley asking for the passage of the PROTECT IP Act currently stalled ...
Some thoughts as Steve Jobs resigns as CEO of Apple…
Breaking news: Silicon Valley pioneer Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, and Tim Cook will be stepping up from his previous role ...
Mag 7 Star Atlas Project
Tom mentioned that a new supernova had been found in M101 , a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. While I used to be a bit ...
Q: Should blogs make font choices for you, or not?
I’ve been making some minor tweeks to the excellent 1024 px WordPress theme that I started using a few weeks ago. I found a small ...
How-To: Coffee Can Radar
This is awesome! MIT has created an interesting course as part of the their Open Course Ware project: it describes how radar can work, and ...
Yawcam – Yet Another Webcam Software
At various times, I’ve wanted to set up a little webcam server, but hadn’t really found a program which combines ease of use with versatility. ...
Real Sound Cookery – Make a contact mic with baking soda and cream of tartar. | leafcutterjohn.com
A couple of months ago, Collin’s Lab featured a story about making your own piezoelectric crystals from Rochelle salt . Collin stopped short of making ...
Another retro computer website…
While researching some information on the old CP/M operating system (don’t ask) I found Herb Johnson’s excellent retrotechnology.{com,net} website. It’s chock full of good information ...
Astronaut Photographs Perseid Meteor
NASA astronaut Ron Garan snapped this awesome picture of a Perseid meteor from his vantage point on the ISS: Astronaut Photographs Perseid Meteor… From Space ...
Arduino PWM Laser Transmitter
A couple of weeks ago, I programmed an Arduino to take digitized sound stored in its rom, and send it out via PWM of an ...
ARISSAT-1’s battery appears to be failing quicker than expected…
I didn’t get a chance to record any more ARISSAT-1 data this weekend, but I did catch up on some reading. Apparently, it’s batteries are ...
AMSAT SSTV gallery
I haven’t had the chance to do any ARISSAT-1 SSTV lately, but I thought I’d snoop over to their gallery to have a peek. Some ...
Amplifier Tutorial
I was looking for some amplifier references to brush up on amplifier design. I found this one to be pretty good: Amplifier Tutorial . ...
More on Dino’s simple common emitter amplifier…
I hadn’t worked through the biasing calculations for collector feedback common emitter amplifiers before, so I thought I’d do that for the simple one transistor ...
I before E except after Hellschreiber « SWHarden.com
Scott Harden had a very cool idea: sending Hellschreiber , an old fax-like teleprinter code invented by Rudolf Hell, using just an Atmel ATMega48 and ...
Preamps and Microphones…
A few weeks ago I did an experiment that stored an 8 bit PCM file in the flash memory of an Arduino, and then used ...
Gutenberg Gem: Francis Galton’s Finger Prints
I’ve always had an interest in forensics in general, and fingerprints in specific. Previously, I had blogged about the FBI publication The Science of Fingerprints ...
Schematic for tanjent’s “bliplace”
Yesterday, I wrote about soldering together my bliplace kit . Today, I thought I’d have a peek at the code and the schematic. Here’s the ...
Morning pass of ARISSAT-1
Success! I managed to record the pass of ARISSAT-1 from my front yard this morning. I woke up around 7:00AM, and tried quickly to get ...
ARISSAT-1 Update…
Okay folks, I’m sorry, I promised that I’d try to stay up late enough to record some of the first passes of ARISSAT-1, but physical ...
Building tanjent’s “bliplace” kit…
I was in the mood to melt some solder, but didn’t really have a lot of time and/or brainpower last night, so I turned to ...
Antenna? Who needs an antenna?
Drew, KO4MA, didn’t let a little thing like the missing antenna on ARISSAT-1 keep him down. He aimed his antennas at the satellite, and recorded ...
ARISSAT-1 is off to a bumpy start…
First, the good news: ARISSAT-1 is floating free in space. I urge hams to listen for its 2m downlink on 145.950 to see if you ...
Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production
I’m interested in low cost computing. Like the kind of computing that costs what a Blu Ray disk costs. For a while, that’s been something ...
Clouds in a Glass of Beer Guinness
I subscribe to the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel which is produced by the University of Nottingham, and today, I noticed they had a new video ...
Decoding a quadrature encoder just isn’t that difficult
I was shown some truly horrifying code that reported to decode a quadrature shaft encoder. It was just mind bogglingly stupifying that someone would go ...
Raymond Jimenez’s Amateur Nuclear Fusion
While looking up some references on amateur nuclear fusion (don’t ask!) I found that Raymond Jimenez had written a cute 40 page book on his ...
On the Ham Nation podcast, or the perils of perpetual promotion.
Ham Nation is a relatively new weekly podcast that is brought to us through the power of the TWIT network, Leo Laporte’s mighty podcast empire. ...
PDP-10/X on an FPGA
I think I saw this a couple of years ago, but Doug Conroy seems to have made some progress on his implementation of a PDP-10 ...
On RC Filters…
Over on the #savagecircuits IRC channel on irc.afternet.org, Atdiy was trying to decipher the mysteries of a mainstay of analog circuit design: the RC filter ...
Hackaday Comment Policy: We’re cleaning up
I am a long time reader of Hack A Day . It’s a great website, and often details projects that I find interesting well before ...
How to mistake correlation and causality, from Scientific American
My tweets this morning included a link to a story by Scientific American editor Anna Kuchment, entitled “How to raise a science fair champ”. How ...
Unboxing the Digikey Monday Mash Prizes!
Digikey runs a Monday Mash puzzle every week on Monday. Last week, I entered and won! Huzzah! Here’s the video of me unboxing my prizes. ...
Dave Richards, AA7EE constructs The WBR by N1BYT
Thanks to Bill at the SolderSmoke blog for posting a link to Dave Richards’ construction project. He made a slick version of the Wheatstone Bridge ...
The Kansas City Standard
I was pondering my laser transmitter the other day, and began to think of how I might transmit digital information from the Arduino to the ...
Hallway Test of the Arduino PWM Laser Transmitter
The other day, I showed how the Arduino could be used to generate PWM audio and send it over a very short distance using an ...
AE6TY on Software Defined Radio
This morning I realized that somehow I had failed to listen to the latest SolderSmoke episode (#135) , so during my somewhat longer than usual ...
Nine years of blogging…
Glancing to the side bar, it appears that today in 2002 was the first post on my blog. This should be post number 3,690. I’ve ...
Using the Arduino to send audio via pulse width modulation
I’m still interested in doing light based communication, but I haven’t made a lot of progress. I did build an LTSpice model of the circuit ...
Parents can trump mentors…
Back on July 8th, I wrote a brief post about mentoring. Hopefully, some of you read it. In case you didn’t, I made the completely ...
Laser audio transmitter…
Okay, so last night, after just testing one of the laser modules I had, I decided to try to make a transmitter to send audio ...
Just playing with laser diodes…
A while ago, I got some laser diodes from from dealextreme.com . They were dirt cheap, but I haven’t had any chance to hook them ...
Shouldn’t we use programming languages with fewer bad parts?
I was reading that Stanford has begun teaching their introductory computer science course CS101 with Javascript . Despite a lot of the propaganda surrounding the ...
Designing a full adder with logisim
An anonymous commenter suggested that I look at logisim , a circuit simulator written in Java. It has many nice features. For instance, you can ...
Maintenance on twitter/facebook posts for my blog…
I apologize. My blog has been remarkably unsociable. Whenever I post to it, I’d like it to also post a short notice to facebook and ...
DIY Computer Project
Continuing my obsession with reading up on homebrew CPU projects, I found this incredible blog. Instead of just presenting the completed design, Dawid has presented ...
Some thoughts on the last Space Shuttle launch…
This morning, I was a bit late coming into work. I decided to sit until 8:26AM Pacific to see if Atlantis would be launched on ...
Are you a mentor, or are you just getting in the way?
It’s Friday, and Fridays are good days for thinking. It’s unclear that it is a good day to write about what you’ve been thinking, but ...
A basic simulator for Caxton Foster’s “Blue” Architecture…
Yep, been spending some time thinking about homebrew computer architectures. I’ve also been reading Gordon Bell’s Computer Engineering , pondering some of the older and ...
Time for some blog maintenance…
My blog may be unavailable for a short time today as I perform some needed upgrades. If all goes well, any down time should last ...
John Doran’s D16 Homebrew Computer
Just another link to inspire me in my glacial moves toward designing a CPU of my own: The D16/M is a general-purpose, stored-program, single-address, 16-bit ...
A Gameduino Button Box, made from parts from Ikea and Surplus Gizmos
I haven’t had all that much time to work on the Gameduino between holidays, visiting family and a business trip, but I have been meaning ...
Michael Bay and Basic Astronomy
I’ve seen lots of bashing of Michael Bay and his movies this weekend. Amongst the blogging world, there seems to be almost universal contempt the ...
Another Numbers Station Recording…
I was bored, and feeling stupid. So, I was scanning around looking for numbers stations. And, if you look, you shall find. Here’s one transmitting ...
Magnetic Loop Antenna Theory
I was digging around trying to find some software to help me design a magnetic loop antenna for use on VLF frequencies. I stumbled across ...
The sights and sounds of RTTY
Over at the tymkrs blog, they’ve been learning a bit about RTTY as a digital mode , but I found their description a bit theoretical. ...
Treasure Trove of Ideas Re: Homebrew CPUS
Dieter Muller has an amazingly interesting collection of interesting ideas about building homebrew cpus with TTL logic. I’m sure to old school logic designers, most ...
Recordings of High Frequency Beacons…
It’s been quite some time since I’ve hunted for any beacons, and I’ve never really payed much attention to HF pirate beacons. Typically these are ...
What is your blog’s business plan? Does it really need one?
It was a convenient time to renew my blog’s hosting plan over the weekend, so I made my payment and you can be assured that ...
Debugging an RFI problem on Field Day…
I spent most of the week in New York, so Field Day snuck up on me without me making any serious plans. But since Jeri ...
Bit banger
Anyone who has seen my projects on the Atari 2600 might reasonably conclude that I have a thing for retro computing. The saying goes “it ...
The Duo Adept, another 8 bit computer built from TTL logic…
In a previous blog post about a year ago, I pointed you at Jack Eisenmann’s 4 bit computer built from TTL chips . It was ...
Gyrator circuit in LTSpice…
While watching TV (not very closely) I went ahead and entered the “gyrator” part of the Gyrator VLF circuit. It does indeed seem to work. ...
Andrew Holme’s projects
Most of the websites that I link to are related to specific topics or projects. But every once in a while, you find one that ...
The Gyrator VLF receiver…
Back on June 7, there was a spectacular coronal mass ejection on the sun: Yes, I did mention this event and gave some links to ...
A Cree LED in my linear current LED Transmitter
I was away all weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to check out my LEDs that I got from Deal Extreme last week. Tonight, ...
Software Defined Radio Links
I own an SDR-IQ software defined radio, a Funcube Dongle (more on that later) and have built a marginally operable Softrock Lite receiver, so you ...
Screenshot from my latest Gameduino tweaks…
I was having some difficulty with doing screenshots using the code that was on the Gameduino website , so I posted a message on answers.gameduino.com ...
Some more simple test code for the Gameduino
Without explanation or screen dump, here’s a little program I hacked together. Update: The syntax highlighter I was using is munging this stuff. So, here’s ...
Papilio – An Introductory FPGA Kit
My own explorations of FPGA have been, well, slow. Well, let’s be truthful: since buying a BASYS-2 board, I have done little more than ensure ...
Cheap ($15) ($14) Robot Swarm developed at Harvard
I initially overcharged my readers by $1, corrected. Just a cool link to the Kilobot project: an inexpensive platform for exploring cooperative robot swarms. The ...
Displaying a graphic on the Gameduino…
Okay, so yesterday I did some sprite animation and learned a bit about how color maps work on the Gameduino. I didn’t have a lot ...
Seeed Studio carries the Gameduino!
Awesome. I’ve been having fun with my Gameduino for the couple of days I’ve had it, so I’m glad to see that Seeed Studio has ...
Gameduino Programming Examples?
I am going to be trying to post some code examples and demos using the Gameduino over the next few weeks. I have an idea ...
Space Invaders Sound Emulation
My recent playing with the Gameduino had me thinking more about games like Space Invaders, and while I was searching around for bitmaps, I kept ...
My first code on the Gameduino, immediately upstaged by Gameduino Invaders
I received a cute gadget in the mail the other day: a Gameduino . It’s a small Xilinx FPGA on an Arduino shield that can ...
Boom! A big solar flare, with some links…
This morning’s massive coronal mass ejection from the Sun got me scrambling around trying to remember details of how amateurs can monitor solar flare activity ...
Op amps in small-signal audio design
KB6NU drew my attention to this article on using operational amplifiers in audio design . It’s apparently drawn from material in Douglas Self’s book Small ...
G0NQE’s Acorn SDR receiver kit
Ever on the lookout for software defined radio designs, I was pleased to see G0NQE’s simple receiver design this morning. He offers a kit, but ...
Dino Segovis builds a copy of Bell’s Photophone
Maker Dino Segovis has a website called hackaweek.com where he tries to do a hack a week, streaming his construction via uStream, and then posting ...
Ham Radio Podcasts
I’ve been meaning to do a quick post about podcasts that I listen to that are related to ham radio, just in case there are ...
What should Radio Shack do to satisfy the DIY/Maker community?
Radio Shack recently posted this (as yet, not incredibly popular) video asking for feedback on what they could do to support the DIY/Maker community: I’ve ...
Lotte Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed
Today, while scanning around for things that I could watch on Netflix streaming, I found that they had The Adventures of Prince Achmed , which ...
Speleogroup’s cool LED headlamp design
Fellow hacker Mike Cowlishaw tweeted me a reminder that he had worked on a design for a spelunker’s headlamp that used Luxeon LEDs, and had ...
Return Infinity – BareMetal OS
At various times, I’ve been interested in writing operating systems. I haven’t done much thinking about this recently, but it is a topic of interest. ...
High Power LED Driver Circuits
My recent experiments with light based communication left me thinking about simple circuits for driving LEDs. I’ve got three big LEDs (1W) on order from ...
A simple constant current LED circuit
I’ve been pretty happy with the performance of my linear current based LED transmitter, but that was just sitting on the bench, driving a 20ma ...
FUNcube Dongle on order!
Huzzah! I’ve been wanting to get a Funcube Dongle Pro for some time, but they have been in short supply. Today, a fresh batch went ...
Question about LEDs…
A few days ago, I posted a query to twitter regarding voltage drop in LEDs: I didn’t receive a lot of truly helpful replies: a ...
More light transmitter experimentation…
Today, I had to do some yardwork, so I dusted off the weed whacker, and climbed the back of the hill to chop down some ...
Improved Joule Thief Circuit
While surfing for more LED information, I found this rather nifty little circuit on Electronic Design’s website. It’s a little Joule Thief-like circuit, but with ...
An improved linear current LED transmitter
I spent some time reading KA7OEI’s great article on creating a good linear current driver for an LED or laser based communication system. The basic ...
DIY FET/home-made transistor Scientific American June 1970
When I was still in grade school, I (and this will be a shock to my readers) spent a lot of time in libraries. Our ...
A foxhole radio…
IRC and Minecraft buddies Atdiy and whisk0r have been doing some cool videos on making cigar box guitars, some kind of neural network stuff, and ...
LED Transmitter Schematic
Okay, so here’s the schematic for the LED transmitter circuit as I assembled this evening. I tried to write up an exposition of how it ...
A simple LED transmitter, and LED receiver!
Tonight’s 20 minute electronics project was to create a simple transmitter to send music using light. A trivial circuit modulates the current through an LED, ...
KA7OEI – LED Linear Current Modulator
My silly experiment with an LED communicator naturally led me to looking up more complex (and better engineered) versions of the same kind of circuit. ...
The Broadcaster Project, revisited
One year ago today, I first published a link to The Broadcaster Project , a site which had several tips on using command line tools ...
All LEDs are not created equal…
Of course I knew that all LEDs aren’t the same: they differ in color, size and brightness. They also differ in the forward voltage, reverse ...
My trip down memory lane leads me back to TOPS-10 and the PDP-10
I’m going to be nostalgic for a few moments. If you are too young to have any sense of nostalgia, skip ahead to the bold ...
Update re: the HamCan.
Dave, NM0S and designer of the HamCan, a kit that I previously assembled, but had some difficulty with nicely contacted me via email today so ...
Toronto Mini Maker Faire
Next weekend is our Maker Faire here in California, but there was just a Mini Maker Faire in Toronto, and it looked like there was ...
Inductive Spikes: Simulation and Reality
Kindred spirits Atdiy and whisk0r over at the tymkrs blog were playing around with inductors: They demonstrated that inductors can generative large inductive spikes : ...
Flashback: the DEC 1091 at the University of Oregon
In my previous post, I mentioned that I had programmed a machine that used core memory. It was the DEC 1091 we had at the ...
Magnetic core memory reborn… on an Arduino????
I may have mentioned before, I’m kind of old. One measure of how old I am is the fact that I’ve actually programmed machines that ...
The Joule Thief — Lighting an LED with 1.5 volts
I was bored, but not quite up to the challenge of debugging my existing radio project, or starting a new one. I idly began winding ...
Simulating the Joule Thief with LTSpice
I always think it is good to follow up a practical build of an electronic circuit with some simulation to try to learn some of ...
Ugly is Better
So, over the weekend I assembled the HamCan, and got some pretty wonky performance. I’m going to go through it all again and see if ...
Today’s Project: The HamCan
I ordered a little HamCan kit about a week ago. It’s a little QRP CW transceiver produced by the Four State QRP kit . Today, ...
Astronomical Musings: What day is Pixar-Henge day?
I’ve had a couple of conversations with Tom over the last couple of days, and they were curiously related. He just got back from a ...
Word squares…
I like to read the Programming Praxis website. Every post challenges you to write some simple programs to boost your skill, akin to finger exercises ...
A small standalone homebrew computer: FIGnition by Libby8dev
I’m old. I learned to program as a teenager in the 1980s. Back then, we learned to program on small microcomputers. These machines weren’t very ...
Eldon made a very cool version of the FM micro transmitter
Eldon, WA0UWH was inspired by my recent experiment with Tatsuo Kogawa’s micro transmitter, and decided to build his own. Unlike my rather crude (but surprisingly ...
Minor outages might occur…
I’m doing a bit of website management. This might result in some minor unavailability of my website: hang in there, I’ll be back. Update: I ...
Book Review: Land of LISP, by Conrad Barski
I learned to program as a teenager back in the 1980s, starting as most of a generation of future computer professionals did. I had an ...
The Micro FM transmitter on copper clad (much better!)
Yesterday’s video showed a very fussy version of Tetsuo Kogawa’s 1 transistor FM transmitter, which worked after a fashion, but which seemed really squirrely. Almost ...
Schematic for the Micro FM transmitter
Tetsuo Kogawa’s circuit is pretty well documented, but not in conventional schematic form. I decided to enter it into LTSpice to see what it could ...
The (too simple) Micro FM transmitter on a breadboard
A couple of days ago, I mentioned Tetsuo Kogawa’s MicroFM transmitter , a simple one transistor FM radio transmitter. Tonight, I decided to put it ...
Watermarking and titling with ffmpeg and other open source tools…
I’ve received two requests for information about my “video production pipeline”, such as it is. As you can tell by my videos, I am shooting ...
Jesse Jackson Jr.: The iPad Is Killing American Jobs
I’m going to divert myself from my normally safe topics of conversations, and briefly wander into a matter of politics, because Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. ...
How to build the simplest transmitter?
In digging around for small AM radio schematics (I’m more interested in AM than FM), I ran across Tetsuo Kogawa’s site on building the “simplest” ...
Code from the Past: a tiny real time raytracer from 2000
Back in 2000, I was intrigued by the various demos that I saw which attempted to implement real time raytracing. I wondered just what could ...
Cool Link on Maze Generation, with Minecraft Application
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 ...
Cool Hack O’ Day: real pixel coding
The problem with working some place with lots of intelligent people is that it is increasingly hard to maintain one’s sense of superiority. Today, I ...
Announcing the “Soldering is Easy” Complete Comic Book!
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 ...
Sony drops lawsuit against Geohot, but not really…
I was directed to a posting about the lawsuit between Geohot and Sony by a twitter from @adafruit. Sony drops lawsuit against Geohot – a ...
Demonstrating the Effect of Decoupling Capacitors
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 ...
Update: Was Hank Aaron really that good?
Back in 2007, I was looking at the career total bases expressed as miles , mainly to demonstrate what an outstanding career Hank Aaron had. ...
Revisiting a Program from the Past: Maze Generation
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. ...
Gutenberg Gem: Blacker’s Art of Flymaking, by William Blacker.
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 ...
How is PWM modulation like AM modulation?
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 ...
555 Astable Multivibrator as an AM Transmitter
I mostly avoided the siren song of the 555 timer that seemed to echo through the blogiverse during the recent 555 contest , but when ...
Amazing small machining site…
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 ...
Neat article on William Friedman and Steganography
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 ...
Roger, G3XBM shows off a software VLF receiver
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 ...
The HOPALONG Orbit Fractal
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: ...
HOPALONG, from Dewdney’s Armchair Universe
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 ...
The Chaotic Lorenz Water Wheel
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 ...
Chua chaotic oscillator
Over sushi this evening, Tom mentioned “Chua’s circuit”, or “Chua’s oscillator”. I knew that I had seen this somewhere before, but failed to remember that ...
My own animation of the Lorenz Attractor
I’ve been working on a script or two for generating intros for some of my little YouTube videos, and thought that maybe something like an ...
The Strange Attraction of Strange Attractors…
I’ll just lead off with a picture: This is a graph of the so-called “Lorenz attractor” , first described by mathematician Edward Lorenz in his ...
Followup re: crystal microphones
A bit more digging on yesterday’s topic (crystal microphones) yielded this book, published by the U.S. Army, entitled CW and AM transmitters and receivers which ...
3-D printing method advances electrically small antenna design
Antenna design and manufacture has historically been pretty, well, primitive. There are reasons for this: early on, solving the large systems of equations to adequately ...
Demo of Enigma and the Turing Bombe at Bletchley Park
Carmen and I just got back from a trip to London, and we had a blast. One of the geekiest things we did while there ...
Cooking up piezo crystals at home
I’ve always been interested in crystals: their outer beauty hints at a certain kind of inner beauty, caused by the orderly arrangement of molecules at ...
No, really, pi is wrong
Having completed my posting of a new program in celebration of pi day (going back to just spelling it out, since somewhere in the WordPress ...
Happy π day!
It’s 3/14 again, and that means that it’s π day! Huzzah. This year, I thought I’d try implementing a way of computing π which was ...
Pocket Laser Engraver
Scanning some of the usual RSS feeds, I saw this link to an interesting little laser paper cutter project, driven by Arduinos and a couple ...
Interesting (wacky!) Tube/Valve receiver
Here’s an interesting project: a tube based regenerative receiver that uses an LM386 as an audio amplifier. Wacky. Still, it appears to only use 12v ...
Bookmarked for later: Open PCB
I’ve been pondering a couple of projects that could benefit from having custom PCBs manufactured, and David Jones twittered about one I hadn’t seen before: ...
Balloon Launch Photographs Discovery Launch from “Near Space”…n
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged that a group of students were planning to photograph the final launch of the shuttle Discovery from a ...
CMMR-6P-60 WWVB Clock Receiver…
Okay, I’ve been thinking (somewhat abstractly, since I have had relatively little free time lately) about what I eventually want my beacon transmitter to be. ...
A dual DAC…
My experimentation with oscilloscope displays made me wonder what the oscilloscope clock by Sparkfun/Dutchtronix used. It turns out to be a $5 dual parallel input ...
Pixels Past Circuit Boards
I’ve done a couple of Atari 2600 projects in the past: my Pong clock and my Enigma Machine simulator. To make physical realizations of these ...
Hershey Vector Fonts
Nearly thirty years ago, I remember hacking together some simple code to display graphics on a WYSE 35 terminal. The terminals supported the TEK 4014 ...
Animated Vector Graphics on an Oscilloscope
I lost the original edit to this post. Recreated. So, while watching the Oscars, I decided to hack together a simple little graphics program that ...
Using an oscilloscope as a graphics display device…
I’ve been meaning to do a project like this for quite some time. The basic idea is to write a program which can generate sounds ...
Arduino + MCP4725 Breakout Board
Well, the other I2C based breakout board I got from Sparkfun was for a Microchip MCP4725 DAC. It’s a 12 bit device, and will eventually ...
DS32kHz 32.768kHz Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator
In considering the long term accuracy of the RTC chip that I was playing around with, I did some additional thinking and reading. My understanding ...
Arduino + DS1307 Real Time Clock
Okay, this is no big deal: lots of people have done it before. But while I was watching TV, I soldered some header pins to ...
PCB Order via DorkbotPDX
A while ago, I remember hearing that DorkbotPDX had some deal where you could submit PCB designs and have them ganged with other designs and ...
Students to photograph Discovery flyby at 100,000 feet | TG Daily
Interesting. A group of students are launching a high altitude balloon “some miles” from the launch site of the Shuttle Discovery at Cape Kennedy, and ...
Dennis Klaat on Formant Synthesis
I’m in serious danger of digressing into trying to learn more about speech synthesis. The discovery of CSpeak, it’s relatively lack of intelligibility and inability ...
Your first Digital to Analog Converter
To control my simple Beacon, I used PWM and as simple (but slow) RC filter. That worked good enough for a test, but I really ...
Using PWM to Generate Analog Output
Analog Devices Microchip has this nice little application note on using pulse width modulation. Seems like it will be useful if you wanted to (for ...
CSpeak and Cantarino
Yesterday’s surfing churned a couple of interesting links on the subject of speech synthesis and computer singing. I wasn’t really explicitly looking for this stuff, ...
Battle of Speech Synthesizers: CSpeak vs. Festival
Okay, this kind of like watching “America’s Most One Sided Fist Fights”, but I was diddling around with Cspeak, which is a speech synthesizer that ...
Is technology good for ham radio?
Over at G4ILO’s blog, he responded to the recent Wired article about ham radio by asking “Is technology good for ham radio?” with his answer ...
The Ham’s Inconsistent Love/Hate relationship with Progress and Technology
WARNING: pontificating and ranting ahead. You’ve been warned. Tom pointed out that I had an inadvertent markup error which ended up dropping several paragraphs of ...
G3XBM: A Simple Sideband 10m Transceiver
I always like reading G3XBM’s blog: he’s been interested in all kinds of cool QRP and LF stuff that I find really intriguing. What makes ...
Happy Valentine’s Day!
This blog is mostly about my geeky side. You all might be shocked to learn that someone as totally geeky as myself has a different ...
The K6HX Arduino QRSS Beacon (ala Hans Summers, G0UPL)
So, today I drove down to HSC in Sunnyvale and got (among other things) some trimmer capacitors so I could tune my beacon, and when ...
Ideas for expansion of the QRSS beacon…
I haven’t even got this on the air yet, and I’m already imagining all sorts of interesting possibilities to improve and change the basic beacon ...
Bummer! No Wednesday deployment of ARISSat-1
The Southgate Amateur Radio News is reporting that ARRISSAT-1 will not be deployed during an EVA from the ISS this week as previously planned. It ...
QRSS beacon, ala Hans Summers, G0UPL
My regenerative receiver was annoying me, and I wanted to do some soldering tonight anyway, so I thought I’d tack together a really simple transmitter ...
Arduino QRSS from AA6DY
My evening’s hacking will probably be in coercing an Arduino to do DFCW (at least) and may SMT Hellschrieber. Of course, as soon as you ...
I’m trapped in the Regenerative Receiver Circle of Hell…
I’ve listened to the SolderSmoke podcast for quite a while, and you’d think I would have availed myself of Bill’s sage wisdom. He’s previously made ...
USB: technology du jour, or evolutionary leap?
G4ILO has a post on his blog grumbling about the increasing use of USB technology in amateur radio: G4ILO’s Blog: USB technology du jour . ...
My weekend project: Ultra-simple W1AW Receiver
Okay, I’ve been wanting to actually do a little radio project for a while. So, instead of cleaning and organizing my home office some more, ...
Is this really why ham radio endures?
David Rowan of Wired.co.uk has an article over on their website: Why ham radio endures in a world of tweets (Wired UK) He waxes philosophically ...
VK2ZOI’s Flower Pot Antennas
I made a brief mention of this website a few weeks ago on Twitter, but thought I should also archive a link to it here. ...
Single Letter Beacons, with some QRM
I like using my SDR-IQ software defined receiver for listening to short wave and ham bands. It’s a great way to look at a bunch ...
A Neighborhood of Infinity: Quine Central
Dan Piponi has a very cool article on nth degree quines on his blog. It’s much more understandable than his fascinating but mostly over-my-head postings ...
My speech bot, using irclib.py
Okay, revamped the basic idea, now using the irclib, which in spite of a lack of documentation, actually proved to be pretty easy to use. ...
Mini hack o’ the day: Making IRC talk…
Okay, it’s been a while since I posted anything: I’ve been busy with travel and the holidays, and now I’m trying to get my home ...
555 Contest
Some idle musings by hacker Jeri Ellsworth has spawned a contest for designs using the 555 timer. It’s not really my area of expertise (and ...
MorseTweeter V 0.7 is running
Hajos dropped me a quick email to thank me for helping him in his Arduino project that uses an Arduino to monitor tweets using an ...
Alan Yates’ Laboratory – G3XBM’s XBM80-2 Trivial 80 Metre CW Transceiver
My “on-this-day” blog sidebar indicates that I was looking at Roger, G3XBM’s XBM80-2 transciever: a fiendishly clever low parts count CW transciever for 80m. I’ve ...
PA1B’s QRPP page
Thanks to Roger, G3XBM for the link to PA1B’s QRPp page. QRP operation is operating with an output power of 5w, QRPp operation is operating ...
Simulating a 40m bandpass filter in LTSpice
A few days ago, I created a small program to compute bandpass filters using the equations from Experimental Methods in RF Design. Basically, you can ...
Getting data from APRS-IS using ncat…
I wanted to log a bunch of APRS-IS traffic for analysis, but didn’t really want to write any code (my brain hurts today), so I ...
Morse on Arduino code, now at Arduino Playground
A long time ago, I wrote some code to send simple morse messages by toggling a pin of an Arduino. It could either blink an ...
Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park’s code-breaking computers
As long time readers of my blog might remember, I’ve been fascinated by old cryptographic machines. I spent quite a bit of time tinkering around ...
Codec 2 good for voice, but not so much for CW
I’ve been thinking about making a kind of “codec2 robot” that people can telnet to and get responses from, and toward that end, I thought ...
Batsocks – Text on TV – Introduction
The chaps over at the Batsocks blog sell a cute little gadget called the “Tellymate”: a nice little serial->video converter that is very, very simple. ...
My Morse Code practice generator…
A while ago, I worked up a simple little program that could generate both computer generated speech and Morse code at various speeds to make ...
On an LC Bandpass Filter for receivers…
I had some time yesterday, but no enthusiasm for melting solder (hey, some times, you just don’t feel it) so I thought I’d spend some ...
DC40B update
Previously, I noted that the oscillator on my DC40B kit (supplied by Doug Hendrick’s qrpkits.com was rather sluggish to start. Reading the messages on the ...
First test of Codec 2
I’ve previously mentioned David Rowe’s excellent work on a patent free codec for amateur radio, Codec2, but today is the first time I actually downloaded ...
Ring Oscillator Das Blinkenlights
Crap, the original entry I made for this got screwed up somehow. Oh well. Alan, VK2ZAY, was experimenting with ring oscillators, which make some very ...
Simulating a (simplified) Ring Oscillator
Okay, simulating the analog parts of the actual physical ring oscillator last night made me ask some questions, so I thought it might be useful ...
Cascode 7 Experimental Receiver
Here is a nice little receiver project which has many features that are similar to the ones I noted as desireable in my post earlier ...
A few thoughts on D-Star
Some chatting on the #hamradio IRC channel on irc.freenode.net have made me think about D-Star a bit more, and I thought I’d write them down ...
FUNcube SDR video
I want one. I tried to get one, but the last batch sold out in 1 minute, which made me about 3 minutes too late. ...
Welcome 2011, with some project ideas…
Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday. I must admit that my own vacation wasn’t productive in the sense of completing projects: I spent far ...
DC40B, Day 4 + over a year…
Back in October of last year, I was eagerly putting together one of Doug Hendrick’s DC40b kits, a nifty little transceiver, complete with a nice ...
It receives!
Well, I found a BNC connector, hooked up my antenna, and voila! Before testing it, I tried listening up on my FT-817, and the band ...
Merry Christmas to All…
Well, it’s just after midnight, and with it is time for me and Carmen to don kerchief and cap and then to settle our brains ...
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Phil Plait dug out these amazing pictures taken by Damian Peach. If you go to your local library and look at astronomy books that were ...
Android In Spaaaace!
I tweeted this earlier, but in case you aren’t subscribed to my twitter feed (user brainwagon) then you should check it out: some Google engineers ...
Apollonian Gasket
It took me an embarrassingly long time to write a program to generate this fractal known as the Apollonian Gasket: More information here: Apollonian gasket ...
You can tune a banjo, but you can’t tuna fish…
Or can you? Courtesy of the Make Blog, here’s an interesting little musical instrument called a “canjo”, a two string banjo that uses an old ...
Total Lunar Eclipse
On Monday, December 20th, we’ll have an opportunity to view a total lunar eclipse. Huzzah! It’s been quite a while since I’ve had the opportunity ...
Ground tracks of satellite passes…
Every once in a while, I feel like making high quality pictures of ground tracks of satellites. The Generic Mapping Toolkit is handy, especially when ...
What ideas infect my brain and why…
Some of you might be wondering what it is about this Karplus-Strong algorithm that has got me interested. Of course, long time readers of my ...
An AO-51 recording, and an attempt at a QSO…
Well, it’s been quite some time since I tried to work any of the FM birds, but I dusted off my TH-D7A, my voice recorder ...
Plink2!
Okay, I finally found my copy of Ken Steiglitz’s A DSP Primer (a great book, but sadly more expensive now than when I got my ...
NanoSail-D Update
It appears that the solar sail cubesat NanoSail-D that was recently launched may not have deployed properly: they haven’t been able to track it or ...
Congratulations to SpaceX, and a new Cubesat!
Lost in yesterday’s thrilling launch of the SpaceX Falcon-9/Dragon launch was that during their flight, they also apparently deployed a cubesat: CAERUS (which is apparently ...
Plink!
The other day, I was trying to remember how to generate some simple sounds with minimal amounts of code. I remembered vaguely something called the ...
The Cinnamon Bear
When I was young, I used to tune into KEX 1190 in Portland during the Christmas season when they would play episodes of “The Cinnamon ...
The J1 Forth CPU, running on an FPGA
Tom showed me a link to The J1 Forth CPU , a very small processor which is coded in Verilog (only 200 lines!) and can ...
LatticeXP2 Brevia Development Kit, with a deal breaker
I’ve been playing with a BASYS2 FPGA development kit from digilentinc.com, and pondering the world of digital system design. I chose the BASYS2 because of ...
Mark’s Bookshelf: Digital Dice by Paul Nahin
Many people use computers to exchange email or pictures, to shop, or even to program for a living. I do all that kind of stuff, ...
The Wobbulator
The Wobbulator is a pretty nifty little video modification gadget. Basically, the idea is that by adding a couple of extra magnetic yokes at odd ...
Crazy Project Idea: Playing with RTL Logic
I’m kind of on a retro computing kick for the last few weeks. I suppose it is mostly because I picked up an FPGA board ...
Mark’s Bookshelf: The Practice of Programming
Today, the hash function has selected The Practice of Programming by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike . On my shelf you’ll probably find a couple ...
Mark’s Bookshelf: Mathematical Recreations by Maurice Kraitchik
Today’s book is Mathematical Recreations by Maurice Kraitchik . As might be evident to long time readers of my blog, I have a lasting interest ...
VGA Signal Timing
I wanted some information on VGA signal timing. A few minutes of googling turned up this information. Bookmarked for future reference. VGA Signal Timing ...
Contrail Science Overflow
The intertubes are all a-twitter (is Twitter a-twitter?) with the video of what appeared to be a missile launch off the coast of Los Angeles ...
Mark’s Bookshelf: Build It Yourself! PVC Rocket Engine
For whatever reason, I have been finding it difficult to find time to blog. Perhaps it is a combination of increased amount of travel, work, ...
Do Americans Eat 3,790 Calories Per Day?
A couple of times in the last few months, I’ve seen this very odd statistic that the average American consumes 3790 calories per day. This ...
Somewhere… over the (simulated) rainbow revisited…
A couple of months ago, I did some simple simulations of light refracting through raindrops in a hope to understand the details of precisely how ...
Congratulations to the 2010 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants
Okay, I’m really more of an Oakland fan, but ultimately I’m a baseball fan, and the Giants provided one of the most compelling post-season runs ...
The BPSK1000 Telemetry Modem for ARISSat-1
The legendary Phil Karn, KA9Q is apparently the brains behind the digital telemetry modem that will be used aboard the ARISSat-1, a satellite designed to ...
Mantis 9.1 CNC Mill – Make Your Bot!
A very nice looking little CNC mill that looks like it would be very nice for milling pc boards and the like, and costs $100 ...
A 2010 “Graphical Computing” Calendar
The Make blog brought the Dead Reckonings blog to my attention. The blog is fascinating: consisting of essays of bits of lost mathematical lore, and ...
Most Americans support an Internet kill switch
Sixty-one percent of Americans said the President should have the ability to shut down portions of the Internet in the event of a coordinated malicious ...
Ting-Tong? Pick-Pock? Keeping time on an Atari 2600…
Years ago, I remembered that someone (couldn’t remember who) had invented a clock which looked like a version of the classic video game “Pong”. A ...
Giants lead Phillies in the NLCS, 3-1
Wow, last night’s Game 4 of the NLCS was a real nailbighter, with the Giants ultimately prevailing 6-5 in a game which saw three different ...
Bicycles & tricycles; an elementary treatise
Courtesy of the Make blog, here’s a link to an 1896 book on the design of bicycles and tricycles. I suspect a lot has been ...
Why are baseball managers so stupid? Or is it just me?
Okay, I’m currently reading The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball because I hate to see intentional walks. Case in point: last night’s 7th inning ...
What do I know about baseball?
Back in 2004, I blogged a short message about the game four performance of the Red Sox against the Yankees. brainwagon » Blog Archive » ...
How a geek tells his wife he loves her: an exercise in Python programming
I’m away from my better half this weekend, visiting my Mom and brother. I scheduled this a few weeks ago, but shortly after Carmen was ...
Design of a simple ALU…
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a bunch of links to a 16 bit ALU designed to operate using blocks which are defined in ...
V4L2VD Home Page
I think I heard mention of this project during a recent episode of the FLOSS podcast a couple of weeks ago, and thought that it ...
Progress in number theory in the years 1998-2009
Dan Piponi passed along the following link to a nice paper summarizing the major results in number theory of the last decade or so. It’s ...
Nano-Satellite Launch Challenge
Apparently NASA is sponsoring the development of nanosatellite launch capabilities by sponsoring a two million dollar prize purse for the first team to launch a ...
Another nifty balloon project…
Luke Gesissbuhler did a balloon launch, lofting an HD video camera and an Apple iPhone to lofty heights before recovering them. Very nice. The footage ...
On random numbers…
While hacking a small program today, I encountered something that I hadn’t seen in a while, so I thought I’d blog it: My random number ...
Redstone circuits
Yesterday I blogged a bit about someone who implemented a 16 bit ALU in the game Minecraft. It wasn’t really apparent to me how the ...
From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps
This came across my desk earlier today. I’ve actually been interested in this kind of “from the ground” up view: basically compiling simulators for very ...
Arduino Blog: Dinner is Ready
Over on the Arduino Blog, they have mentioned a bunch of interesting new developments in the Arduino-verse. These include two new Arduino models, with some ...
Works of Shakespeare Copyrighted on Project Gutenberg?
As a followup to my earlier posting on the public domain, I noticed something rather curious. if you surf over to Project Gutenberg looking for ...
Teaching English, Ebooks, and the Public Domain
Forgive this slightly meandering diatribe, there are a few ideas that have been kicking around in my head, and today is the day I decided ...
Ambisonic Microphone Exp2 Construction
Here’s one for Tom, or anyone else interested in doing ambisonic sound recordings. It mounts four inexpensive Panasonic electret microphones into a tetrahedral array to ...
Direct use of the PostScript language
As I have mentioned before, I sometimes find it convenient to write raw PostScript. I’ve used it to generate business cards, to make templates for ...
Software for the SDR-IQ
Earlier this year, I blogged about my acquisition of an SDR-IQ receiver, made by RFSpace . I hadn’t had it hooked up for quite some ...
Stain PVC Any Color You Like
PVC can be a useful construction material, but it comes in an annoyingly limited range of colors: white. Painting it is a pain, but it ...
Revisiting: Printing Holograms on a Laser Printer
A few years ago I spent a couple of hours tinkering with implementing Thad Walker’s scheme for printing computer generated holograms (see the link for ...
Happy Birthday, Super Mario Brothers
Super Mario Brothers is 25 years old today. Which means that I was 21 when it was released. I feel old all of a sudden. ...
Homemade T.E.A. Lasers
Nyle Steiner gets a link from me again, this time for his construction of T.E.A. lasers. I remember reading about these kind of lasers in ...
More hackable hardware: Installing OpenWrt on Seagate DockStar HOWTO
I have a suprising fascination with devices that can be reflashed with custom firmware. I have an old NSLU2 from Linksys. I have more than ...
Guess What, You Don’t Own That Software You Bought | Threat Level | Wired.com
Sigh. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision on Friday that says that software makers can use use licenses (in particular, shrink-wrap ...
Translating HAKMEM 175 into C…
A couple of years back, I made note of HAKMEM 175, a nifty hack by Bill Gosper that finds the next higher value that has ...
GPS Visualizer
GPS visualizer takes all sorts of data from various GPS type hardware/applications, and can convert into bunches of other output formats, like Google Earth’s KML ...
Les Météores, René Descartes
I was hoping to find a copy of René Descartes treatment of rainbows as part of Project Gutenberg (hopefully in English) but no dice. It ...
APRS experiment: OpenTracker + Kenwood TH-D7A
On Saturday, I decided that the missus and I needed to do two things: get out of the house and get some exercise, and test ...
Somewhere… over the (simulated) rainbow…
A few days back, I simulated how light propagated in a single drop of water , but with a number of problems. First of all, ...
Khan Academy
I’ve seen the Khan Academy listed a couple of times before, but never really bothered to look at it again until today. I was confused ...
Hydropower generator
On hack-a-day today, I saw this interesting link to a small hydroelectric generator. I’ve been interested in DIY/non-centralized generation of electricity for quite a while ...
iHAB Iowa High Altitude Balloon
I was on the #hamradio channel on IRC this morning where people were watghing the progress of the Iowa High Altitude Ballon (IHAB) operating with ...
Lightning, slowed down by a factor of 300…
0.3 seconds of real time, stretched out to 90 seconds of video. Very cool. ...
On light in drops of water…
A couple of days ago, I linked to an article which talked about using a laser beam as a kind of microscopic projector . The ...
Morning Commute with OpenTracker+
So, this morning I decided to give my OpenTracker another run, both to get a feel for how some of the parameters worked, as well ...
Laser Microscope
An interesting impromptu project: a laser pointer directed through a drop of water projects a large magnified image on the wall. Teravolt.org – Laser Microscope ...
A Project from the Past: My OpenTracker+
Over a year ago, I blogged that I had assembled a bit of amateur radio gear, the OpenTracker+ . This little gadget has a couple ...
Pictures of the Blum Blum Shub Random number generator…
A couple of years ago, I did a post about the Blum Blum Shub random number generator. I was watching Psych, and bored, so I ...
Old Glory, in Postscript
I needed a graphic of a flag that I could scale to whatever size I needed. About 10 minutes of Postscript hacking with the specifications ...
Twitter Test
A recent upgrade broke twitter updates on my blog. If you read this on twitter, it means that it’s working again. Addendum: Sigh. Still broken. ...
CUSF Landing Predictor 2.0
Cambridge University has an amazing webpage that provides a web based front end to a weather balloon flight prediction program. It can even save output ...
Making a soft-circuit input device for your computer
I’m intrigued by various uses for embedded processors, and so are my readers. I hadn’t seen this particular microcontroller board before, the “Teensy”, which is ...
Thoughts on the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal…
I’ve had a few days to sit and think about the proposal that Google and Verizon have published, and I think it is time to ...
HOWTO make a simple HTTP server…
It’s occasionally useful to have a basic HTTP running to serve the files in a directory. You might want to fetch some MP3 or movie ...
Zounds! Sounds!
Tom and I have been discussing some early hacking efforts, probably spawned in part by my re-reading of Levy’s Hackers . A couple of days ...
Drawing “circles” ala Marvin Minsky…
In my re-reading of Levy’s book Hackers , I was reminded of an interesting bit of programming lore regarding an early display hack that Marvin ...
My Thoughts on The Acceleration of Addictiveness
Paul Graham has a interesting little missive over on his website on the increasing trend toward addictiveness in our society: The Acceleration of Addictiveness . ...
Kite Photography
Tom and I took a quick break after work today to try lofting my Canon camera up in the air. We used the Picavet that ...
Writing emulators for obscure old computers…
(Hmmm. I’m sort of on a retrocomputing kick today…) A few years ago, I wandered into Tom’s office one day to find him typing away. ...
I don’t think I am a hacker…
Today’s moment of introspection came this morning. After some time spent updating my twitter feeds and answering emails, followed by my regular commute (where I ...
One Bit Ferrite Core Memory
Anyone younger than me has probably never seen core memory, or even knows how it works. A very cool writeup, illuminating the actual workings of ...
A Prototype Picavet Kite Rig
I got home today, and decided to tack together a prototype picavet, mostly because I couldn’t visualize how it works. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEIbac-dULs In case you don’t ...
Anybody want to take over the domain telescopemaking.org?
I’ve had the domain telescopemaking.org for a long time (even longer than brainwagon.org) but I haven’t been keeping up with refreshing any of the content ...
Basics-Picavet – Kite Aerial Photography Electronic Resources
I might have an opportunity in a couple of weeks to go do some kite flying at an upcoming picnic, and I thought that I ...
10,000 Monkeys Typing…with a Unix/sh challenge…
I was testing some code that I wrote for analyzing cryptograms, and decided that the easiest way to do so would be to get some ...
Wikileaks, and the Report on the Barnhouse Effect
My iPad blinked a CNN headline this weekend that Wikileaks had published a vast number of previously secret reports on the ongoing war in Afghanistan. ...
The Burger Lab: The Ins-n-Outs of an In-N-Out Double-Double, Animal-Style | A Hamburger Today
I have fond memories of In-N-Out. In fact, one is fairly near my house, so I don’t need to go deep into my past: I ...
Primality testing with Perl regexs
Okay, here’s a little pet peeve of mine. Somebody brought up that it’s possible to do primality testing using Perl regular expressions. This has been ...
Eight years of blogging…
Today is the eighth anniversary of my blog. Post #3428. Happy Birthday to brainwagon! ...
Some projects related to Wikipedia…
Wikipedia is an amazing resource. I suspect there are a lot of you out there who are Wikipedia critics, but I think that on the ...
Reminder: HOWTO tunnel http using ssh…
I have a couple of devices at home that provide http servers on my local network. I have them tucked nicely behind my firewall so ...
Crazy Optimization of Chaocipher…
Okay, this is a minor hack, but I thought it was fun, so I thought I’d write it up here. My original code for simulating ...
Furor over the iPhone 4 antenna…
Honestly folks, I don’t get it. A lot of people think that a recall of iPhones will be inevitable now, because (to their way of ...
Typos in Exhibit 1?
WARNING: if you are working on this code, this article contains spoilers which may blunt your own intellectual satisfaction in working on it yourself, including ...
Progress on Exhibit 1
Okay, I think I’ve figured out the problem with my code that back propagates cipher wheels to the beginning of the code, and ran it ...
More on Chaocipher…
Well, I didn’t have much time left to work on Chaocipher last night, so I left it running on Exhibit 1. It claimed to recover ...
Progress on the Chaocipher…
My brain has got a bug now. It’s called Chaocipher. Despite the fact that I’m spending my days off with my family, I find that ...
Visual Inspection of Chaocipher Output Implies Weakness
So, first thing this morning, before I had even had coffee or blinked the sleep from my eyes, I decided to try a chosen plaintext ...
An Implementation of Byrnes’ Chaocipher
Okay, insomnia got me, so I went ahead and implemented it in Python. It appears to work reasonably well, at least it successfully deciphers their ...
The Chaocipher revealed! from Cipher Mysteries
Stumbling back through articles in Slashdot, I found a pretty nifty article on one of my favorite subjects: historical cryptography. The story goes that back ...
Ed Felton on How Not to Fix Soccer
I’m not much of a soccer fan, or even a football or basketball fan anymore. If I am passionate about any sport, it would have ...
Revisiting TinyP2P
As I was driving in this morning, I entertained a train of thought that led me back to thinking about peer to peer networks. I ...
Multitasking With iOS 4 is Horrible: Apple Blew It – PCWorld
Jared Newman of PC World thinks that Apple blew it with respect to the multitasking in the iPhone: Multitasking With iOS 4 is Horrible: Apple ...
Awesome Balloon Launch, carrying HD cameras…
Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo . ...
RBox: A diy 32 bit game console for the price of a latte – rossum’s posterous
32 bit processors now cost $1. That means that you can build fairly competent video games for the price of a coffee. Check it out: ...
My Avatar…
My Avatar from Evolver.net ...
French fishing boat rescues stranded Calif. teen – Yahoo! News
It’s good to see that 16 year old Abby Sunderland has been rescued by a French fishing vessel. She was attempting to set a world ...
A 4 Bit Computer, built from TTL chips
I am always on the lookout for people who build interesting computers from scratch. Here’s another nifty one: a 4 bit CPU called the Duo ...
Using Registax…
Lots of amateur astronomers use Registax to do what is known as “Lucky Imaging”. The idea is that you record a bunch of video frames, ...
Inexpensive 3 axis mill…
As part of the “How To Make (Almost) Anything” course at MIT, David Carr designed and built a very simple 3 axis mill, that seems ...
Big Fat Lies by Gary Taubes
I’m back again fighting the battle against my weight, cholesterol and blood pressure. As a guy who tries to be very rational and very scientific, ...
A question from the ballgame…
Can someone (preferably somebody whose very keen on baseball, especially sabermetrics) answer me a question? Tonight I was at the game between the Athletics and ...
Amateur Astronomers Detect Jupiter Impact
Two different amateur astronomers detected an object impacting Jupiter on June 3. Catch the video: it’s pretty impressive, and shows that amateurs can make interesting ...
Perfect Game, Imperfect Call
Yesterday was an intereseting day in baseball. In the last month, we’ve seen two perfect games pitched: the first by Dallas Braden, and the second ...
Clarifying my thoughts re: Facebook and Twitter
I was listening to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast as I was commuting this morning, and found that Steve Gibson said something ...
AT&T changes data plan charges, with some additional ranting about cell phone companies…
it seems like the last month has been rife with stories of corporations doing things that annoy and irritate their customers. Facebook privacy concerns. Google ...
NaCl, at 70x
Slides and coverslips are back ordered, so I am still playing with stuff I can front illuminate. For your viewing pleasure, ordinary table salt, magnified ...
From my home office: first picture through my microscope
As you might have guessed, I’m a “collector”. Not of anything in particular, but of anything that interests me even vaguely. A few years ago, ...
From the code cellar: a program to find haiku in text…
While I was surfing around this weekend, I was reminded of the old sweetcode.org website (sadly, which is no more, but you can still see ...
Maidenhead Grid, courtesy of geolocation in HTML5
What it looks like on the iPhone... If you have a browser that supports the HTML5 geolocation facilities (such as Mobile Safari on the iPhone, ...
Martin Gardner, 1914 – 2010
Today, someone who had a big influence on my life (and whom I’ve never met) passed away: legendary recreational mathematician Martin Gardner. I learned about ...
Musings on Blogging and Social Media
Over the last couple of days, weeks, and even months, I’ve been pondering my participation in various social media: mostly my efforts at blogging and ...
Google Font API Test
Google has a new API that enables you to easily embed a selection of fonts into web pages. It seems to work! Try googling for ...
The WebM Project : Welcome to the WebM Project
While I am surfing around, I discovered that Google made good on their promise to release the VP8 codec they obtained from their acquisition of ...
Converting Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD Webcam for Telescope Use
Before computers, my first love-affair with geekiness was an interest in telescopes and astronomy. For the past few years, I’ve slacked off considerably in my ...
Atlantis + ISS cross the Sun
Sweet. ...
How to layer/remix videos with free command line tools « The Broadcaster Project
I work on video and audio files fairly often using a variety of free tools. FFmpeg is particularly useful for modifying video, and this hints ...
On G4ILO’s Scratching the SDR itch
I try to surf a lot of different ham radio blogs, mostly for inspiration about projects. My own life has been a bit hectic lately, ...
Why I can’t play checkers very well…
White is to move. It isn’t that hard to find the move that draws, but in two minutes, I couldn’t work out the move that ...
The Virtual Choir – Eric Whitacre
In between celebrating the completion of a project at work (and coincidently Cinqo de Mayo) and pondering the mysteries of singular value decomposition, I found ...
Images of Objects in Orbit
Ralf Vandebergh has a really interesting web page, where he shows pictures of the ISS and Shuttle missions taken with a 10″ Newtonian telescope. The ...
LED’s as Varicap Diodes
G3ZJO just posted a nice little blog entry about the use of LEDs (which are nearly ubiquitous) as varicaps (which are often harder to find). ...
Connect-4 Strategy
Here is a nifty little page that I haven’t had time to absorb, but it gives some good strategy hints on playing Connect Four. Saved ...
A new mobile for my car (or the shack)…
I’ve been wanting to put a ham radio into my car for quite some time. The obvious thing would have been to get a nice ...
Simple, reliable 2.5D photography
I’ve been interested in techniques where amateurs can digitize images and models for quite a bit. This website percolated to the top during today’s relaxing ...
The Fhourstones Benchmark
The game Connect Four is a pretty neat little game, which was solved back in 1988 by two different individuals: James Allen and Victor Allis. ...
Milhouse muses from the past…
A couple of years ago, I mused about an “easy” checkers problem which my checkers program Milhouse found to be pretty difficult. Here’s the position ...
Great Science Videos: Sixty Symbols
While mucking around this morning, I bumped across the Sixty Symbols website, something I hadn’t seen before. It describes itself thusly: Ever been confused by ...
Q: Are there any good, open user interface options?
Yesterday I was in our Atrium, and Craig had his iPad with him. I got into a discussion with him and Loren about why I ...
Shame on You: An Open Letter to Gizmodo
I sent a copy of this as a letter to Joel Johnson @ Gizmodo. I have no pre-existing relationship with Joel, but was dismayed by ...
G4ILO’s Blog: Arecibo success
G4ILO had much better success than me with similar equipment. His mp3’s are way more convincing than mine. G4ILO’s Blog: Arecibo success . ...
Yes! Arecibo!
Or should that be maybe? Arecibo? In the world of visual astronomy, it is well known that your eye’s peak sensitivity to light doesn’t occur ...
The moon is quiet…
Sigh. Not hearing anything from the Moon. Tuning into the live ustream.tv video/chat line it appears that lots of people with much larger/better setups than ...
Cheap Yagi is ready…
Will I hear anything from the moon tomorrow? Your guess is as good as mine. The business end of a Cheap Yagi ...
Counting down to Arecibo…
So, my barely finished antenna got just one basic operational test last night. I monitored the pass of SEEDS II, which was squawking in Digitalker ...
WA5VJB Cheap Yagis — Wood Boom
A couple of weeks ago, I started working on a version of the DL6WU Yagi that I might be able to get going for this ...
Inspiration for Moonbounce Day…
Okay, I’m stretching with this one: it’s a link to archive.org and their movie Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip To the Moon, or ...
KP4AO EME on USTREAM
Apparently the Arecibo dish will be streaming video from their location during the Moonbounce event over the next few days. Check out the following link, ...
Rules of Awari
Jonathan Schaeffer used to have a page that contained the rules for Awari that are typically used in computer play. Through the miracle of the ...
Counting Awari Positions…
Previously I wrote a simple program to compute the number of positions that are legal in Checkers. I thought I might perform the same analysis ...
Milhouse, what are you thinking?
Okay, here’s the problem which is driving me crazy. Milhouse gets itself into this position: Black to move, but Milhouse doesn't get the right answer... ...
Mancala/Oware/Awari
Checkers is driving me nuts. I thought maybe I should implement a different board game, just for variety. Chess and Othello seemed obvious, backgammon might ...
Three Kings vs. Two Kings still confounds Milhouse?
A couple of years ago, I realized that Milhouse didn’t play the 3K vs. 2K engame properly. Today, in doing some testing, I realized that ...
What does this software do?
From a spam email that snuck pass my filter today (name was changed to prevent giving spammers free advertising) Thanks for your interest in Mubbley ...
Weekend Project: A Cheapie 70cm Yagi for Moonbounce Day
Okay, okay. The postings about computer checkers haven’t exactly been all that popular with you guys, so I thought I’d write up something that I ...
Why Cory Doctorow won’t buy an iPad (and thinks you shouldn’t, either)
Cory Doctorow has a long write up on how he doesn’t like the iPad and why he thinks that you shouldn’t either. Since this is ...
False advertising for MLB.TV?
I’ve got opening night tickets for the Athletics/Mariners opener next Monday, and once again, baseball is beginning to creep into my brain. I’m an XM ...
It is good to see another checker program work hard…
I was sparring a bit with both Martin Fierz’s Cake , his jCheckers and also with John Kruezer’s guiCheckers . These games illustrated a number ...
Two questions regarding the performance of Milhouse…
Just a couple of quick notes for future investigation: Milhouse uses a windowed search with a “soft-fail” alpha-beta search routine. If the value returned is ...
How not to write a Sherlock Holmes story…
The late Jeremy Brett, possibly in the truest portrayal of Sherlock Holmes I interrupt your normally scheduled ham radio and computer checkers postings to frankly ...
A small experiment with a C compiler
I’m still somewhat baffled by the performance of my checkers program. I keep pondering that perhaps it would be a good idea to take all ...
jCheckers Beats Milhouse
After watching a couple of games where Milhouse appeared to get behind, but then pulled out a draw, here’s one where milhouse got behind, stumbled, ...
jCheckers released
Martin Fierz, author of the truly excellent checkers program Cake, has released a checkers program in Java. I run Cake on my PC, and also ...
Proposed change to Part 97.113
The FCC has a notice of proposed rulemaking whose purpose would be to amend Part 97.113 to allow radio amateurs who are participating in government ...
Classic Board Games for Computer Implementation?
So, my experiments with my checkers program Milhouse have been fun and interesting. There is still work to be done: I don’t think a machine ...
Moon Bounce Day (Where do I aim the antenna?)
A few years ago when the amateur satellite AO-51 transmitted a beacon message on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, it was enough to rekindle my ...
Milhouse vs. the iPhone
I woke up at 5:30 or so this morning, and couldn’t get back to bed, so I thought some more tinkering with Milhouse was warranted. ...
Can I derive an adequate evaluation function for Milhouse through random play?
As I have mentioned from time to time, I have an implementation of a middling checkers player program that I’ve called Milhouse. Every few months ...
A Shorter Quine in Python
Quines are programs that when run produce themselves as output. Previously I had written a fairly longish one in Python . I was reading Russ ...
Building Yagi Antennas
I previously made a half-assed “cheap yagi” just using some aluminum wire and a scrap of wood from the garage, but I’ve been thinking of ...
QRSS VD – The Free, Open-Source, Cross-Platform QRSS Spectrograph by AJ4VD
Saw this drift by on the KnightsQRSS mailing list, looks very promising. Also makes me think that I should have gotten my own program ready ...
Can I ever stop doing math?
I’m still trying to shake the worst of a cold, so the XBox 360 is getting a bit of a workout. I usually only play ...
VLFradio.com
Once again, Roger G3XBM has provided me with links to interesting and inspiring reading. Roger is now interested in experimentation below 9khz. He found this ...
5mw signal from W1BW
Overnight I heard and was heard by a number of VK and ZL stations, but perhaps my most interesting spot was from long time QRSS/grabber/WSPR ...
A potential replacement for the Kenwood TH-D7A?
I was reading the pre-announcement for this month’s QST, which apparently includes a product review for a new tri-band Alinco HT: The Alinco DJ-G7T . ...
MathWorks on Single Sideband Modulation via the Hilbert Transform
Yesterday I spent some time trying to implement a simulation of an SSB exciter that worked by using the Hilbert transform on some input audio, ...
Focusing guides for telescopes
Today I was cleaning out my office. I’m a clutterbug: I have tons of treasures, but also, let’s face it, an even larger amount of ...
Where are the visionaries in ham radio?
I was reading amateur radio blogs and for the third time or so in a month, I was treated to what amounted to a diatribe ...
Simulating a phasing radio…
I’m gonna dash off to an appointment with my tax guy in a few minutes, so I’ll have to be brief. I’ve been reviewing literature ...
Back transmitting on WSPR…
Well, yesterday I was out shopping at HRO, and couldn’t resist the allure of a new Signalink USB sound interface for my FT-817. This is ...
How not to create a new digital ham radio mode…
You’ve had a C compiler sitting in front of you and some communications textbooks, and so you’ve done some hard work and created a new ...
Launching a rocket with hydrogen/oxygen combustion…
A recent issue of Make magazine had an article about launching water rockets via hydrogen/oxygen combustion: basically an electric current is used to break water ...
New DX spot via WSPR…
This wasn’t quite a personal DX record for me, but it was close, and the first time I’ve heard South Africa in quite some time. ...
HFAERO.jpg (3397×1781)
While tuning around, I found some of the VOLMET traffic from NY this evening. In trying to identify other aeronautical signals on HF, I discovered ...
Remotely-tuned loop antenna for LW and MW
I was looking for some information on how to compute the resonant frequencies that are attainable from small loop antennas, especially for VLF. This appears ...
The Science of Water Rockets
There has been a lot of publications lately about water rockets . These are rockets which are usually constructed of empty plastic soda bottles, pressurized ...
On the LDG Z-11 Pro
AK6L was installing an attic dipole, and idly wondered what the maximum inductance and capacitance the LDG Z11 Pro could swap in. He sent LDG ...
Illustration of why power lines are dangerous…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYktDghfoFM Addendum: It seems rather likely that the person photographing this was the yutz who tossed the branch up there. Don’t try this at home, ...
New DRM channel of Disco Music
I believe that it was the Amateur Radio newsline podcast which mentioned the following: A Miami based Radio Station – The Disco Palace – has ...
Vacuum Tubes in Wireless Communication
More early reading on vacuum tubes. To be honest, I never really understood (or frankly studied) the physics of semiconductors, which always seemed a bit ...
Low Voltage Vacuum Tubes
As part of my delvings into things vacuum tubes, I of course found that many others have been down this road, including this rather interesting ...
Tubes? Who uses tubes anymore?
For the last week, I’ve been embarking on a ham radio “trip down memory lane”. Well, it would be memory lane if I had any ...
K6FIB again…
This morning, I see K6FIB back, this time in all caps as he said he would be, along with perennials KC7VHS and WA5DJJ. Good clean ...
K6FIB on 30m, SMT Hellschrieber…
Monitoring the QRSS part of 30m this morning for the first time in a while, got this new face: Addendum: A few minutes later, I ...
New Book: International QRP Collection
While over at Ham Radio Outlet the other day, I noticed a new QRP/homebrewing book on the shelf published by the RSGB: International QRP Collection, ...
Fifth Position, a test for milhouse
My trip to Powell’s also netted me Erroll A. Smith’s The American Checker Player’s Handbook , a nice little tome published in 1944. It mostly ...
Build Your 1st Vacuum Tube Regenerative Receiver
In addition to the checkers books that I got the other day, I also picked up a couple of radio books. One was an old ...
Some new additions to my checkers library…
A visit to Powell’s books today netted me three new (well, new to me, but used, and in two cases, quite old) books on checkers. ...
A recording of AO-51 – KJ6AKQ
One of the chaps that I talk to occasionally on IRC has built an IOio satellite antenna, and was nice enough to post a recording ...
The Carolina Flashers Photonics Group
Roger, G3XBM once again turned me on to an interesting link, this one on a group of hams who are experimenting with communication over optical ...
Rob Pike on Quantum Computing
Rob Pike is a Google researcher, and has written a bunch of stuff in the past that I’ve enjoyed reading. He’s also a telescope maker, ...
XBM80-2 An Experimental 80m CW Transceiver G3XBM
I’ve been a little too busy to fire up the soldering iron and build anything, but I’ve been pondering putting together one of Roger’s G3XBM ...
Gruenberger’s prime path
Here’s an interesting little mathematical morsel from the pages of the bit-player blog having to do with two topics I’ve found interesting in the past: ...
Real-Time Rendering Blog
Back around 1984 or so, I first became interested in computer graphics. I was going to college at the University of Oregon, and we didn’t ...
Building an IOio satellite antenna – KJ6AKQ
KJ6AKQ tackles a project I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: the construction of a little handheld satellite antenna: Building an IOio satellite antenna ...
Broadcom.com – BroadVoice® Speech Codec Open Source C Code
This month’s QST had a pointer to a potentially interesting voice codec that I hadn’t seen before. It appears that Broadcom has developed a voice ...
Another try at an HF FAX decoder…
About two years ago, I spent an evening and hacked together a simple program for taking recordings of HF-FAX transmissions and converting them into image ...
CQ WW RTTY?
Looks like an RTTY contest is currently going on, and nothing is better for revealing band openings. I tuned up to 15m to see what ...
The math of frequency demodulation…
Here is the tiny clever bit from last night’s demodulation experiment using HF radiofax. For the purposes of this experiment, I record a single channel ...
Google Chart Tools / Image Charts
Wow, the Google Chart Tools api includes all sorts of interesting things you can do with a tiny bit of web programming. For instance, you ...
NAVTEX on 518khz
I don’t have the right antennas or the best setup for decoding, but I can still occasionally hear some of the more local NAVTEX stations, ...
Azimuthal Map Server
An azimuthal map shows the compass direction for the shortest path to a given location from the place the map is centered. This can be ...
WSPR on 15m today…
Today is Wednesday, which means that it’s a day for trying different bands on WSPR. Today is scheduled to be 15m, which I have never ...
Morse Timing
While working on my Morse practice generating program that I have tentatively called mscript , I decided that I wanted to support “Farnsworth” timing: basically ...
End of an Era, and The Start of a New One
I normally read the blog of W9OY for its ham radio content, but this morning he waxed poetical on the impending cessation of human space ...
Measurements of my 40m dipole…
I hooked up my MFJ antenna analyzer to my dipole, and wrote down the R and X measurements (resistance and reactive impedances) from 7.0 to ...
40m dipole not really tuned for 40m… or is it?
A while ago, I bought an MFJ antenna analzyer, but I hadn’t really done much with it. I wanted a short, simple project over the ...
A Great Ham Radio Podcast: ICQ Podcast
Allright, I’m probably the last ham on the planet who doesn’t know about this one, but just in case there is one other out there, ...
Bruce, VE9QRP on his qrpTracker
Bruce, VE9QRP has been experimenting with using a small Atmel controller to implement the Plan 13 algorithm that provides satellite tracking and Doppler calculations (the ...
A New Weight Loss Experiment: Twittering My Weight
Well, I’m about to embark upon a new experiment. My weight has crept back up to where it was when I first joined Weight Watchers ...
A little evening programming project…
Well, there wasn’t anything terrific on TV tonight, and I’ve had a little program kicking around in my head for a while, so I decided ...
Diana Eng demonstrates dipole and Yagi antennas…
This morning greeted me with this nice little video, where Diana Eng demonstrates the pattern generated by dipole and Yagi antennas by a simple detector ...
Internet Archive: The telescope by Louis Bell
Poking around on archive.org, I found that Louis Bell’s classic work The Telescope was available for download. It is a pretty nice book, well worth ...
WSPR spot of DP1POL
Tonight, I’m currently hearing station DP1POL, from grid IB59uh on 40m. Where is that, you might ask? Antarctica. He’s heard my beacon before, but I ...
Radio History: The book of wireless telegraph and telephone : being a clear description of wireless telgraph and telephone sets and how to make and operate them, together with a simple explanation of how wireless works
The early history of radio is quite fascinating, and luckily, lots of books from this early period are out of copyright and are available for ...
Up receives five Oscar nominations
Yep, it’s that time again when the Oscar nominations are announced, and once again my Pixarian overlords are nominated for no less than five Oscars ...
The Wireless Amateur in Times of Disaster (1913)
The more things change, the more things stay the same: MR. B. N. BURGLUND, whose description of the wireless station at the University of Michigan, ...
Homemade applesauce…
If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that it wasn’t always about ham radio. It’s really about whatever I happen ...
HAMRADIOSAFARI.COM
If you haven’t had a chance yet, try checking out Jack Dunigan’s HAMRADIOSAFARI.COM blog. He’s (from his sidebar) the Senior Management Leader of Aidchild Inc., ...
Crazy Simple 40m Transciever: MOSQUITO Minimalist Transceiver
This 40m transceiver only has around 16 parts, and only a single active device: the ubiquitous IRF510 power transistor which you can even get at ...
M1KTA’s QRP ham radio blog: PTO VFO
If you go back through lots of amateur radio designs, you’ll find many, many circuits that use the nearly uniquitous 365pf air spaced variale capacitors ...
Book Review: The ARRL Antenna Designer’s Notebook by Brian Cake, KF2YN
The other day I was in HRO and scanning for some reading material for the long weekend. I ran across Brian Cake’s new book, The ...
Vicacopter
There has been a lot of work in recent years toward making amateur level UAVs. This one is a tricopter, and is completely open source. ...
Upcoming Balloon Launch: Arizona Near Space Research
Another one of those nifty amateur balloon launches is scheduled for next Saturday, February 6: The vehicle will be a 1200g helium-filled latex balloon. The ...
40m spots on WSPR
I’ve got the RFSPACE SDR-IQ hooked up as a receiver again, and using it to feed WSPR. There is a ton of loud RTTY signals ...
Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font
I admit it: I’m an old timer. When I first was learning about Unix and C programming, I was sitting in front of a TVI ...
Another checker problem…
I was waiting for sleep to come, and surfed over to the American Checker Federation website. As long-time readers of this blog might remember, I’ve ...
On properly operating a WSPR station…
Anyone who is subscribed to the QRP-L has likely been subjected to a long string of complaints against WSPR in the past week or so. ...
Goodbye QRP-L…
I subscribe to quite a few mailing lists relating to ham radio. A few months back, I decided to give the QRP-L a whirl. Unlike ...
10 more minutes of “The Cuban Lady” on 5.883 Mhz
I was bored, tuning around when someone on the #hamradio IRC channel mentioned that the “Cuban lady” numbers station was audible around 5.883Mhz. I was ...
XBM80-2 An Experimental 80m CW Transceiver G3XBM
Roger, G3XBM has a terrific blog and website, and is always tinkering things together that I find interesting and inspiring. This morning, I see that ...
Spectrum Lab + 30m + Lightning…
Well, we are beginning to get some lightning in the area, so my radio is disconnected, but before I did so, I managed to hook ...
K6HX QRSS Grabber
For fun, I’ve got my new RFSPACE SDR-IQ running on my laptop using Spectrum Lab and monitoring the 30m QRSS beacon subband. I enabled its ...
A Self Contained QRSS beacon…
Paul, M1CNK, has a very nice webpage that details his QRSS beacon, constructed as several different kits assembled as modules. Very cool. qrssbeacon (wiltonpaul) . ...
KnightsQRSS blog
Joachim, PA1GSJ has decided to put up a blog for the KnightsQRSS. I recommend all those interested in QRSS operations to go ahead and subscribe, ...
Perils and Pitfalls of SDR | Signal and Noise
Jeff (KE9V) posted an interesting commentary on an article by G4ILO about why he’s not excited by software-defined radio . My comments are mostly directed ...
Proper setup of the EMU-202 Soundcard for SDR
I’m saving a link to this page, because I think I may have something misconfigured in my own attempt to use the EMU-0202 sound card ...
G3XBM – ham radio blog: Simple LF/MF QRP transmitter
G3XBM posted a link to VE7SL’s nifty LOWFER beacon transmitter , setup to run around 188khz. I’m still fascinated by LF operation under Part 15, ...
W3EEE on LF radio..
It’s too late, I should be in bed, but once again I’m reading up on low frequency radio communication, another of those oddball interests you ...
Jonathan Ward – MIT – Machines That Make
I’ve been interested in all kinds of machine tools for a long time, and in the various projects like Rep Rap and the like that ...
Gilbert Cells
Diane, VA3DB passed along this excellent page detailing the inner workings of the Gilbert Cell mixer. I was interested in these primarily because I was ...
Contest!
Earlier tonight, I noticed that CW traffic on 40m picked way up. You get an interesting view of the band conditions when you can tune ...
Digital Radio Mondiale, recorded on the SDR-IQ, decoded with GNU Dream
Digital Radio Mondiale is a new digital broadcasting standard that is being used on shortwave. Sadly, its one of those annoying standards that relies on ...
Digital piracy hits the e-book industry – CNN.com
Phillip Torrone pointed out a dreadful article on CNN.com today: Digital piracy hits the e-book industry – CNN.com A few things that I’d like to ...
New gadget in the shack: an RFSPACE SDR-IQ
Well, I got a new gadget in the mail today: an SDR-IQ from rfspace.com . It’s a cute little gadget: a general purpose receiver that ...
30m Subharmonic I/Q-SDR Receiver
Over on NT7S’s Ripples in the Ether blog , he presents a link to a project by Joachim, DL1GSJ, a very nifty little SDR designed ...
Autodyne receiver for WWV
While scanning QRP-L today, I found an interesting link to a project which gave some details about a little WWV receiver that can serve as ...
On responding to threats to our amateur spectrum…
I was driving around a bit yesterday (I needed a new hand nibbling tool to punch some holes in a project box, and wanted to ...
A pass of SO-50….
I hadn’t worked SAUDISAT 1C (aka Saudi Oscar 50, or SO-50) in quite some time. My recollection was that it was a trickier satellite to ...
DK3WN SatBlog » XW-1 SSTV
More fun on HO-68! During a low elevation pass, Mike DK3WN and Henk, PA3GUO made the very first SSTV contact via HO68 – linear transponder. ...
Gilbert Cell Mixer in LTSpice…
Well, I went ahead and built the Gilbert cell mixer from the Elmer 101 pages in LTSpice. I’m not sure I understand the biasing that ...
HO-68 in SSB mode
I don’t really have the hardware to effectively transmit to satellites in linear transponder mode. To really make it straightforward, you probably would like to ...
Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners
I keep thinking that I should build one of these, but have never gotten around to it. Bookmarking this interesting link for future reference: Build ...
The Hila Trebuchet
I like trebuchets. Former Pixarian and RenderMan engineer Dan apparently located some plans for building small trebuchets from the Hila Science Camp: The Hila Trebuchet ...
Bounced a signal through HO-68
This morning I got another chance at HO-68, the newest Chinese amateur satellite that was operating in FM mode. I wasn’t sure what the problem ...
Elmer 101: Understanding the SW-40+
I was surfing around the web today looking for an LTSpice model for the NE602, and came across the Elmer 101 FAQ , which is ...
Modelling the NT7S code practice oscillator with LTSpice
As I was chatting on the QRP Echolink conference tonight, the subject of code practice oscillators came up. I think it was Bob, AD7BP who ...
Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes
I’ve mentioned before that I’m a pretty big fan of Sherlock Holmes. Every couple of years, I dust off my copy of his stories and ...
A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
Okay, I’ll admit it: I like cooking, and I’ve begun to read a bit upon the subject of so-called “molecular gastronomy”. I was also watching ...
Christmas… and Radio!
Yep, it’s Christmas again, and I’m such a geek, I can imagine all sorts of things that link it back to radio stuff. If you ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Yes, Christmas is upon us again, and this year we are treated to a movie release about a character near and dear to my own ...
My first attempt at the FM transponder on HO-68
The new Chinese amateur radio satellite, formerly XW-1, now designated HOPE-1 or HO-68, made a pass with its FM transponder active around 10:00AM local time ...
Milhouse takes Quiz #10 – Double Cross
Checker expert Jim Loy has a number of quizzes on his website, including the following one that I found as part of my earlier post ...
Dusting off my checkers program Milhouse…
I noticed that Martin Fierz released a new version of his Checkerboard program, so I thought I’d set it sparring against my own program, milhouse. ...
Gutenberg Gem: Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son, by John Mills
I love old books, even on technical subjects like radio. Often, by looking at the books of the past, we find them more accessible (because ...
Actor Mickey Morton
Mickey Morton had a brilliant career. Can anyone guess why I might have stumbled across his curriculum vitae today? Hint: I’ve just watched arguably the ...
Chinese Amateur Satellite XW-1 launched, beacon has been heard…
This morning, a quick check of my email and blog roll indicated that the Chinese had launched XW-1, probably the most interesting amateur satellite to ...
Some Document Scanner Links
I love books, and I love the fact that technology is becoming increasingly easy to get books digitized and distributed online. Several years ago I ...
KL7R’s HW-8 DSB modification…
G3XBM pointed out silent key KL7R’s modification of a Heathkit HW-8 to do double sideband voice. It looks pretty straightforward, and would be an interesting ...
An Active Filter Design
Eldon, WA0UWH pointed out WA4DSY’s website that features an active filter design applet . I was just waking up this morning, so I thought I ...
The FDIM 2010 QRP Challenge: a good personal challenge?
I’ve never attended Dayton or FDIM, but I am thinking that perhaps I will soon (hopefully this year). An affiliated event is the Four Days ...
Regarding comment spammers…
It’s been quite some time since I had a decent rant on this blog, and I didn’t sleep well last night, and I am feeling ...
Bandpass Filters
Just some more playing around. I surfed to the following page, looking for bandpass filter designs, such as might be used at the input stage ...
Visible Storage Event @ the Computer History Museum
If you haven’t visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, then this weekend might be a good time to go. On Sunday, they ...
Photosynth of my office…
Want to know what it is like to be me? Here is a photosynth of my office at Pixar Animation Studios. It’s my first try, ...
Tank Circuits…
Okay, time to work my way through some more complicated (but stll simple) examples. First of all, let’s consider a simple parallel LC circuit. Here ...
Power Transfer Math
As I might have mentioned, I am trying to teach myself a bit about electronics and radio design. I find the problem with being self ...
A Half Wave Filter in LTSpice
On page 3.4 of Experimental Methods in RF Design, they have a little side bar about a particularly simple form of harmonic filter that I ...
Gaining experience with LTSpice…
So, for fun, I entered the circuit for the bidirectional amplifier used in the BitX20, and did some basic simulation. You can see it in ...
Ham radio without a radio?
OZ9AEC shows how you can use free software and web-based radio receivers to decode amateur digital communications. Very nifty. I tried this myself using WebSDR, ...
The Christmas Season is upon us…
Well, I spent the morning raking leaves in my front yard, and then went over to Target and got some new LED lights for our ...
An LTSpice screencast using screentoaster.com
I was trying to remember how I did screencasts before, but instead discovered the interesting online service at screentoaster.com . It doesn’t require that you ...
Simple Temperature Sensing IC
A couple of projects that I’ve been pondering could make use of a little temperature sensing chip. Microchip makes this little gadget, the MCP9700A, which ...
Wolves And Rabbits
I really like programmpraxis.com. Today, they had an interesting little task, not so much for the program itself, but for what it reminded me of. ...
Satpack: Arduino Satellite tracking and doppler tuning
Bruce, VE9QRP has a nice video demoing his qrpTracker code (open source) running on an Atmel AVR microcontroller and tracking the Doppler of a cubesat ...
A night of WSPR spots…
Got some interesting spots overnight. VK6BMW is located in Perth, Australia, which is pretty close to the maximum distance I’ve heard before. PA0LSK is in ...
A couple of days of WSPR 2.0
Left my FT-817 beaconing for the last 48 hours or so, mostly on 40m, and got some interesting DX, including someone I think I never ...
Recommendations for a little LTSpice design project?
Well, one of the advantages of getting a new Windows 7 laptop is that I now have a much nicer environment for running LTSpice. Does ...
New Google Voice Number
Courtesy of Zeid, I finally got an invite to use Google Voice. I’ll write more about this when I figure more about it, but at ...
FreeBSD 8.0 is released…
I’ve been a long time fan of FreeBSD, going all the way back to the 1.1.5.1 days (and used regular BSD going back even further). ...
Back on WSPR today…
Well, I finally dug up all the cables I needed and hooked up my little HP netbook to my radio again, and got it going ...
A simple, naive implementation of a MasterMind solver
Okay, I woke up this morning, and decided to code up a version of a MasterMind solver. About fifteen minutes later, I had this tremendously ...
SO-67 Audio…
John, K8YSE recorded a North American pass of SO-67 (the new South African ham satellite) and posted the audio on his website. It appears the ...
Investigations into the Master Mind Board Game
Over at the Programming Praxis blog, the task of the day is to write a program to solve the game Mastermind . Mastermind is actually ...
Orion Nebula
IMG0012 21st November, 2009 Dan Lyke of flutterby drew my attention to the astrometry pool on Flickr. If you upload an astrophotograph to this group, ...
Handmade Cigar Box Instruments – Ukuleles – Banjos – Guitars
It’s been a while since I posted a link to anything related to home made musical instruments, so when I ran across this page this ...
Creating an Anaglyph from a Stereograph
Back in 2005, I wrote a little blog post about creating stereo images with the GIMP along with a screencast. Little did I know that ...
VK7 OPTICAL COMMUNICATIONS EXPERIMENTATION
While listening to the “This Week In Amateur Radio” podcast this morning, I heard reference to a new record setting non-line-of-sight one way contact that ...
Homemade Thin-Film Transistor Experiments
Another link to some interesting experiments on building your own thin-film transistors. And a Quarter Gets You Coffee » Homemade Thin-Film Transistor Experiments Addendum: Of ...
Mandelbulb formula…
Without further explanation, here’s Daniel White’s “Mandelbulb” formula . (x, y, z) n = r n (cos(n θ) cos(n φ), sin(n θ) cos(n φ), -sin(n ...
Another try at an Arduino Based Morse Beacon
Back in 2008, I blogged about a stupid program I wrote to implement a Morse Beacon on the Arduino . I couldn’t find that code, ...
30m QRSS Transmitter (clayton.isnotcrazy.com)
Just flipping around the web tonight, found another interesting MEPT (Manned Experimental Propagation Transmitter) project that uses solar power an a small Atmel AVR processor. ...
LM3909 Oscillator
I was wandering the net at random, following various links, and ended up researching a rather interesting integrated circuit that I’ve used before: an LM3909 ...
Good prices on microscopes…
Just saving this link after someone reminded me that I could use a decent cheap stereo microscope for some of my electronics assembly work. These ...
More Fuji Real 3D W1 experiments (and an anaglyph)
Well, I’ve tinkered around a bit more, and discovered a few things: the camera doesn’t actually do very much to align images. In fact, there ...
Fujifilm Real 3D W1 Camera
Today we got an interesting new toy in the lab, a Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W1 . It’s a very cute little camera which you ...
Crystal Sets to Sideband, by Frank W. Harris
I was trying to remember where I had seen this excellent online book, and finally found the link that lead me to it. Archived here ...
K6MM on Helical Wound Vertical
I’m interested in short vertical antennas, so I keep collecting links to interesting article. K6MM has a nice description of his work with a 25 ...
Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font
I’m mostly resistant to nostalgia when it comes to computing. Let’s face it, the iPhone has way more impressive capabilities than the desktop machines I ...
Movie Review: This Is It (2009)
Tonight’s movie screening at work was Michael Jackson’s This is It , essentially a concert movie starring the recently deceased King of Pop, Michael Jackson ...
From the Brainwagon Archive: Silly Arduino Project #1: A Trivial Beacon
One year ago tody, I tinkered together a very simple program and keying circuit to use my Arduino to send out a simple Morse Code ...
WSPR Organ – Computerless WSPR TX
I mentioned G3ZJO’s “WSPR Organ” idea a couple of days ago: he has a much better write up of its success on his own blog. ...
Audio processing for amateur radio voice communications…
This is just a brief note to myself to archive, well, what amounts to a single command that processes an audio file, but to stand ...
Some interesting new (to me) radio techniques…
The Knightsqrss mailing list still intrigues me, although my own qrss beacon has been off the air for a while (I’m trying to get around ...
The principles underlying radio communication
While digging around for some information on crystal radios on the Internet (since i seemed to have misplaced the book on the subject I was ...
Link to K7QO’s Lab Notebook
I missed out on last night’s Echolink QRP confab (Sundays, at 6:00PM Pacific time) but I did notice that Henry had posted a summary of ...
Make an Instant-Charge Screwdriver | Popular Science
Ben Tongue’s article on using a supercapacitor to hold energy harvested from an antenna tuned to strong local broadcast system got me thinking about supercapacitors ...
Zero Threshold MOSFETs…
I don’t know why this percolated to the top of my consciousness today, but I thought I’d dump a link here so I can find ...
AA1TJ — “El Silbo”, a voice powered radio (complete with QSOs!)
I subscribe to the very interesting QRP-L mailing list, and recently read an article by Michael Rainey, AA1TJ about an interesting radio and set of ...
EtherGeist: Quick prototype printed circuit boards
I was reviewing Stu’s articles on his “Ethergeist” blog again regarding his QRPp WSPR beacon, and was admiring his nice looking prototypes. I’ve goofed around ...
Using the 74HC240 in radio applications…
There are a number of interesting radios based upon using things like hex inverters or octal drivers as both oscillator and amplifier. In digging around, ...
DC40B, Day 4, and stupidity on my part…
Well, over the weekend I completed the trial assembly of my DC40B. The voltages all measured out correct, but the oscillator seemed to not start ...
No DC40B work tonight…
Too tired, so instead I took the wife out for some Mexican food and a movie, and when I got back I relaxed a bit. ...
DC40B Construction: Day 3
Toroids. Today it was winding toroids. I really don’t mind winding ’em, it is stripping and tinning the leads that seems to be annoying. Nevertheless, ...
DC40B construction: Day 2
Well, I found a replacement for the one resistor I screwed up, and started work on all the caps. They are all in and double ...
Midway DXpedition, courtesy of my HW-8
Well, as I was heading off to bed, I was reminded that there is currently a DXpedition operating from Midway island using the callsign K4M. ...
DC40B construction underway…
Well, after playing around with my Heathkit HW-8, I was struck by a feeling of productivity and started working on my latest kit, a DC40B ...
PROPNOMICON: From the Mountains of Madness
Shifting gears a little from my normal subject matter, I’ll confess to a certain literary guilty pleasure: I like the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. ...
My new toy, a Heathkit HW-8
Yesterday I managed to be the winning bidder for this little radio at the QRP Pacificon. Mike Schettler, WA6MER was kind enough to put it ...
Pictures of my Softrock Lite II (40 m)
Diane, VA3DB, wanted some pictures of the Softrock Lite II kit that I built, so I fired up the Canon and snapped these. ...
LCROSS was apparently a bust, at least visually…
We were fogged in here, so I didn’t have an opportunity to watch, but it looks like I didn’t miss much: early reports are that ...
Kurt Akeley’s Publications
The other day I was lucky enough to be invited by Bob Whitehill to share a lunch up at UCB with Marty Banks, Kurt Akeley ...
LCROSS to impact the moon…
This Friday the NASA LCROSS probe will deliberately impact in a dark crater on the moon, with the ultimate goal of trying to decide if ...
BROADCAST YOUR PODCAST
Well, this isn’t quite amateur radio in the sense of ham radio, but it’s a cute and potentially useful project: a simple fm transmitter that ...
Real-Time Rendering · SIGGRAPH 2009 Course Pages
I didn’t make it to this year’s SIGGRAPH, but I still try to keep up on my reading. There are several nice courses that occurred, ...
More on the Softrock Experience…
I am not really that much closer to figuring out why opposite sideband rejection is so poor, but I downloaded a couple of different SDR ...
My Softrock 40…
So, I’ve had my Softrock 40 on the shelf for a while. When I’ve hooked it up, I don’t get very good opposite sideband cancellation. ...
cpu_from_scratch [bradthx.net projects]
Every few months, I read about some one who embarks and completes a homebrew CPU project. A few months have gone by, and here’s another. ...
AlgaeGeek.com
I have a bizarre fascination with algae. There is a lot of science going on with algae for use in food stuffs, in detoxifying industrial ...
‘Toy’ Stories in 3-D – Buzz Lightyear Finds a Dimension
Well, today’s the day. For about the last year, I’ve been working away deep within the halls of Pixar Animation as part of a fantastic ...
Day 2 of the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference
Yep, I’m actually at the NVIDIA (why do I type NVIDIA like nVidia? everything seems to indicate that it is all caps now, I dunno) ...
Bokode @ Home – Recreating MIT’s bokode tech with everyday materials
One interesting paper I read from this years SIGGRAPH paper on the creation of an interesting real life tagging technology called Bokode . Here’s a ...
Small caution on using PyEphem…
My previous post on using PyEphem to compute satellite locations was based upon my experience with the latest version (3.7.3.4). Apparently this includes a fairly ...
How to use Python to predict satellite locations…
Occasionally I get to talk to hams who are just getting into using amateur satellites, and many of them ask the quite reasonable question “How ...
Gutenberg Gems: Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume VIII slice III – Destructor to Diameter
It’s been a while since I posted a link to a Gutenberg Gem. I am subscribed to the Project Gutenberg feed, and scan it from ...
WSPR back online, but performance is marginal…
My WSPR setup is back online, but my receive performance is marginal. I am not sure, but my wire dipole may have developed a fault ...
The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler, and others | MetaFilter
This metafilter post has a link to several interesting recreational and math puzzle books available as downloads. Very cool. The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler, and ...
Today’s weather, courtesy of NOAA 19…
Nothing more to say… ...
Recently Launched Cubesat Frequencies
Andrew, VK4TEC posted this list of frequencies for four recently launched cubesats. Archiving for future reference. I’ve added links to some relevent info for each. ...
Bouncing APRS packets off the ISS…
My wife mentioned to me that there was a visual pass of the ISS this evening. Wow, is she awesome or what? She found out ...
Is mobile operation of a ham radio really safe?
The federal government is currently considering the possibility of legislation banning the use of cell phones and texting. I’m mostly okay with that, because, quite ...
High altitude balloons – Hack a Day
Courtesy of hackaday, here’s a link to a list of nifty high altitude balloon projects: High altitude balloons – Hack a Day . ...
Codec2 – Open Source Low Bit Rate Speech Codec
David Rowe is working on a very cool project that should be of interest to hams with an interest in digital communications. He’s creating an ...
Why work for a game any company like this?
This link is making the rounds of a couple of different mailing lists I’m on. Activision games to bypass consoles – News at GameSpot When ...
Upcoming launch of SumbandilaSat
It looks like the launch of the South African amateur satellite is on track! The launch of SumbandilaSat is on track for 15 September 2009. ...
Project Icarus
A group of MIT students did a high altitude balloon launch. That’s really not all that unusual: radio amateurs do similar launches several times per ...
Parrondo’s Paradox
I was reading Nahin’s Digital Dice , which I bought a while ago but which I didn’t really dive into deeply, and he had a ...
HAKMEM 175
HAKMEM is a legendary technical memo from MIT that’s packed full of interesting bits. On this occasion, I ran across item #175, which you can ...
Dennis Ritchie Home Page
Using Stumble Upon!, I, well, stumbled upon Dennis Ritchie’s page. He’s famous as the creator of C and an early influential developer of Unix. Back ...
Nomograms
For some reason, I found myself looking at a rather pedestrian page about slide rules today, and it once again rekindled my interest in the ...
Tom Duff on Reading code from top to bottom
Matt pointed to an interesting article by Tom Duff on writing code. It actually clearly elucidates some of the principles that I use in writing ...
Another interesting question of probability…
I was reading Kraitchik’s Mathematical Recreations book (a very nice little Dover volume) and ran across this interesting puzzle on pg. 140: 21, A man ...
Cheap Arduino Wireless Communications
As part of my slow, arduous march toward doing a high altitude balloon launch, I acquired some super cheap wireless modules from sparkfun.com . Sadly, ...
Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering
Thanks to Kevin Bjorke for pointing out this paper. It combines a couple of interesting features to create a point-based renderer that efficiently uses the ...
A little statistics puzzle…
I hand you a deck of cards, which you shuffle, and deal me a random 5 card poker hand. I announce that I have an ...
Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications
Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski has a text on computer vision available for download . Szeliski has written countless papers on computer graphics, including lots of ...
Another HTML 5 video test…
This is just a test. If you are running Firefox 3.5, you should get a video window that allows you to watch a Superman cartoon ...
The telescope turns 400 today…
On this day in history, 400 years ago Galileo Galilei demonstrated his telescope to a group of Venetian lawmakers. In March of the following year, ...
A simple, short puzzle
How many coins do you need to remove so that the centers of all remaining coins form no equilatoral triangles? Here is a simple puzzle ...
Random bits…
Well, pseudo-random, but reportedly cryptographically strong. 01110 10011 01100 01000 11101 11001 11010 10011 00000 10011 11111 11001 10101 11100 10011 10110 01010 01100 01000 ...
FM receiver from the Atmel AVR 2004 Design Contest
Just a place holder for a link to an interesting FM receiver that could be used for receiving NOAA polar orbiting satellites. It was an ...
HF Reference Material
From a thread on qrz.com, here’s a nice list of 1000 utility stations which broadcast on HF. Nifty. HF Reference Material ...
Something fishy going on here…
Another of my attempts to make pictures from volume data… ...
More volume rendering…
Well, I thought I had the rotation thing figured out, but I still seem to be missing something. But I did muck around a little ...
Volume Rendering: Going boldly where all have gone before…
Image from CT data downloaded from http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/voldata/ Okay, this is a bit gruesome, but I’ve been dusting off some old papers that I never really ...
WSPR signals heard from E51EME
I still check my WSPR station logs each morning when I wake up. This morning I spotted the callsign E51EME, coming from grid square BG08. ...
SumbandilaSat launch scheduled for Sept 15
I haven’t been playing with the LEO sats much lately, but it’s good to hear that the South African amateur satellite SumbandilaSat is nearing launch. ...
Compromising Reflections
I’ve been interested in TEMPEST and related technologies for a while. Here’s another link to another paper: This project investigates a novel eavesdropping technique for ...
Still Images from the Computer History collection
The Computer History Museum is a fascinating place, and here is a link to their collection of still imagery, some of which I have seen ...
Single Lens Stereo with a Plenoptic Camera
While re-reading Ren Ng’s paper on light field cameras, I saw reference to a much earlier paper by Adelson and Wang. I added it to ...
Decoding packet….
It’s late, so I am not figuring this out, but I seem to be getting quite a bit of ripple in the output of this ...
FET Transistor Homemade From Cadmium Sulfide Photocell.
I’ve blogged about the experiments of Nyle Steiner before, but just recently got back to his Spark Bang Buzz website again, and found that he’s ...
No luck on ISS SSTV, but NOAA 17 looks nice
I tried to record the pass of the ISS as it came over, but I heard nary a peep (or beep) from it as it ...
Passing the Amateur Extra test by guessing…
The Amateur Extra test is 50 questions, multiple choice, with 4 answers per question. A passing grade is 35 or more. A few minutes of ...
Beginnings of an SSTV demodulator
So, armed with the SSTV link that I dug out yesterday, and with a couple of hours this morning to tinker, I started working on ...
KR7A SSTV Demodulator
Don’t you hate it when you remember seeing a webpage but can’t remember exactly how to get there? This one took me a bunch of ...
A Personal Satellite Kit?
Planet Earth has entered the age of the Personal Satellite with the introduction of Interorbital’s TubeSat Personal Satellite (PS) Kit. The new IOS TubeSat PS ...
SSTV from the ISS, August 3 and 4
The ISS should be operating SSTV on August 3 and 4, using the Robot36 mode. I’ll go ahead and see if I can catch some ...
Project Mark begins anew…
Well, I’m suffering from a feeling of deja-vu: recent doctor visits indicate that my weight has crept back up (no surprise) and that my BP ...
Loren posts Vol Libre on Vimeo
A few days ago, I posted links to a couple of videos that used fractal rendering techniques . One was the Genesis effect of Star ...
YouTube Blog: Now in 3D
Youtube has apparently now got support for 3D Video. Neat! Read about it below, and expect to see a test video of mine over the ...
On Multiplication…
As I was “StumbleUpon”-ing tonight, I was reminded of something that I was thinking about a couple of days ago, and though I’d write it ...
The Water-Culture Method for Growing Plants without Soil
I’ve been doing a bit more reading about growing plants hydroponically. In doing so, I found reference to something called “Hoagland solutions”, which are nutrient ...
Hydroponics on NASA Website
NASA is obviously interested in hydroponics research as an enabling technology for long duration space flights. They are also quite good at educational outreach, so ...
Success: Robot36 encoder works…
Well, it works! Using the information in the paper I linked earlier in the day, I spent some time and managed to code up a ...
Paper detailing SSTV modes
I was looking up technical information suitable for implementing some of the SSTV modes (Robot 36, given the recent satellite activity). Here’s a paper by ...
BibliOdyssey: Extinct Monsters
BibliOdyssey is a terrific blog which posts incredible images from old books that have entered the public domain. By way of example, check out this ...
Schneier on Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough
A couple of weeks ago during lunch, someone had mentioned that a breakthrough in the world of cryptography had occurred: that someone had succeeded in ...
40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 on AO-51
Tonight the amateur satellite AO-51 made an evening pass that was almost directly overhead, and was sending a congratulatory message for Apollo 11, along with ...
Why is ham radio dying?
Lately everyone I talk to seems to think ham radio is dying. I wonder why they think that. Anybody have any guesses? ...
President Obama declares July 21st National Brainwagon Day
Okay, not really, but on this day in 2002, I did start this blog. Since then, I’ve made 3,106 posts, and there have been 5,461 ...
Forty Years of Lunar Lander
Here’s a very nice article about the game phenomena that was Lunar Lander: Forty Years of Lunar Lander | Technologizer Addendum: Here’s a screen grab ...
Batting Stance Guy on Letterman
Thanks to Bob @ work for mentioning this to me. I think I appreciate this guy not just for his knowledge of batters and their ...
The Straight Dope: How does a siphon work?
Last night’s reading reminded me that I have never really been satisfied with my understanding of how siphons work. Apparently I’m not the only one, ...
Variations on a Theme In Computer Graphics History
It was originally my intention to compare and contrast Loren Carpenter’s Vol Libre , a mile stone in computer animation, the first film to use ...
The Barrel-Ponics Manual
I’ve been interested in hydroponics for quite some time. It’s part of a growing interest that I have in sustainable and decentralized production of food ...
NASA – LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has begun its mission around the moon, and has managed to image most of the Apollo landing sites. Check out the ...
A new low, blogging about the weather…
I was up on the hill behind my house, moving a little antenna that I have, and was immediately struck by how blazing it was. ...
40th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing
40 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two astronauts to step out on the surface of the moon, as Michael ...
Downsample from 48khz to 8khz
I was tinkering. Wrote some code to low pass and downfilter a 48khz audio signal to only 8khz. Here’s some example output. It filters out ...
Google Chrome OS? Yes, please!
Last week, Google announced that they were developing an OS, originally targeted toward netbooks. I think it is a great idea. If there is one ...
Saturday’s Double Rainbow
Well, everyone in the area seems to have blogged or facebooked this already, but here’s my view. We were heading out for some last mnute ...
Downloadable Book on High Altitude Amateur Balloon Launches
Big big thanks to Bill Meara of the Soldersmoke blog for calling my attention to the following link. Even bigger thanks to author Paul Verhage, ...
Scrappy
One year ago today, we found out that Scrappy, our formerly feral cat had FIV, the feline immunodeficiency virus. The good news is, he’s alive ...
Progress Report on ASUS WL-520GU/OpenWRT
Well, i’ve had a couple of days to muck around with the ASUS WL-520G (hereafter revered to as “the ASUS” or “the router”) and OpenWRT. ...
A New Project: OpenWRT on an ASUS WL-520GU
People who read this blog might have noticed that I have a love of devices that have firmware that can be subverted for other purposes. ...
Build Your own “Bag End”
A topic which interests me greatly is the idea of sustainable housing, especially durable housing that can be constructed by relatively unskilled labor using readily ...
scanwidget: Using an AVR as an RFID tag
This is one of the more impressive electronics hacks I’ve seen in a while: it uses an Atmel microcontroller as a replacement for an RFID ...
Factoring Machines
I’ve blogged about D. H. Lehmer’s factoring machines before. It’s fairly hard to convince those who aren’t pathologically interested in rather quirky bits of mathematics ...
JBOT – An Easy QRP linear amplifier
During a morning chat, N2MCS mentioned that he was looking at a simple QRP linear amplifier design and gave me the following url: JBOT – ...
YAFU factors a 100 digit number for me…
On Friday, I left YAFU factoring a 100 digit number. I returned to find that it had discovered: 57790 93002 97410 10009 81807 59480 96292 ...
On Factoring, by Jevons’ The Principles of Science
While reading the section on factorization of large numbers in Knuth’s Seminumerical Algorithms, I encountered a reference to an interesting claim by William Stanley Jevons ...
A Simple Python Program for Factoring…
Sometimes, your interests converge. Over on Programming Praxis , he had a coding challenge to implement Monte Carlo factorization. The last couple of days, I ...
Use a Wii Balance Board with Linux
An interesting part of the Nintendo Wii design is that they rely on bluetooth for connecting their joysticks and (as it turns out) their Balance ...
Factoring Large Numbers…
A few days ago, I mentioned that I was pondering the stages of Simon Singh’s Cipher Challenge that I didn’t complete “back in the day”. ...
Looking back at Michael Jackson
Today came the news that Michael Jackson, the legendary King of Pop, died of cardiac arrest at age 50. Yes, I was a fan. Who ...
Magic Lantern Firmware for the Canon 5D
I’m a huge fan of gadgets which have the possibility of open source third party updates. I have a couple of Linksys routers that I’ve ...
Mmm… Cobbler
I like cooking. Well, eating really. Okay, eating and cooking. But in particular, I like what is generally called comfort food. The silly thing about ...
Taking my own code challenge…
Back in 2007, I made a blog post entitled “Code Challenge”, where I put forth a code challenge. Code Challenge | brainwagon . Nobody took ...
iPhone 3GS: My Early Experience
Well, my iPhone 3GS arrived on Friday, and I’ve had a couple of days of tinkering with it, so I thought I’d give my impressions ...
Revisiting Simon Singh’s Cipher Challenge…
The other day, my friend Jeff sent me an email detailing the latest benchmarking of his new 8 core Intel box. He had written a ...
No early iPhone joy in Mudville
The blogosphere was atwitter with the news that many iPhone 3GSs seemed to have shipped early, and indeed might be delivered early. I checked mine, ...
10m opening up perchance?
I haven’t really been monitoring 10m very much, but I’ve been hearing more about activity there, so I tuned up tonight and caught VE7MTY/B coming ...
Matt Blaze: Security and Human Behavior 2009
For all the people who’ve come to see this as my ham radio blog, I apologize, but I do have other interests, and computer security ...
NOAA Satellite Frequencies
I haven’t been goofing around much with receiving APT weather satellite data, but I was going to try to record some passes now that the ...
The Next 700 Programming Languages
I learned that computer scientist Peter Landin passed away recently. Landin’s research helped refine the direction of my college studies, and was always a great ...
Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
Here’s a nice little math essay regarding big numbers. It ties in interesting notions from computability that are what I think about when I feel ...
WSPRing via a little HP netbook…
When I first began mucking around with WSPR, I was using my Macbook, and I couldn’t get WSPR to compile properly. As a result, I ...
Test of the HTML 5 video tag…
WARNING: If your browser is “lucky” enough to support the video tag (like certain beta Firefox 3 releases, or Safari) then there should be an ...
Build Your Own Z80 Computer
Old timers may remember Byte magazine, and Steve Ciarcia’s column therein. Steve went on to publish Circuit Cellar magazine, an electronics magazine which is more ...
Z80pack – Z80 Emulator and Crossassembler for UNIX
More “don’t ask” links. I was tinkering with emulators again, and ran across this comprehensive page on the Z80 and the various DRI operating systems ...
DIY Wifi Radio courtesy of mightyOhm
Last weekend, I fought off my head cold and drug my body off to the Maker Faire to get inspired by the projects. I saw ...
Arduino Waveshield, sans joy…
At the Maker Faire this weekend, I picked up a Waveshield kit for the Arduino . It’s a cute little board with an SD card ...
ATMEGA328 suppliers?
I suspect that if I could replace my ATMEGA168 with an ATMEGA 368 (as suggested by Robert, thanks!) life might be better for my Arduino ...
Gordon Bell: Computers, Projects, Patents, Books, and Papers
I was trying to hunt down Gordon Bell’s description of the PDP-8 architecture (don’t ask) which I heard was available in his 1971 book, Computer ...
Dusted off my Softrock Lite 2 for 40m
I haven’t blogged much about my Softrock 40 since I finished its construction. I knew that it basically “worked”, but I was pretty sure that ...
Geeky Math Joke
Very, very geeky. Q: What’s an anagram of ‘Banach-Tarski’? A: ‘Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski’. Don’t get it? This might help. Or, it might not. ...
Electronic Publications of Richard Pask
I’ve run across this page a couple of times, but keep forgetting to bookmark it. Pask has written a great deal about checkers, and these ...
CQ World Wide WPX Contest Coming This Weekend
I was reminded that the CQ WW WPX contest is coming up this weekend. I’m not much of a contester, but perhaps it would be ...
Attempt at Lightning Photography
Some people have been using the CHDK firmware to do motion detection and capture pictures of lightning strikes. Despite the fact that lightning has been ...
Milhouse needs an infusion of actual checkers knowledge
This morning, I woke up and was trying to resolve a problem: why is Milhouse (my checkers program) so slow? The answer didn’t seem entirely ...
The Three Projections of Doctor Futamura
No, this isn’t the sequel to the movie “The Castle of Fu Manchu”. It’s a very interesting bit of computer science that deals with the ...
Fast Shutter with Canon SD1100 + CHDK
I have a little Canon SD1100 that I picked up a while ago. One of its cool features is its ability to run the alternative ...
Flaws in Milhouse’s Play
While debugging some more challenging positions from The Checker Maven , I encountered the following position which seemed to be giving Milhouse fits. White to ...
Happy Birthday Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!
Last year, I noticed that Google had changed their search page to a Sherlock Holmes inspired theme in honor of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. ...
Gould Puzzle #516
I started working through my analysis of Gould Puzzle #516, which my previous scan using the Cake 8 piece database, and revealed to be a ...
Gutenberg Gems: Philosophical Transactions Vol. I.
I was scanning through the recent additions to Project Gutenberg, and found that Volume I of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dating back ...
47 Some 28? mistakes in Gould’s The Game of Draughts
Earlier, I blogged about the historic book available from Google Books called Gould’s The Game of Draughts . While surveying a few problems, I noticed ...
Learning something about printf, of all things…
I’ve been C programming for… (quick arithmetic) roughly 25 years now, and yet, there are still things to learn. For instance, I decided to move ...
Gould’s The Game of Draughts is on Google Books, and archive.org
I was goofing around with my program, and had loaded a problem that was supposedly a win for Red, and set it searching. After searching ...
Using Cake’s Endgame Database…
I’ve been having a bit of difficulty with the Chinook endgame database, so I thought that since Martin Fierz was kind enough to release his ...
Milhouse fairs pretty well against Simple Checkers at 5 seconds/move
[Event "More Sparring"] [Date "2009-05-12"] [Black "Simple Checkers"] [White "Milhouse"] [Result "0-1"] 1. 11-15 22-17 2. 9-13 17-14 3. 10x17 21x14 4. 7-10 14x7 5. ...
“Everyone is edited by circumstance.”
Pardon me for this diversion from usual topics. While commuting in with my wife this morning, I was listening to a talk show discussing a ...
Using the Chinook WLD database…
So, for the past couple of days, I’ve been working on fixing the WLD database lookup code in Milhouse, in an attempt to get it ...
Milhouse misses a win…
White to move and win... I was playing a sparring match between Milhouse and Cake, and Milhouse arrived at the position on the right as ...
Ionisation Chamber Radiation Detector from VK2ZAY
Alan, VK2ZAY, has a really nice blog with all sorts of interesting experiments. Today’s fun installment was a radiation detector that’s just about as simple ...
Happy (Birthday to Me|Mother’s Day)!
Happy Birthday! To all the moms out there in the world, thanks for all the wonderful things you do for all your children. And while ...
Updated Map of Stations Heard on 30m WSPR
In the last few days, I’ve heard a few stations in countries I hadn’t seen before, like Guatamala, Brazil, and Portugal. Here’s my updated map: ...
Listening to WSPR activity
Over the past few days, I finally got a windows box up and running so I could run the official WSPR executable from WSJT. In ...
Some new, and relatively challenging checker puzzles
I was surfing over at Bob Newell’s “Checker Maven” website, and found this awesme collection of PDN files for download . I have a table ...
Milhouse wins against Cake!
Okay, before I get too excited, I’ll disclose that Cake was set to a time limit of around 1 second, which limited it to just ...
Gutenberg Gem: Pioneers Of Science, by Oliver Lodge.
Glancing through the recent additions to Project Gutenberg, I encountered this nice little book which details some of the pioneering scientists in the field of ...
3D printing goes back to the Stone Age
I’ve been interested in 3D printing for quite some time. It’s a technology that seems poised for a break through. One of the things that ...
K450 PVC Rocket Engine Design & Construction
K450 PVC Rocket Engine Design & Construction In just a few hours, anyone can build a powerful K450 engine that will send a rocket soaring ...
KCheckers isn’t very good at all, but Cake is no cake walk….
Milhouse utterly destroys kcheckers. This game is typical of the five I just played against it. [Event "KCheckers Game"] [Date "2009.04.29"] [Round "1"] [Black "*Master*"] ...
QRSS grabber temporarilly down…
I’m testing WSPR reception using some new hardware. It’ll return to active duty soon. ...
Milhouse defeats Chinook (on amateur level anyway)
Oddly Chinook seemed to know the end was coming before Milhouse recognized it. But sure enough, Milhouse managed to navigate itself to a victory. [Event ...
At last, some QRSS news…
A while go, I posted a link to AA5CK’s website and his use of the iduino as a QRSS keyer. He used a little oscillator/buffer ...
Milhouse needs an opening book…
I decided to play a game against Chinook set on its intermediate level. It was lost before it even began. Fortman’s Basic Checkers lists 3. ...
PBH-10 to launch soon..
Project Blue Horizons is a group which is attempting an unmanned Trans-Atlantic balloon flight from the United States to Europe. They are estimating a launch ...
Goofing around with Unicode…
I’m kind of old school. I tend to write a lot of programs with character, line oriented interfaces. Part of it is sort of an ...
Sparring Milhouse versus Chinook
Well, I’ve mucked around a bit, and begun to add PDN (Portable Draughts Notation) logging to Milhouse. Here is a sparring match between the novice ...
Milhouse beginning to show signs of promise…
Well, I got move ordering implemented, and the performance on my two previous test cases seem much more comparable. And with this addition, milhouse is ...
Some advances on Milhouse…
I finally got around to totally ripping out the old implementation of transposition tables, and installing a new one based upon hints I read about ...
Milhouse still hides some mysteries…
So, I was doing some more testing this morning, and noticed an anomaly in my checkers program, Milhouse. Consider the following position: LOADED puzzle 177: ...
Car bomb! Twice!
There, did I get your attention? So yesterday was a really warm day, the first of the new year really. According to weather.com, temperatures in ...
Weather Sensor Boards
Here are some interesting kits, all designed to use the 1 Wire sensor bus. In theory, the Open Tracker can use these directly. Perhaps the ...
Alpha-Beta Search is Hard To Debug
So, I’ve spent a few hours over the last couple weeks to try to debug milhouse, my computer checkers program that I tinkered together over ...
TinyGPS Library for Arduino
Yep, I’m still working on my balloon project, and part of it is still scoping out the flight hardware. I found this library for interfacing ...
Looks like Bill has his DSB WSPR beacon working
One of the Knights mentioned that Bill was now visible on WSPR. Presumably, this means his DSB beacon is actually alive. Here’s a link to ...
Bob Hyatt’s Online Publications
I’ve been poking half-heartedly at Milhouse, my checkers program this morning. I found that a particular puzzle (puzzle 34) that I got from a puzzle ...
Wavy!
More on the Open Tracker and APRS…
So, a couple of nights ago, I went ahead and assembled the OpenTracker Plus kit that I had ordered from Argent Data Systems. The kit ...
Dusting off Dusting off Milhouse…
A year ago, I blogged that I had dusted off my old checkers program, named Milhouse , and had uncovered a bug in my transposition ...
Lots of spots into VK land overnight
It’s my usual morning ritual to go back through my WSPR spots and my grabber images, and try to see if anything new shows up. ...
High Voltage Fun
And I thought I was nerdy for having the Dr. Who theme be my ringtone… httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KRja415Iwk ...
MV sent across to VK6DI
I’m getting good propagation this evening out to VK land. David, VK6DI runs a grabber, and I started noting that my WSPR beaconw as getting ...
AA5CK on his iDuino MEPT beacon
Check out his nice pictures and description of his beacon and keyer: iDuino Addendum: His oscillator/buffer board is a very cheap kit produced by www.vakits.com ...
Pile Driving Begins at Pixar
MVI_7296 Originally uploaded by oaklandEarthGirl This is just an interesting little aside. Over the past couple of days, construction of the new building here at ...
Happy Birthday Tom Lehrer!
April 9th is Tom Lehrer’s birthday. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY ...
WSPR-ing on 40m 17m now…
Today is a special event day, where those of a WSPR bent move from their 30m haunts to other bands. I’ve shifted operation over to ...
Some WSPR updates…
First of all, starting within the next eight hours or so, my WSPR operations will shift over to 40m for a Wednesday “Special Activity Day” ...
IK1ZYW Labs: MP3 WSPR
Sometimes it’s amazing how people on opposite sides of the world get to working on the same thing. Paolo has been workin on using a ...
Does WSPR need a successor?
Bill, IO/N2CQR over at Solder Smoke blog commented on one of the problems that I had with my WSPR beacon: that it had become “desynchronized” ...
Beacon Gremlins
I was having some difficulty spotting my beacon: both on WA0UWH’s grabber, and via WSPR spots. I figured that maybe my jury rigged antenna had ...
Open Tracker+ ordered…
I have been trying to start a project to do a high altitude radio balloon launch. Toward that end, I ordered myself a Open Tracker ...
3000th Post! And Gratzel Cells…
Wow…. this is the 3000th post that I’ve made to my blog since it’s inception. Huzzah. I really need to get a hobby. In any ...
Nice signals over to W1BW this evening…
I was getting some pretty good SNRs into the east coast this evening, so I set my MEPT beacon to SMT Hellschreiber mode. Here’s the ...
Updated WSPR Map
I’ve gotten a couple of additional sporadic spots from DX locations, so I thought I’d update my WSPR map again. This shows my reception from ...
Funny, but somewhat uncourteous image on 30m
I was scanning back through my log of all the pictures from my QRSS grabber over the past few days, and found this rather funny ...
Computing the Square Root of Two
I was dusting off some of my old code for computing pi to many decimal places, and was reminded that I’d never written similar code ...
NavSpaSur Lunar Imaging by DF6NM
While recovering from my brief outpatient procedure yesterday, I was surfing around, looking for the ChirpHell and ChirpPix programs that some people mentioned in the ...
Some nice signals this evening…
Regardez! ...
Nifty kits from K5BCQ
In the comments to one of my postings about the K1EL, Tom, K9AC mentioned that I might want to look at K5BCQ’s list of kits ...
Ouch.
For all my close friends who I’ve chatted with about today’s adventure: I’m home, and doing fine. But seriously, ouch. ...
aamath
Suppose you wanted to format a nifty math equation for insertion into plain old ordinary email, or maybe as a comment in your C program. ...
Feature Column from the AMS
I’ve been using StumbleUpon to find new webpages on a variety of subjects when I am bored, and as you might have seen from other ...
More WSPR/MEPT developments…
This morning I was scanning my WSPR logs and my MEPT screenshots for the night. It seemed to be pretty good. I had quite a ...
TEST appears on 30m…
Reveal yourself! 🙂 Addendum: Voila! And I’m not the only one listening! ...
Too much caffeine == shaky soldering
I’m glad I didn’t try my hand at my second Softrock today. Instead, I decided to wire up all the programmable message buttons on my ...
Genius! Extreme Sheep LED Art
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw ...
X Prize? How about the N-Prize?
The Official Site for the N-Prize The N-Prize offers two cash Prizes, each of £9,999.99 (nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds and ninety-nine pence, ...
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
This picture was circulating around the mailing lists at work. It made me smile. ...
Signals crossing the Mighty Pacific…
David, VK6DI has his grabber running, and WB3ANQ, WA5DJJ and even NM5DV can be made out in not only my grabber, but in his as ...
Even bigger primes…
Last year, I wrote a post about a program I wrote to compute a really large prime number. . At the time, 2 32482657 -1 ...
Multipath on 30m MEPT?
This QRSS signal was looking a little fuzzy, and then basically split into two different signals. I hadn’t seen it before. ...
Basic Grabber Back at http://qrss.info
I’ve got the basic code resurrected, but I haven’t got time stamps working again yet. I’ll work on it soon. But if you want a ...
WSPR DX from the land of penguins…
Well, after failing on 20m earlier in the day, I waited a bit, until I saw that Felix, DP1POL had shifted from 20m to 40m. ...
VA3STL’s QRP beacon
Alan, VA3STL posted a nice list of captures of his QRP beacon on his blog , including a link to a spot of him that ...
Grabber down for a couple of days
Sadly, last night I was working late, and was tired, and managed to delete a chunk of my grabber recording source code. The bad news ...
K6HX transmitting “Step Morse” now….
I’ve changed my beacon to send “step morse” for a while. It will look like this (thanks to WA0UWH’s grabber): It’s kind of wacky, but ...
WSPR on 20m, trying to snag DP1POL…
I don’t think this is going to work, but I noticed that DP1POL is currently reporting WSPR spots and being spotted from his base in ...
First signals heard through the Softrock Lite II
Well, I’m not sure that the Softrock I put together is working entirely well. I’m beginning to believe that the transformer that I wound might ...
SDR Software for the Mac
Part of the difficulty that I had testing my Softrok was the apparent lack of SDR software for my MacBook. Both WY7USA and NM5DV came ...
KK7CC Grabber
KK7CC has a new grabber online in Las Vegas. I seem to be getting in there pretty well. ...
Softrock Lite II breaths it’s first breath…
Well, since I have Tom’s oscilloscope, I started probing around, measuring the voltages and waveforms of pretty much every location I could find. And, low ...
Math identities…
Hmmm. While searching for some unrelated program, I uncovered a program that I wrote which found the following identities: 1 3 + 12 3 = ...
Nice morning QRSS gallery…
This morning, I have a particularly nice array of signals streaming across. First NM5DV at the top. He put a T-attenuator onto his Softrock transmitter, ...
Gutenberg Gem: Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln, by Robert Schumann
Project Gutenberg just released the following: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Advice to Young Musicians. Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln, by Robert Schumann It’s nominally a ...
250mw can work!
Amazing. 173 reports today, running just 250mw. And not just really close contacts: I even got one spot two spots from VK6DI. Imagine what I ...
Thanks for the loan of the oscilloscope, Tom
My friend Tom was kind enough to loan me his oscilloscope, a basic 20Mhz model, but adequate to what I needed it for: testing to ...
Hellschrieber from W8LIW
Cool. ...
Dropping MEPT/WSPR power by 10db
While I won’t get quite as many spots with 10db less power, I think it’s more sporting. I’ve been seeing quite a bit of IMD ...
VK2ZAY, both here and abroad…
Not only am I currently recieving VK2ZAY’s signal rather well: But he’s concurrently getting into ON5EX’s grabber in Belgium: It’s about 7,400 miles from me ...
WA0UWH grabber/K6HX beacons back on the air…
WA0UWH announced that his awesome grabber was back in a new temporary location, fed by satellite internet. I had some difficulties getting images earlier in ...
Cycle America
A friend of mine from the Chabot Space and Science Center, Don Saito, was recently laid off from his IT job in Berkeley, and decided ...
SolderSmoke Daily News: Homebrew WSPR from W3PM
Bill posted today about W3PM’s design for a dedicated WSPR beacon transciever. It’s very slick: basically a crystal oscillator that can be mixed with the ...
QRSS over morning coffee…
This morning I see that Dan, NM5DV has worked out his issues with this Softrock, and is now putting out a nice signal up above ...
DX Hellschrieber, from VK2ZAY
Alan, VK2ZAY apparently has changed his beacon to send MT Hellschrieber, in addition to his FSK CW. If you look carefully, you can see VK2ZAY ...
The Internet can be an odd place…
This is just a strange little story. I’ve wanted to add some time markers to the spectrum display on my grabber at http://qrss.info , but ...
Sigh… Softrock not working…
I think I’ll need to borrow an oscilloscope and see what’s going on. Frankly, I think I just made too many mistakes during assembly. Since ...
Morning QRSS discoveries…
After more or less a full day where I made almost ever mistake possible (exaggerating) on gettin my Softrock Lite built (which it is, except ...
Double Double U
Caught W1BW’s flying W twice in a row. You can see WA5DJJ across the top (the new crystal oven seems to work pretty well) and ...
In progress: Softrock Lite II, 40m
I’m kind of at a position where I don’t know what to do, and I’m having a feeling that I shouldn’t be working on machinery ...
Softrock Lite II arrive!
On Saturday, I sent a check off to Tony Parks, KB9YUG on Saturday along with my order for two Softrock Lite II receiver kits: one ...
Your Daily QRSS report
Well, overnight, I didn’t get a whole lots of activity. I saw a single brief opening arout 2:15AM local time (10:00 UTC) where I got ...
Pat on the back, from Pixar Animation Studios
I work for a great company that genuinely tries to do well by its employees. Tomorrow, they are giving some of us old timers (I’ve ...
Visible this morning on W8LIW (dimly)
This morning, I saw this on the W8LIW grabber… You can see the usual suspects toward the bottom: the flying W of W1BW, the FSK ...
Ouch!
Without further comment: To their credit (whoever it was) it did not repeat. 🙂 ...
S/MT Hellschreiber to VK6DI?
Okay, this one requires a bit of imagination, but it looks like my sequential, multi-tone Hellscrieber ID is at least weakly making it to VK6DI. ...
New mode received by AA5CK
I had been experimenting with using S/MT Hellschreiber as a beacon format. It worked, and I got a few reception reports, but it’s copyability seemed ...
Blog
Earlier, I blogged about the collision between Iridium 33 and the defunct COSMOS 2251 satellite. Today, I noticed that Celestrak had orbital elements for 134 ...
Some overnight spots…
Okay, this is getting kind of repetitive, so I’ll try to reduce this to its bare minimum. Got quie a few WSPR spots from VK6DI ...
Unusual WSPR spot
This morning I was surprised by two WSPR spots from a callsign reported as BY3AKL1X, located in grid OM89ua. If you look it up on ...
More spots from my own grabber…
Earlier this afternoon, I was getting not only the usual suspects, but also VE1VDM and W1BW. Glad to see the flying W back again… It ...
WSPR update…
I hadn’t checked the totals in a while, so I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve now had WSPR spots from 37 out of ...
Grabber update…
Earlier, I noted that W8LIW was getting signals simultaneously from both Europe and Australia, so I was hoping that as the earth spun around, I ...
Today’s NOAA-19 pass….
Nice pass today over the middle of the U.S. Got it recorded and transferred, and my wife even took some pictures and a short video ...
Spotting from NUT….
That’s Northern Utah. Mark, KU7Z noted lots of activity stateside, and here’s his screengrab: I’m getting into Seattle pretty well all day too. Some odd ...
Johan reports Ohio Rocket Launch
Johan, ON5EX, reported that he had detected a rocket launch on the Ohio grabber. He gave the following screenshot: Scanning back through my own records, ...
Collision!
It appears that WA5DJJ and I have chosen the same frequency space to operate in. Here’s the view from WA0UWH’s grabber: This is the problem ...
Homebrew Software for QRSS
Last night, I got home, made my wife some pork tenderloin with maple glaze, and then about 9:30 settled in with my laptop and started ...
WA5DJJ Beacon Transmitter
Bill Meara over at Soldersmoke pointed me over to the webpage detailing the QRSS transmitter of David, WA5DJJ this morning. Check it out, it’s very ...
Overnight MEPT grabs…
I saw a bunch of spots of my WSPR beacon around 2:00AM local time, but I didn’t see a hint of his beacon anywhere. I ...
Monday activities…
I took Monday off, and mostly sat around the house with my wife. Still, I managed to get a couple of ham radio related activities ...
Equipment used at M0AYF for QRSS
M0AYF has a great bunch of information about QRSS operation. It’s really good stuff: filters, antennas, frequency standards, receivers, you name it! Very, very cool. ...
K6HX — CM87 spotted in the wild!
David, WA5DJJ sent me the following screengrab. He collects the prize as the first (and clearest thusfar) report of my new SMT beacon. With some ...
11 Hours of 30m Beacon Band…
Well, last night, I tweaked my recording program to produce recordings in 15 minute chunks and started it running. This morning, I had a bunch ...
Testing New S/MT Hellschrieber Beacon ID…
I am currently running my 2w beacon with the following sequential multi-tone Hellschrieber ID on 30m: As Colin, G6AVK pointed out, this is likely to ...
NM5DV beacon on 30m…
Dan, NM5DV is now operating a 1w CW beacon on 30m from grid square DM75. His blog is here, and he’s doing a great job ...
WSPR Spots: WA2YUN from an interesting location…
This morning began like any other. I logged in, checked my email, and searched wsprnet.org for WSPR spots of my beacon, to see if any ...
IRIDIUM 33 + COSMOS 2251 = BOOM
It was reported that an Iridium satellite and an “non-functional Russian satellite” collided yesterday. I was curious, so I did a bit of digging, and ...
Using a PDP
I’ve been interested in old computers for quite some time, so I was pleased to run across this link: Using a PDP . ...
flatplanet maps
I wanted some graphics of the entire earth for a little programming project. I found them here: flatplanet maps Addendum: NASA’s Blue Marble: Next Generation ...
Code for counting checkers positions…
A year ago today, I blogged that Tom Duff had shown me Russell Cox’s blog . I hadn’t kept up with it, so I went ...
WSPR beacon reaches IK4PMB in Italy
In the past, I haven’t had much luck reaching Europe on 30m using WSPR, but today, to my shock, I saw these three spots of ...
WSPR spots by state…
I’m up to spots from 33 states. AK <td> KL7OA </td> </tr> <tr> <td> AL </td> <td> KU4PY, N4AU, W3PM, WA4KBD </td> </tr> <tr> <td> ...
Adrien, VE3IAC shows me ClearDarkSky.com
While reading up on Adrien’s blog, he mentioned a site which I hadn’t seen before. It attempts to predict how good the conditions will be ...
VK6DI spots my MEPT beacon…
I just got mail from David, VK6DI. He’s reported spots of my WSPR beacon a few times in the last few days, and I’ve been ...
Adding a buffer amplifier to my crystal oscillator…
Today, I felt some compulsion to work on something radio related. A couple of weeks ago I build the crystal oscillator from Chapter 1 of ...
First Weather Picture from NOAA-19
Update: If you do a search for NOAA 19 on google, this blog post actually makes it to the front page. Some of you might ...
Happy Pixarday to Me!
On February 7, 1991, I became an employee of Pixar Animation Studios. Tomorrow will mark my eighteenth anniversary. It’s practically unheard of to spend eighteen ...
MEPT beacon
VK6DI reported that he was picking up W1BW’s 100mw beacon signal (a distance of over 11,000 miles) today, so propagation was obviously pretty good. Here’s ...
Dead Reckonings » The Art of Nomography I: Geometric Design
In the days of slide rules, before electronic computers, many engineering problems were solved using nomograms (also known as nomographs). In its simplest form, a ...
Worked All States via WSPR?
Just for fun, I decided to try to see how many states had reported hearing my WSPR beacon. Turns out the answer is 32. All ...
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication is probably one of the most influential papers of the 20th century. It spawned the entire field of information ...
Superbowl ads / Chuck in 3D
I imagine that millions of Americans were watching the Superbowl this weekend, and saw the trailer for Dreamworks Monsters vs. Aliens that was broadcast in ...
AA5CK via QRSS
Yesterday, I recorded a couple of hours of signals off of 30m, and ran them through my homegrown spectrogram code for fun. I found the ...
Overnight WSPR spots on 40m
I got home fairly late last night, and wasn’t up to any serious radio activities, but I did activate my WSPR beacon on 40m, and ...
A Stereo Picture
Here’s the gang I work with at Pixar Animation. This was taken with the incredibly low budget technique of snapping a picture, moving the camera, ...
It once was lost, but now is found…
This morning as I was heading out the door, I scanned my bookshelves for something that I could read during my lunchbreak. Much to my ...
On the politics of clubs..
Steve has an interesting post entitled “Golden Rule and Imagined Worlds” on his blog. It’s an interesting post, suggesting that transparency and equality are the ...
Bill’s ET-1 / FETer (Transceiver Made with One FET)
Bill is building an FETer (Transceiver Made with One FET) as published in Sprat by G3XBM . I don’t get Sprat (but should), but you ...
TEMPEST: A Signal Problem – Hack a Day
I’m not 100% obsessed (more like 98%) with radio topics: this morning, I found this link on Hack a Day which provided a link to ...
New Japanese Satellite — PRISM
Got a quick recording of the PRISM satellite, launched on the 23rd, as it came over my location. It was booming in, very fast Doppler. ...
More ngspice experimentation: a harmonic filter
Goofing around while watching Battlestar Galactica (which incidently is one of the most depressing, soul-less, unfun thing to watch that I can imagine) and decided ...
Common emitter amplifier design using ngspice…
Okay, I’ve been reading some of my variou sources on amplifier design including EMFRD and the ARRL Handbook, and decided to try to test my ...
QRP Transmitter Design
Here’s a nifty PDF on QRP transmitter design . It looks like it might have been cribbed from one of Doug Demaw’s books (which you ...
Six Oscar Nominations for Wall-E!
This morning I awoke to find that Pixar’s Wall-E had been nominated for an incredible six Academy Awards! Best Animated Feature Film of the Year ...
All About Circuits on Feedback
I was digging around information on common emitter amplifier design, and encountered this link which seemed quite helpful. Digging around the All About Circuits webpage, ...
Klunky Schematic Drawing
Need to make a quick and dirty schematic drawing? Try the Klunky Schematic Drawing page. ...
From the Inaugural Address of William Howard Taft
I don’t speak about politics on this blog very often. Frankly, I don’t find politics itself to be very interesing: it is a sphere of ...
A Universal VXO by George Dobbs G3RJV
Well, you can’t do better than an article by the legendary George Dobbs, G3RJV. The circuit that he has closely resembles the oscillator that I ...
free university lectures on lecturefox
I must admit: I’m separated by 20 years from my college experience, and I still miss it. Not the parties, being single, or even being ...
To Oscillate, or not to Oscillate…
Or more precisely, is it oscillating, or is it not oscillating? This is my first attempt at actually trying to build a circuit using Manhattan ...
Bestiary of Digital Modes
I was looking at the website for fldigi, and noticed that they added a guide which has waterfalls, spectrum, and sounds for each of their ...
Mystery of Sodium Acetate
You can find some occasionally surprising stuff on youtube. I’d seen a number of videos illustrating rapid crystallization of supersaturated mixtures of sodium acetate, but ...
My Big Fat Ham Radio Epiphany at KE9V.net
Over at KE9V.net, Jeff has had an epiphany. I thought I’d give a couple of comments. Many hams seem to be completely paralyzed that the ...
Arduino Realtime Audio Processing
The Arduino is a cheap little microcontroller, but you can use it to do some interesting audio effects. Check out the following Lab3 – Labor ...
Homebrew QRP rigs
OH6DC has a great webpage detailing some interesting homebrew QRP rigs which should serve as interesting inspiration for the homebrewer. ...
Worked an evening ISS pass…
Here’s the recording. Heard many old familiar calls (VA7VW, N6RSX, W6YX). Hung in there okay until the satellite crossed over the continental U.S., then it ...
And this year’s Golden Tomato goes to….
Wall-E! Every year, rottentomatoes.com gives out an award for the film which received the best reviewed film of the year. This year, Wall-E narrowly edged ...
N5ESE’s Ballpoint RF Probe
A nice little project on packaging the kind of RF probe circuit that I’ve been playing with into the body of an ordinary ballpoint pen. ...
The Tale of Two Meters
Well, I’ve been mucking around with my RF probe circuitry a bit tonight, and encountered something pretty strange. I have two digital multimeters lying around, ...
More Meter Madness
Okay, after having read WB8ICN’s postings on QRPedia, I decided to try to measure the impedence of both of my meters. I dug a 1.5M ...
Steve Weber on SMT Soldering
Steve Weber has a nice Youtube video on surface mount soldering: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5HEjDTHUo ...
More Good Ham Video Goodness: Jeremy Chase, N1JER
I ran across Jeremy Chase’s nifty ham radio website when it was mentioned on QRP-L. It’s really quite cool: Jeremy is just beginning to get ...
Atlanticon Kit – It’s a Snap!
More digging around for information about the RF probe, I found this link to the NJQRP’s presentation at Atlanticon 2000. It’s a cute little QRPP ...
Wall-E gets a Golden Globe
I don’t spend much time talking about my day job here on the blog, but every once in a while, I have to take time ...
Diodes for RF Probes
My dummy load experiment still has a few unanswered questions, but I found that the ARRL Handbook has had a circuit which is basically what ...
Aircraft reflection? Or something else?
This duplicates a posting I made on the wsprnet.org website. Aircraft reflection? Or something else? | WSPRnet On Saturday, Jan 10th, I had my transmit-only ...
G3XBM’s ham radio blog: Off-air historical ham recordings
G3XBM dug around and found inks to a couple of sites with interesting historic recordings of ham radio transmissions. Here’s one, and here’s another with ...
Dummy Load/Watt Meter Experiment
Okay, this is pretty basic stuff really, but it’s part of my trip toward additional homebrewing, and it might be of some vague interest, so ...
Why The Hell Would You Want A Ham Radio?
Kelly, AB9RF has a nice article, written in response to the question “Why the Hell Would You Want a Ham Radio?” It’s a very good ...
Find your QTH locator (or your grid square) with GoogleMaps
Now, I don’t have to write this myself. ...
Bouncing ball analog computer – Hack a Day
Courtesy of hack-a-day, check out the following video illustrating an analog computer that implements the dynamics of a bouncing ball, not using a microprocessor, but ...
Zinc based audio oscillators
Courtesy of the Make blog, check out Nyle Steiner’s Electronic Composition, using a variety of audio circuits which use bits of heated zinc instead of ...
YouTube – How to make fractals without a computer
While exploring some related links from the previous video on analog computers, I ran across this very interesting link on creating fractals using video feedback. ...
The Official Class E Transmitter Web Site by WA1QIX
Weeks ago, I found the following website on constructing ham transmitters using class E amplifiers, and today, I tried to find it again. It took ...
MEPT beacon visible in Ohio
W8LIW’s grabber on 30m is currently showing my “MV” beacon transmissions as well as the DFCW of VE1VDM (I presume) and the flying W of ...
Testing TwitMe plugin for WordPress…
If you get this tweet, it probably means that the TwitMe plugin for WordPress is working. The rest of you, pay no attention. ...
Back to work…
Well, after a little over two weeks of vacation (which seemed a lot longer to me) it’s finally time to take a shower, put on ...
4bitsynth
Another place holder post so I can find this later: a simple synthesizer that does MIDI, based upon an Atmel AVR microcontroller. Very retro. 4bitsynth ...
First real QSO of the year…
With VE3IAC, lost the first part because fldigi crashed on me, but then got this: Sorry, had a software glitch there. Odd. Anywwhoo… BTU de ...
Scrappy
My little feline buddy Scrappy was a feral cat that we’ve adopted. A while ago, we found out he tested positive for FIV, so we ...
Space Weather Radio: News and information about sunspots, solar flares and meteor showers
Thanks to Joanne, K9JKM for pointing out that Space Weather Radio is piping audio of Ursid Meteors crossing the radar fence which guards our country ...
Homebrew Satellite Antenna
While I am on the antenna kick, Howard, G6LVB mentioned his page on putting two cheap yagis on the same boom. Very, very nice. 10db ...
The Gray-Hoverman Antenna For UHF Television Reception – Digital Home Canada
While searching for a link for my brother on building antennas for HDTV (you guys are all ready for the oncoming digital TV Apocalypse, aren’t ...
K6HX beaconing on 30m with WSPR/MEPT
Okay, I hadn’t been doing any WSPR beacon operations since before Thanksgiving (which was also before my new callsign) and I was kind of bored ...
Happy New Year!
Well, 2008 had its moments, but I’m glad to kiss it goodbye. 2009, bring it on! Tonight Carmen and I decided to stay in and ...
Gutenberg Gem: Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 by Various – Project Gutenberg
I admit to a fascination with Scientific American. I used to have a couple of decades of the magazine which I kept mostly for the ...
Peter Donnelly on How Statistics Fool Juries
I’m spending way too much time sitting around this morning, surfing the web. I’m gonna stop, but before I do, here’s a link to an ...
Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture
Thanks to KE9V for pointing me at this lecture by Randy Pausch: httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo I don’t know what rock I’ve been living under, but it’s a ...
Polyphemus Demonstration and Evaluation “Kit”
Okay, it’s not really a “kit”, it’s just some directions on how you can wire some commonly available gadgets (like a Nokia 6100 LCD panel ...
Cooking at Kitchen on Fire
Carmen and I have reached the point in our lives where buying stuff for each other at Christmas is kind of superfluous. Stuff we need, ...
Dog Eating Burrito
Okay, I mostly don’t post pet videos on this blog, but sometimes, you just have to make an exception, like when someone decides to give ...
Intimate Control for Physical Modeling Synthesis
Okay, for every slobbery dog video I post, I promise to post something with a little more meat. My friend Tom is interested in all ...
NIST Time and Frequency Publication Database
Laura Halliday mentioned this page on the QRP-L while discussing the innards of those Radio Shack “atomic clocks” that you can buy. Seems like there ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Canterbury Puzzles by Henry Ernest Dudeney – Project Gutenberg
A couple of years ago, I blogged about H. E. Dudeney’s Amusements in Mathematics . Today, I noticed that Project Gutenberg had released a copy ...
Ham Radio Transmitter from a CFL bulb
Alex wasn’t the first to recommend this article on building a 80m transmitter from parts scavenged from a CFL bulb , but his link was ...
Gutenberg Gem: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Well, what would Christmas be without a link to that classic of classics: the immortal Dickens’ tale A Christmas Carol . This version is illustrated ...
Lots of Morse, via SDR
While browsing around at the airport before Christmas, I ran across this page by PE0FKO about his program IQRec.exe, which is used to record the ...
The Schupmann Telescope Patent
It’s been quite some time since I’ve bought a book about telescope making: I just have been more absorbed in the world of amateur radio ...
OpenStreetMap
I’m interested in mapping and in open source, so it’s interesting to see projects which combine both. Such is OpenStreetMap , a project which not ...
Merry Christmas All…
Best wishes to all on this Christmas holiday. After a bunch of waiting around in the Portland Airport, I’m back with the wife. We just ...
Mr. Plow, take me away!
Mr. Plow, that’s my name! My name again, is Mr. Plow! Will I get home before Christmas? Taking all bets… ...
Career advice from XKCD
While it’s not entirely true, it’s more true than it should be. (Thanks to Dan for bringing it to my attention.) ...
Snowed in while visiting….
Well, this morning we have eight or ten inches of snow on the ground at my Mom’s house, covered in a layer of ice from ...
On the three year anniversary of…
Well, it’s the three year anniversary of my last trip into Portland during a freezing rain storm. You can read about my previous trip here ...
Re-animating the PDP-11/70
A few years ago, Tom Duff and I each wrote an emulator for the PDP-1 so we could play the original version of Space Wars! ...
The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes | Lambda the Ultimate
A while ago, I got interested in reimplementing various versions of the Sieve of Eratosthenes. I eventually tacked together a threaded version that could calculate ...
KB2HSH talks about High Speed Meteor Scatter, the Geminid Shower, and FSK441
John, KB2HSH, whom I chatted with a few times on the #amsat IRC channel has been writing up his experiences working satellites and the like. ...
Short Movie Review: Twilight
Okay, it was Carmen’s turn to pick. I wanted to go see The Day The Earth Stood Still , but I usually pick movies, and ...
Gutenberg Gem: Astronomical Instruments and Accessories, by Wm. Gaertner & Co.
It’s been quite some time since I posted a “Gutenberg Gem”, a book from Project Gutenberg that might deserve some special attention. Today’s example contains ...
Congratulations to Adam and Becca
On December 8, 2008, my son Adam Rogers took Rebecca Hand to be his wife. After all the excitement, I’m just now getting around to ...
Barest of Bare Bones Arduino
Here’s a way to turn an ATMEGA168 into an Arduino compatible controller with a minimum of external components. arduino-standalone « Conversations with spaces ...
Low NOAA 17 Pass
I woke up this morning, and wanted to relax a bit before the day’s exciting activities (more on this later), so I noted that NOAA17 ...
K1EL remounted in a better box…
This morning, I decided to take the new box that I had acquired and remount my K1EL keyer into it. The new box is somewhat ...
K1EL mounted in a case…
Well, this morning I decided I wanted to get the K1EL keyer that I put together mounted in a proper aluminum case. The sad thing ...
More Hardcore Homebrew — Cutting Quartz Crystals
Yesterday’s linked article about negative resistance oscillators got me thinking about the possibility of creating a radio where literally every component was made by hand. ...
Zinc Negative Resistance 80 Meter CW Transmitter.
The Spark, Bang, Buzz website has a lot of really interesting low cost electronics experiments involving homebrewing electronics components. Like making your own vacuum tubes, ...
HF Beacon for MIT Atlantic Balloon Program
Courtesy of Bill Meara over at SolderSmoke , check out this link to the HF Beacon for MIT Atlantic Balloon Program . It’s a pretty ...
Jerry needs no help playing with his ball.
This is the greatest thing I’ve seen on youtube in at least a few hours. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PcL6-mjRNk” ...
Santa Mark and Elf Scrappy
Carmen got a cute little elf hat for Scrappy. He didn’t scratch or fuss too much, but neither was he especially happy. We decided to ...
On Serving Web Pages…
I must admit, I’ve been running WordPress for quite some time, and for the most part, I’m pretty happy with it as weblogs go. But ...
The Cinnamon Bear (revisited)
I’ve posted links to the old time radio serial The Cinnamon Bear as part of my holiday preparations in years past . I updated this ...
Google Code University
One of the greatest things about computing technology is simply how much information is available to anyone who is interested. Technical reports, papers, and most ...
Another Mandelbrot Zoom
Testing the Smart Youtube plugin for wordpress: httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdtOAOe1-qU ...
The Challenge of Amateur Radio
Jeff KE9V, over at KE9V.net is once again falling victim to pessimism about amateur radio. I can’t help but shake my head at the effort ...
Keyboard Acoustic Emanations Revisited
While my blog has been dominated by radio related stuff lately, I do continue to be interested in lots of different subjects, including various topics ...
Pico-Satellite Solar Cell Experiment (PSSC)
I just head that Endeavor will eject a small picosatellite (5x5x10 inches) that will test two different types of solar cells in the environment of ...
Movie Review: Bolt, in 3D
Tonight I took my wife, son and future daughter-in-law out to see Bolt , Disney’s newest animated feature. For extra bonus points, we went to ...
ATMega Controller
I’ve been playing around a little bit with the Arduino microcontroller board that I bought a while ago. It’s a nice little board, but there ...
Changing my theme…
My WordPress “theme” seems to need a little maintenence. Don’t be alarmed if the look of my website changes a bit over the next couple ...
Happy Thanksgiving!
In my house, we celebrated the holiday yesterday, to give my son a chance to go and have Thanksgiving dinner with his in-laws. So I ...
You seem shorter than I remember…
When you get an amateur radio license, you are issued a callsign. Mine was KF6KYI. This was a “2×3” call, which means it had two ...
NOAA 17 this morning…
My blog indicates that I was decoding my first NOAA weather sat images about a year ago. I have made some progress on improving the ...
New Morse Paddles
Today I had a few minutes to finally put together this pair of small Morse paddles that I got from American Morse . They have ...
Simple Mandelbrot Movie
I was bored. I had five minutes. I wrote some C code. A few minutes later, I had this movie. YouTube – Simple Mandelbrot Movie ...
Holy Crap.
I’m really, really tired of watching the economy implode. ...
Grid Beam Building System
I ran across a reference to “grid beam construction”. I didn’t know what it was. Now I do, and it’s kind of neat. Like a ...
Short Book Review: Hands-On Radio Experiments
I needed something to read on a plane trip this last weekend, and a quick stop at Ham Radio Outlet had me leaving with a ...
Near Space
Last week, I had a discussion with Ryan Clarke regarding high altitude balloon experiments. He said he was preparing a Wiki, so I took some ...
MERL – TR2003-035 – Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs
A novel microprocessor interface circuit is described which can alternately emit and detect light using only an LED, two digital I/O pins and a single ...
My tussle on amsat-bb
Today’s example comes from the amsat-bb mailing list. I am a member of AMSAT and a subscriber to the amsat-bb mailing list because it’s an ...
khymos.org – blog and website dedicated to molecular gastronomy
A fascinating website on food that came up in a discussion this weekend. khymos.org – blog and website dedicated to molecular gastronomy ...
In my copious spare time…
While awaiting a talk in an undisclosed location, by an undisclosed individual on an undisclosed subject, I found myself with time to finally work on ...
President Elect Barack Obama
Enjoy the victory tonight. Soon, the really tough work begins. Addendum: For all the crowing that was done last night about how miraculous it was ...
CQSS This Weekend…
I’m still working on “the code”, but this weekend is the CQ Sweep Stakes, and all the bands are alive with Morse code contacts. I ...
Ham Radio
Two of my current interests… ...
Silly Arduino Project #1: A Trivial Beacon
While waiting for my K1EL keyer kit to show up, I was twiddling my thumbs, and remembered that I had an Arduino microcontroller board sitting ...
Google Earth for iPhone
There is a new Google Earth app out for the iPhone. It’s pretty cool. Grab it from the Apple App store. Nuff said. Addendum: Okay, ...
E51JD from the Cook Islands
The 15 meter band continues to be pretty strong today. I was getting mostly South America, but tuning around, I heard E51JD calling from Cook ...
DF0HQ from Germany
I don’t get much from Europe with my low antenna, but DF0HQ on 40m was booming in pretty well! ...
CQ World Wide DX Contest
Well, this weekend is the CQ World Wide DX Contest , one of the larger contest weekends. I tuned up to 15m, around 21.259, and ...
Cheap Yagi
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while: toss together a cheap Yagi antenna suitable for listening to AO-51 on 70cm. If you just ...
Sticky Tape X-rays
This is the craziest bit of science that I’ve seen in quite a while. Sticky Tape X-rays ...
First Spot from over the Atlantic via WSPR…
Today, on wsprnet.org, W1BW announced that Wednesdays would be “Special Activity Days” , and that today’s special activity would be to operate on 20m instead ...
Prime Number Fun
As some of you may have noticed, I occasionally like to write small programs to compute odd little mathematical curiousities. Something I hadn’t done in ...
Steamboat Ed’s Shop in high resolution…
Gigapan is a website which displays super high resolution panoramic images, acquired by a special panoramic camera rig. Today, I got a note from Ed ...
Ordered a K1EL Keyer…
My Ramsey 40m QRP rig needs a keyer, so I ordered this nifty one from K1EL . I should be able to install it in ...
blog.bjrn.se: Let’s build an MP3-decoder!
At various times I kind of wanted to write an mp3 decoder. Don’t ask why. Anywhoo…. here’s a link: blog.bjrn.se: Let’s build an MP3-decoder! ...
I’m now KF6KYI/AE
Just got back from Pacificon. Had a nice time, and managed to pass the upgrade exam. I’m now an Extra class ham. Bow down and ...
I hate…
… languages which don’t implement tail recursion properly. You have no excuse. Seriously. I’m looking at you, Python. ...
Simple Electronic Keyer
Having completed my little 40m QRP transmitter (pictures to come sometime soon), I was scouting around trying to find the most appropriate keying options. While ...
First SSTV image from ISS
It’s not too exciting, but it’s a start. During a 30 degree pass, I managed to get MacRobot SSTV to decode this partial image. It’s ...
Slow Scan Television via AO-51
For the next week or so, Richard Garriot will be aboard the ISS. Richard’s dad was the first astronaut to use ham radio to talk ...
Assembled a 40m QRP transmitter…
Well, I was kind of bored, so I decided to tack together a little CW transmitter. I had picked up a little 40m kit from ...
Haven’t I seen this in a movie before?
Still, it’s kind of cool. ...
Latest WSPR reception map…
This week I picked up a spot from 9V1LF in Singapore, as well as a few other more mundane state side locations. I’ve had reception ...
WB5FKC on 40m
30m was crapping out after about 2:00AM UTC, and I had heard that Christian, WB5FKC was going to be sending QRSS Morse on 40m, just ...
A survey…
SpaceX launch reaches orbit…
I didn’t get a chance to watch the online webcast, but the SpaceX launch of flight 4 of their Falcon 1 launch vehicle managed to ...
More spots from W1BW…
Well, I got bored trying to make PSK31 QSOs amidst all the RTTY contesters, so I flipped back to playing with my WSPR daemon. First ...
Visual Beacon heard by W1BW
Bruce finally got his grabber back online, and I swiped the following image from it: In addition to the WSPR digital message, my beacon program ...
Another map…
My previous maps of WSPR spots didn’t do a great job of showing where my beacon had been heard in the U.S. Here’s another try: ...
More WSPR developments…
Well, I took a hint from Bruce, W1BW and modified my beacon to do both WSPR and visual beaconing on 30m. Below, you can see ...
World Map
I’m still playing around with GMT to generate some maps. I’m not sure I’ve really got it figured out, but here is an attempt to ...
Progress on WSPR
So, I’ve made some progress on teasing apart enough of the encoding of WSPR beacon messages to write a completely stand alone Python program that ...
Off to Yahoo! Hack Day
Perhaps I’ll see some of you there. ...
WSPR: Can you hear me now?
I haven’t had the chance to type up my notes yet on my attempts at beaconing using WSPR, but I did leave my beacon running ...
JH5RXS working contest on 7.0945Mhz
Woke up around 4:00AM, couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went downstairs, turned on the radio and caught JH5RXS on 7.0945Mhz booming in. He’s ...
Is this multipath?
While listening to some WSPR signals (and testing my new encapsulated WSPR beacon) I heard some signals that were throbbing at about the baud rate. ...
Poor Man’s Guide to WSPR Spots
Okay, so I’ve been playing around with generating various kinds of visual signals on the MEPT subband on 30m. That’s the 100hz wide band just ...
Thunderbirds are go!
Yesterday, I took the wife and the future daughter-in-law to Travis AFB for their airshow. It was a blast. Lots of cool planes, culminating in ...
MV beacon on 30m
Well, inspired by Bruce’s “Flying W” beacon, and realizing that it was a pretty nice and efficient way to send out an easily identified beacon ...
Amateur Radio Station W1BW in the Morning
I’ve been trying to monitor (intermittently) some of the beacon activity on 30m. This morning, I managed to capture Amateur Radio Station W1BW , who ...
YouTube – Cute-1.7 + APD II Earth Movie
YouTube – Cute-1.7 + APD II Earth Movie From the amsat-bb: We release the movie taken by Cute-1.7 +APD II. It was taken above Japan. ...
Speed of Light, measured tonight…
Well, I was bored, and it was getting close to midnight. There was nothing really going on on any of the amateur radio bands, so ...
BibliOdyssey: Early Microscopes
Courtesy of BibliOdyssey: Early Microscopes , a collection of very cool etchings showing, well, early microscopes. ...
Morning K & M beacons, testing my new 500hz CW filter
Ordered a new Collins 500hz filter for my FT-817 from W4RT, and installed it (really simple, remove some screws, disconnect speaker, plug in the module ...
More 30m beacon activity….
Somebody is sending out a CQ. I just noticed it at the end of a recording I did, but he’s retransmitting again now. I’ll let ...
Ether busting in the AM…
Well, I woke up this morning, kind of bleary eyed, and decided to see if I could reach any of the other QRSS grabbers during ...
QRSS Grabbed from CM87ux -> FN85ki
Well, I was experimenting a bit. I dusted off my QRSS3 iTunes beacon idea, and set it going. VE1VDM had his “big ears” grabber going, ...
Slow Feld Hell Examples…
Hellschreiber is a method of sending text over radio. It basically is a kind of primitive fax machine: it sends each character as a 7×14 ...
@ SIGGRAPH 2008
Well, I’m sitting at The Standard (a frankly far too chic hotel for a forty something computer geek like myself), it’s not quite 7 A.M. ...
Space Tracking Notes
Sven Grahn’s Space Tracking Notes talks about his efforts in using radio to track satellites. There is all sorts of really good stuff in here, ...
SWL on 30m…
I was monitoring the 30m PSK31 subband this evening, and it seemed to be fairly quiet and also picking up some pretty good DX. I ...
QRSS experiment…
Well, last night, conditions on 40 and 30 were frankly pretty terrible. I tried to get a couple of VE3s to pay attention to me ...
This morning? Two letter beacons…
Yesterday, I was playing with WebSDR , an awesome software defined radio that you can access from the web, and I noticed that there was ...
IBP software for Linux/Unix
Well, the bands were really dead this evening, so I decided to try to see if I could find some software that might be useful. ...
Receiving QRSS
Conditions have been really bad on 30m. I haven’t had any luck at recording any beacons at all in the MEPT subband, so I was ...
YouTube – Adam’s Airman Run, July 31, 2008
YouTube – Adam’s Airman Run, July 31, 2008 (Higher Quality) Today we got to see Adam for the first time in six and a half ...
Graduation, two stripes.
Marching pass us in the graduation parade. Couldn’t be prouder. ...
First two contacts via PSK31!
Tonight was a momentous occasion. Using 5w of power into a low end fed antenna, I managed to get two contacts. The first was Chuck, ...
Test from iPhone
Just testing the wordpress application for the iPhone. ...
SPLAT! A Terrestrial RF Path Analysis Application For Linux/Unix
While mucking around last night, I ended up asking myself how i could find out what the attenuation of the TV antennas atop Sutro Tower ...
K4GFG tracks satellites on a budget…
While digging around for information on how to observe radio echos from meteors, I stumbled across this fascinating link about using reflections from the NAVSPASUR ...
Writing a tunable bandpass filter…
Today, I decided to code up a little test of something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time: to write an implementation ...
Magnetic Loop Antennas
DJ1YFK suggested this site for info on small magnetic loop antennas. I should check this out. Magnetic Loop Antennas, Magnetic Loop Info, How to Build ...
VLF Paper Archive
Just stashing a link to some papers on VLF radio that came across a mailing list. Index of /~talves/VLF ...
HF Volmet Broadcasts
While tuning around below the 30m band on my FT-817, I heard a rather loud and clear weather broadcast on 10.051Mhz. It turned out to ...
DJ1YFK – Ham Stuff
I need to remember to bookmark DJ1YFK’s website. He’s a regular on the #hamradio irc channel, and he has a bunch of nifty stuff on ...
BT878 Audio Capture Trials
I subscribe to a number of different mailing lists related to radio topics. Something that has intrigued me for quite some time is VLF or ...
Happy Birthday, Brainwagon
On this day in 2002, I made my first posting to this blog . If any of you have hung around since then, you will ...
WWV and WWVH
I have been monitoring 30m to try to detect some of those MEPT (Manned Experimental Propagation Transmitters) that I wrote about a few weeks ago, ...
Dear God, Will It Never End?
The All-Star game is going to the bottom of the 13th in a 3-3 tie. Both teams are 3-27 with runners in scoring position. There ...
First Moon Landing 1969
39 years ago today. YouTube – First Moon Landing 1969 ...
Don Mitchell’s Blog
Today I found out that Don Mitchell has a blog. While I’ve only briefly met Don a couple of times, I’ve been aware of his ...
Re: Bandwidth, iTunes, and iPhone activation…
As I’m sitting here with my iPhone, eagerly (and as yet vainly) waiting for it to be reactivated via the iTunes store, I was trying ...
Scrappy has the Feline Immunodeficiency Virus
Well, I suppose I should have seen this as coming. Our adopted feral friend Scrappy has been fighting off a skin infection, and we have ...
iPhone 2.0 update… in progress! HOLD OFF FOR NOW Well, mine works now.
My cat woke me up before 6:00AM this morning to remind me that today was the Apple 3G iPhone release date. Buying a new phone ...
Quail!
My wife noticed a mommy and daddy quail at our fence, with a whole bunch of babies squabbling around in the grass at the bottom. ...
Televisor
Very cool. I want one. ...
Torpedo Data Computer Mark 3
This came across one of my mailing lists: a complete description of the mechanical computer used to solve torpedo targeting problems during WWII. It’s really ...
Beacon Activity on 30m?
Well, I decided to try again to record some of the beacons that are on 30m. I recorded 1 hour of what sounds like white ...
Backyard Shed Turned Home Office
Courtesy of Lifehacker, here are some neat pictures of a guy who added an office to his home by using a pre-fab 8×15 shed which ...
WSPR activity on 30m
I’ve been bitten by the QRPP/QRSS bug, and am considering a project where I build a MEPT (that stands for Manned Experimental Propagation Transmitter, apparently), ...
An Internet Anniversary
I blogged about “Dramatic Chipmunk” one year ago today. My, how time flies. YouTube – Dramatic Chipmunk ...
Hellschreiber Font Definition
Here’s a link to a scan of the page which actually defines the Hellschreiber font that was used on real Hellschrieber machines. It’s not in ...
Wall•E review on “The Bleat”
I normally wouldn’t be so self-serving as to link to movie reviews for one of our films, but James Lileks is a really good writer, ...
Field Day Weekend Activities
Well, this weekend is “Field Day”: one of the big contest weekends for amateur radio. Basically hams go off grid, travel to campgrounds and the ...
Wall•E Looking at Hal
Wall•E Looking at Hal 20th June, 2008 Angus McClane is one of Pixar’s animators, and widely acknowledged as perhaps being it’s largest geek. He’s also ...
2N2/6 Transverter Information
On the softrock40 mailing list, somebody mentioned the 2N2/6 Transverter , which is a 6m transverter for use with a 40m transceiver. It’s not completely ...
Decoding LO-19 Telemetry Again
A while ago, I used my FM ht to decode telemetry from LO-19 . So, I decided to give it a try again (getting bored ...
Too good to bee-lieve
Just a quick snapshot I got using my little Panasonic point-n-shoot camera: ...
James A. Moorer’s Published Articles Page
I was trying to remember the name and author of a paper on implementing linear phase bandsplitting. It had applications to noise reduction, and seemed ...
Back From Cruise…
I’m back from my vacation cruise to Mexico aboard the Carnival Elation to Los Cabos. Needed relaxation, and the cruise provided. Snapped lots of pictures. ...
Turbo code tutorial…
Learning about turbo codes has been on my list for a long time. Here’s a tutorial that looks like it might be helpful. ...
Dennis Havlena’s cool DIY instruments…
From the make blog, here is a pretty cool link to Dennis Havlena’s cool website about DIY musical instruments, including a youtube of him playing ...
CubeSat Community Website – Developers Workshop 2008
Just a link to the papers from the CubeSat Developer’s Workshop 2008. I’ve gotten more interested in satellite design and what’s possible over the last ...
Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss
Link to an interesting paper that I encountered while looking for something else: Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss ...
Pizza Order…
A few days ago, I blogged about a Python program to monitor the status of your Domino’s pizza order. Last night found me at home ...
Oakland A’s Get Wet and Wild
Didn’t catch the Friday win for the Athletics over their Bay Area rivals, but found out that the sprinklers came on during the ninth with ...
NOAA 18 Weather Picture
I haven’t done one of these in a while, hauled out my Yaesu VX-3R and recorded a pass. I’ve busted the sync corrector in my ...
Threefer of Satellites…
I’ve been trying to catch the SEEDS cubesat in SSTV/digitalker mode for a while. No dice. But I did record three of the cubesats as ...
How long could you survive in the vacuum of space?
Silly Internet Quiz of the Day: How long could you survive in the vacuum of space? Created by OnePlusYou ...
Christie’s Auction of Interest
Okay, I’m not a gazillionaire, so all of this interest is (pardon the expression) purely academic, but check out the 347 lots available in this ...
Early Television Patent by C. F. Jenkins
Don’t ask me how I got here, but i thought I’d bookmark the 1922 patent of C. F. Jenkins for sending pictures over wireless. TRANSMITTING ...
My Biased Coin: Cuckoo Hashing, Theory and Practice : Part 1
Various projects that I’ve worked on rely on building efficient hash tables for looking up, well, all sorts of stuff (wow, that was vague). Say, ...
Brief Movie Review: Kung Fu Panda
What can I say? It’s really good family fare. Animation? Art Direction? Story? All really good! I enjoyed it a lot. So did the wife. ...
Picture from CUTE-1.7
Click below for a color picture relayed back to earth from the CUTE-1.7 satellite. It is my understanding that CUTE is only capable of sending ...
Punch & Judy: The Punch Page
To show just how much of a lunatic I am, today while surfing around, I was trying to remember what the gadget that caused the ...
MOVIES IN THREE DIMENSIONS
Just a fun link of the day: a Mechanix Illustrated article on making home made 3D movies. MOVIES IN THREE DIMENSIONS ...
Website with Amateur Satellite Frequencies
All the fun I’ve been having with tracking satellites has made me want to create a nice little database of all the frequencies they use. ...
Hassock Hog motor controller
This came over the make blog this morning: a rather nice looking page describing a cool robot motor controller. Hassock Hog motor controller description ...
Hackszine.com: Python pizza status
Crazy link from hackszine.com that monitors the progress of your pizza from Dominos website. Neat! Hackszine.com: Python pizza status ...
SEEDS spectrogram
Last night I was redoing my Python script that did Doppler tracking. There was a very low (max elevation under fifteen degrees) pass of SEEDS ...
Nick’s pinhole photography
My morning browsing eventually sent me to Nick’s pinhole photography , which has many excellent scans of 19th and early 20th century articles on the ...
Platypus
Platypus is a system that can convert scripts (shell, Python or even perl) into something that looks a lot more like a real Mac application. ...
Another look at Yubileiny
In an earlier posting, I presented a recording that I did of the new Russian satellite Yubileiny, also designated RS-30. I finally found my spectrogram ...
Movie Reviews in One Line
I’ve seen a bunch of movies lately. Rather than give details of each, I just thought I’d give a single line review of each. Iron ...
Another try at recording Yubileiny
Well, by the time I got home tonight, there was going to only be a single low pass of the Yubileiny satellite to the west ...
Yahoo! Hack Day
I attended the first one, I’ve pencilled in the next one on my calendar. hackday.org ...
Phoenix to land today…
The Phoenix probe to Mars should land today around 6:00EDT. It’s a lander designed to dig in the Martian top soil to look for sub ...
“Yubileiny” is a next generation small satellite
The Russians, in commemoration of their 50th anniversary of their launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, commissioned a small satellite called Yubileiny which apparently ...
Six – A Hex playing program for KDE
Well, all this reading about the board game Hex made me want to play. Six is an interesting, capable hex player available for Linux. It’s ...
Spying on Computer Monitors Off Reflective Objects
I’ve bitched before about CSI and their use of “video enhancement” to read displays and the like using low resolution security cameras reflecting off objects. ...
HexWiki
Work on my checkers program milhouse has stalled a bit: I have a problem in the transposition tables that is fighting against my endgame database ...
Easy to construct, 18×18 magic square.
If you take the decimal expansion of 1/19, 2/19… up to 18/19, and write out the first 18 digits of the decimal expansion of each, ...
Animatronic WALL-E Spotted in LA
As we get closer to the Wall-E premiere, you’ll probably be seeing this animatronic version of Wall-E in various promotional spots, and eventually deployed at ...
25 Cent I2C Adapter
I doubt I’ll ever need this, but I still think it’s kind of neat. I2C is a two wire serial bus that is used in ...
Chinook Endgame Database working (pretty much)…
Well, in a fit of productivity (or what passes for productivity when you are working on useless pet projects), I decided to get the Chinook ...
On the futility of expert checkers play through deep searches alone…
I really can’t put off creating an endgame database for my checkers program for much longer. I’ve been studying the so-called “First Position” for a ...
More on checkers…
I’ve been thinking about improving the evaluation function that milhouse uses, and have been particularly interested in automatic tuning of these functions. The two obvious ...
Milhouse v. Chinook
Well, this morning as I woke up, I decided to try to play milhouse against Chinook. Deluded by feelings of competency, I felt like it ...
Loy’s Checkers Problems
I was looking for some more difficult checkers positions to test my checker program milhouse against. Jim Loy’s excellent page has a list of difficult ...
Welcome back, Frank Thomas
Slugger Frank Thomas got let go from Toronto, and got resigned to come back to Oakland and smack some balls around for us. I couldn’t ...
COMPASS sounds pretty chirpy….
Last night I went out with my FT-817 and a little voice recorder and tried to pick up COMPASS and CUTE on 437.275Mhz as they ...
Cubesats away!
Well, the satellite launch that I’ve been waiting for happened. On the first pass I thought I was setup to record the Delfi C3 telemetry, ...
Sabernomics » Simple Rules to Speed Up the Game
The Sabernomics blog has some suggested rule changes that might serve to speed up the game. I haven’t blogged about a baseball related topic in ...
AO-16 gone quiet…
The news is that satellite AO-16 has gone quiet. We’ve been assured not to panic: Hello all, There are reports at http://oscar.dcarr.org/ that AO-16 has ...
General Decimal Arithmetic
While trying to find out if Python included some built-in capabilities for dealing with BCD numbers (it appears not) I encountered this rather interesting page ...
Total number of checkers positions…
I might actually get to constructing an endgame database for checkers sometime soon. To start, I decided to try to write code to reproduce the ...
Another satellite recording…
I heard via the amsat-bb mailing list that RS-22 was still transmitting telemetry, but might be interrupted by low batteries during eclipse period. I haven’t ...
Is this an easy, hard problem, or a hard, easy problem?
I’ve been entering puzzles from various checkers books that I have lying around as test cases for my checkers program milhouse. Oddly enough, I found ...
Upcoming Cubesat Launch…
On the 28th of April, a PSLV-C9 launch vehicle will carry a bunch of tiny cubesats into earth orbit. Mineo Wakita posted a list of ...
QR-Code Generator
QR-codes are a kind of 2D barcode that you can see around from time to time. I wanted to bookmark this code generator, just for ...
Graham Kendall – Game Playing Research – Checkers
A brief history and bibliography of checkers research. ...
Some statistics on historical checkers games…
As part of my ongoing checkers work, I downloaded the Open Checkers Archive and wrote a simple bison/flex parser to read in the data. I ...
WebSDR on 40m and 80m in JO32KF
Read about a system called WebSDR on the softrock mailing list, and boy, is it ever cool. It is a software defined radio that is ...
Checker game from the past…
I dusted off my copy of Schaeffer’s book One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers and reread the description of the match between Arthur ...
You’ll Own “Slaves” by 1965
When I was a very young kid, my dad had copies of the old Mechanix Illustrated lying around. I remembered as a kid reading an ...
Dusting off Milhouse…
Since looking at Olithink a few days ago, I’ve been re-bitten by the “write your own game” bug, and dusted off milhouse, my Checkers program ...
The Museum of RetroTechnology
I was reading up on mechanical amplifiers the other day, and found a link to information on this rather esoteric period in technological history. It ...
Three Kings vs. Two Kings
Well, I dusted off my checkers program source code and compiled it on my Mac. It managed to actually solve this position: a rather common ...
Checkerboard…
In reading up about Olithink, I recalled my own not-too-good Checkers program that I called “milhouse”. It doesn’t really work very well, despite all my ...
Generating trigonometric tables
While researching the computation of “twiddle factors”, I was looking for good recurrence relationships that might be useful. As usual, Wikipedia seemed to turn up ...
Olithink: a small, competent chess program
I don’t know if any of you have noticed that you can see some of the things that I’ve posted on the current day in ...
More FFT Paper Links…
Practical Fast Polynomial Multiplication ...
Efficient FFT Algorithm and Programming Tricks
I do like programming “for fun”, and this includes writing programs that, well, have been written hundreds of times before, but which I never have ...
Quote of the Day…
“When a proposition is ludicrous enough, we lend it undeserved credibility when we respond too politely.” — Robert M. Price ...
Tinkering with baseball scripts…
Today, I realized that I had written some scripts to dig out information on the web and present it to me in a nice, concise ...
Big Mess o’ Wires
Here’s another of those home built cpus that I find fascinating. Big Mess o’ Wires Check out the crazy wire wrapping. ...
Nifty “demo” on an unusual platform
There is a segment of the computer art culture which works on creating “demos”: short bits of combined computer animation and music which play on ...
Homemade Transistors?
My excursion into nostalgia has me researching homebrew transistors and tubes. Today, G3CWI mentioned this article about homebrewing transistors on the GQRP list. The method ...
Internet Archive: The Radio Amateurs Hand Book (and more)
Here is a link to Frederick Collins’ 1922 version of The Radio Amateurs Hand Book . Neat. Addendum: Radio telephony for amateurs also appears pretty ...
Working the QRP repeater on AO-51…
This week, the powers that be have enabled the second repeater on AO-51 for use. Uplink is on 145.88 and the downlink is nominally on ...
Low western pass of AO-51…
I worked the fifteen degree pass to the west of AO-51 tonight. Not all that great, was hoping to get someone from Hawaii, but alas, ...
Bunny Torture…
Not real bunnies. Just chocolate bunnies. Happy Easter. ...
I’m genuinely sad….
I must admit, part of my fascination with computers and mathematics has to do with my early exposure to Martin Gardner’s absolutely fantastic Mathematical Games ...
The FFT Demystified
Here is a good explanation of the FFT. I have used FFT libraries before, but I never really bothered to code one myself. The FFT ...
HF SDR receiver designs…
This link came across the softrock mailing list. Preserved for its many cool ideas! HF SDR receiver ideas from YU1LM ...
Jörg’s useful and ugly FXT page
Well, my excursion into FFT multiplication the other day left me with some more interesting questions, including trying to find out more information about the ...
Courteous AO-51 Operation
I like working AO-51. It’s the easiest of the easy satellites, with strong signals, little fading, and is workable with small handheld antennas or mobile ...
Sunday Afternoon AO-27 Pass
It has been quite some time since I worked AO-27: the passes usually occur in the early morning and early afternoon, which isn’t all that ...
2^32582657-1 is prime
In fact, at the moment, it’s the largest known prime, with over 9.8 million digits. As part of my pi day celebration yesterday, I was ...
AO-51 pass…
Nice high pass this evening, got a few people. Pass seemed a bit tougher than normal, I was waving the antenna around alot trying to ...
Tomorrow is pi-day….
Tomorrow is 3/14, known as pi day, or Albert Einstein’s birthday. How better to celebrate than with a script in pi-thon? #!/usr/bin/env python from itertools ...
Rawls on Baseball
Want to know why baseball is the greatest sport? Check out this article from philosopher John Rawls on the magic of baseball . (Thanks to ...
Economics in One Lesson
While reading up on the Broken Window Fallacy, I found this interesting article: Economics in One Lesson Briefly put, the Broken Window Fallacy is that ...
MLB 2008 Schedules…
One stop shopping for the 2008 MLB schedule in .csv format: wget -r -A.csv -l1 -H -np -nd -erobots=off http://www.mysportscal.com/ I’ll probably make a merged ...
TX5C on 30m
Earlier today, I was tuned into 30m listening for the the DXpedition to the Clipperton Atoll , transmitting using the callsign TX5C. The signals to ...
First SSTV pictures received…
I spent a little time this morning moving my 20m dipole up a bit higher (to no noticeable effect) but then did start getting some ...
More from weather satellites…
Well, I didn’t record this off the air, but I did take the raw data from the NOAA 18 weather satellite (more on how to ...
QSO via SO-50
Got N6LY, who had apparently just assembled his own Arrow antenna. Neat! N6LY on SO-50 ...
Numbers station
I was just scanning around the bands when I got home from work, and tuned up 30m, the amateur band between 10.100Mhz and 10.150Mhz. I ...
Bob Simpleton’s Guide to Quickie Antennas
VE7BPB was telling KC9MUC how to make a quickie 6m dipole out of a chunk of coax on the irc #amsat channel. I don’t think ...
Evening pass of NOAA 15
I didn’t hold high hopes for the NOAA 15 pass tonight, but the combination of the late evening twilight and the nearly overhead pass made ...
Feld Hell Decoder
I was tuning around this morning, and caught WA9HCZ, Jerome in Wisconsin, sending Hellschrieber on 10.139Mhz (in the 30m band). It was actually the first ...
ARRLWeb: It Seems to Us: Amateur Radio, Version 2008
The ARRL is the premier amateur radio organization in the United States. It’s two major purposes are to promote interest in amateur radio, and to ...
Association Of Rocket Mavericks
With all the pondering of satellites that I’ve been doing lately, it seems inevitable that I would have to develop some interest in rocketry. Here’s ...
SO-50 pass in the afternoon…
I decided I needed a break, so I wandered outside and caught the SO-50 pass from the parking lot using my TH-D7A and my trusty ...
Try to get N3CRT on AO-51…
Got stomped. Oh well. AO-51 Pass, February 23, 2008 Addendum: N3CRT tried to record it too. His recording is here . ...
AO-16 attempt…
Well, I was going to try AO-16, but as it turns out, I forgot to charge my FT-817, so I only got six minutes of ...
More HF-Fax experimentation…
Worked a bit more on the code. It now sets the appropriate horizontal size and aspect ratio, and I tuned it to actually have the ...
Where is this fax from?
I’m a teeny bit confused. The strong source of HF-FAX transmissions that i’ve been recording and decoding is broadcasting at night on 8.502 Mhz. I ...
Strange Sounds From Saturn
One of the greatest science fiction movie of all time is without doubt the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet . One of the reasons it was ...
Evening programming…
Got home, and didn’t feel like standing outside in the rain and wait for a satellite pass. But I did feel like doing something radio ...
Ditch the diet soda if you’re trying to lose weight
Ditch the diet soda if you’re trying to lose weight In a study to be published today, American researchers found that rats fed yogurt sweetened ...
VP6DX Ducie Island 2008
On Saturday afternoon, I was tuning around with my FT-817, and heard VP6DX calling CQ on 20m SSB. He was working split, transmitting on 14.190 ...
More weather pictures….
Well, I decided to give NOAA 18 a try during a nice 18 degree pass. The resulting image was actually pretty good, although still spoiled ...
Product detector and method therefor – Google Patents
Several recent direct conversion receiver designs that I have been looking at use something called a Tayloe mixer. It’s an interesting way to construct a ...
Evening satellite passes…
Sigh. Just went out to try to work AO-51, couldn’t hear anything from the satellite, nor could I raise it. It was only after I ...
HF-FAX
Well, I was playing around with cocoaModem a bit more, and decided to try to decode some of the HF-FAX images sent by the station ...
Another night pass on AO-51…
Well, beneath a beautiful crescent moon and a stunning view of Orion, I set up to work AO-51 again. Sadly, on the eastern pass I ...
research!rsc
Tom Duff recommended this blog for my perusal, and I filed it away. Today I discovered that it was linking back to one of my ...
cocoaModem
For fun, I downloaded cocoaModem: a program that decodes many modes, including RTTY, PSK31, and SITOR-B. SITOR-B is similar to RTTY, but is used by ...
Saturday NOAA 17 pass..
Here’s another NOAA 17 pass, recorded on a bright and sunny Saturday morning. I tried a bit of a different setup this morning: I was ...
Happy Pixar Day…
Eighteen long years ago was my first day at Pixar (before it was Pixar Animation Studios). Today, I’m celebrating by taking a bunch of my ...
A Satellite Two-fer…
Got on board the late night pass for the ISS, and right after that went down, turned around and worked SO-50. Sadly, the recorder I ...
Updates to my python tracking program…
It now can put out ground tracks as well as more detailed tracking information. Just a few more lines of code. ARISS will be visible ...
Antenna Design
I’ve been reading up a bit on antenna design, particularly the design of Yagi style antennas, and decided to give it a whirl. In particular, ...
Haven’t forgotten about weather satellites…
It’s just that the weather has been too crappy for me to stand outside with my laptop and do the recordings. But today, the weather ...
The Winner: FedEx 2008 Super Bowl Ad
I think this was the best ad during the Super Bowl (which actually for the first time I think eclipses the advertising spectacle that is ...
FM Voice Repeater Active Aboard ISS
I heard on the amsat-bb mailing list that the repeater aboard the ISS might be active, so tonight I waited for a pass, which occurred ...
Pleasant Morning on AO-51
Mostly just the regulars, got W0DXC, which is one of those annoying club addresses with no email contact on QRZ. Sigh, oh well. W0DXZ (thanks ...
Trying to record some of VO-52…
Tuning for the Doppler shift on VO-52 is a bit challenging, particularly when you have an antenna in one hand. You all are probably bored ...
Weird Sound Generator
Here’s a link for Tom: a kit for the Weird Sound Generator. Unlike many of these things, I actually found the variety and quality of ...
New Radio on AO-51
Well, last night I went and programmed in the various doppler shifted frequencies for AO-51 into the new FT-817, and then this morning worked the ...
Overlap-Add STFT Processing
Another signal processing link that I think I need to understand: Overlap-Add STFT Processing ...
WA0D on AO-51
The weather here is terrible, and standing outside with an antenna in your hand just isn’t that much fun. But I did manage to handle ...
Another try at LO-19 on some new equipment
Well, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I picked up a new Yaesu FT-817ND to expand my capabilities. It’s a neat little radio, and tunes all ...
Script to predict satellite passes…
Well, my plan13 library has been joined with a library that decodes grid squares and the like, and another which downloads orbital elements and stores ...
Volksat
I keep wondering if the whole KISS principle (a personal favorite of mine) might be sensible to apply more thoroughly. Diane, VA3DB pointed me at ...
Gravner-Griffeath Snowfakes
I still read stuff that isn’t radio relate. Some of it I’m sure most of you wonder “what kind of a nut are you, that ...
Awesome High Altitude Balloon Flight
Well, the price of launching a satellite for real is still way too high to be even an insane possibility, but there are some fun ...
Globe trotting, er… plotting…
My old program for drawing globes made some nice postscript output, but in reexamining the source code, I can only imagine that I was doped ...
UO-11 also wakes up from its nap…
Another old time satellite might be waking up from its sleep as it comes out of a period of eclipses. Joanne Maenpaa mentioned that UO-11’s ...
AO-16 lives, in a very strange way…
This just came across the amsat-bb mailing list: Since AO-16 was recovered approximately 6 months ago, the command team has attempted to reload the satellite ...
Evening passes for AO-51
Couldn’t work the bird at all, it was a low 20 degree pass, and I simply can’t get in when the satellite is crowded like ...
Evening Western Pass for AO-51…
Got a QSO with KL7XJ, from BP40 near Anchorage Alaska. Not bad, according to my calculator, that’s about 3250km. Also got regulars VA7VW, and heard ...
Decoding LO-19 Telemetry…
I heard that the telemetry signal from LO-19 was quite strong, and could be easily picked up with even the simplest equipment. It’s sent as ...
All the alligators come out on SO-50…
Alligators have big mouths, but little ears. On a satellite, an alligator is someone who sends a loud signal without listening, effectively trashing someone elses ...
NOAA-17 a day later…
Yesterday I posted an image that I had captured from the NOAA-17 weather satellite on a pass over the bay area in the mid morning. ...
Another weather satellite pass…
Another pass of NOAA-17 this morning. A pretty nice one too, lots of good detail. Not the most noise-free image though: not sure what the ...
Plan13 code nearing alpha test…
My Python port of the Plan13 algorithm is pretty much working now. I wrote a simple script to find the next pass of NOAA-17, and ...
Lawrence Lessig @ Pixar
Stanford law professor and copyright champion Lawrence Lessig came for a lunchtime lecture here at Pixar. I’ve been interested in copyright law and intellectual property ...
UVM CricketSat Program
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a balloon launch, perhaps carrying a full GPS and radio transmitter payload, but I think it would ...
Maidenhead Gridsquares
If you’ve listened to some of my satellite audio, you’ll notice that in addition to the callsigns, people are exchanging things that sound like “Delta ...
Morning Coffee on AO-51
Yep, another AO-51 pass this morning. I frankly was in a rush, and for the life of me can’t remember who it was I worked ...
AO-51 back from the dead…
Yep, it’s back. Worked N6PAA and WA6FWF (although I totally misheard his call originally, glad I record these things). I was fighting antenna polarization early ...
An Almost-No-Solder Electronic Organ
This is perhaps too simplistic a project to please the electronic and experimental music lovers among my readers, but it was written by Mark Spencer, ...
Six Amateur Radio satellites to launch in March
I mentioned Delfi-C3 a few weeks ago. It’s another amateur satellite that is tentatively scheduled to launch on March 7. The rocket will actually carry ...
Plan 13, in Python
Well, I’ve made some headway on a project that I thought would be cool to write: porting G3RUH’s Plan 13 Satellite Prediction algorithm to a ...
Grump! AO-51 down, command team on it.
Sigh. I was gonna work AO-51 this morning, but couldn’t hear the downlink. I shifted to the digital downlink frequency, and could hear it was ...
Nice NOAA-17 pass today!
I got a pretty good recording of the NOAA17 pass today, and converted it with my software. Turned out very nice. You can see Catalina ...
Non-hams making poor use of AO-51
Well, it was a scheduled 88 degree high pass for me today on AO-51, so I was out there with my Arrow again. For the ...
Bay Area Modern Geek Ham Radio Meetup
Click here to check out The Bay Area Modern Geek Ham Radio Meetup! Alex Perez, KD7OFR, sent a message to the AMSAT mailing list, basically ...
FeldHell encoder…
I’ve been pondering the amateur mode known as FeldHell or Hellschrieber. It’s a very old mode, dating back to a patent in 1929. I’ll let ...
A brief musical interlude…
Haven’t had much of this lately for Tom, so here’s an amusing musical interlude. ...
Extreme Homebrew Electronics
Every once in a while, I encounter one of those odd hams who likes to homebrew his own electronics, but who views using integrated circuits ...
Sines and Cosines of the Times….
I can never remember these formulas, so I wrote this program. I’m putting it here so I won’t lose it, and so others may benefit. ...
Argh… battery died during AO-51 pass…
Early today, I had problem with feedback on my little Sony ICD-P520 voice recorder during an AO-51 pass, which was unusual: I’d never heard it ...
Why a receive preamp is better than a transmit amplifier for working amateur satellites…
I’ve been pondering potential upgrades to my satellite capabilities. Right now, I’m using a very popular combination: an arrow antenna and a Kenwood TH-D7A. Often, ...
Motion…
As a break from my amateur radio posts, here’s a photography one! Most of my photographs are cool largely by accident. This is no exception. ...
AO-27 Pass…
First time I worked AO-27 in the new year, caught regulars WA8SME, VA7MG, WA6KYR (who I didn’t recognize, but I worked him on December 19th), ...
Colorized Sat Pictures
I was trying to figure out how people really colorize satellite pictures, but wasn’t making any headway, so I just went ahead and did some ...
AO-51 from inside…
Well, the weather today sucks. We have 40mph gusts, and are expecting a full 2 inches of rain. That being said, I decided to try ...
Kenwood TH-D7AG Quick Reference Sheet
As uploaded to the Yahoo! group for TH-D7A owners… Quick Reference Sheet for the Kenwood TH-D7AG ...
Laser cutter, start slicing stuff for under 50 dollars
Guy buys some cheap laser modules, scavenges parts from a couple of old scanners, and builds himself a laser stencil cutter. Uses Postscript to generate ...
Talking to smart people makes me feel stupid…
Okay, so here’s the deal: I’ve been working on my weather satellite decoder off and on for a few weeks, and been cleaning up the ...
PLAN-13 Satellite Position Calculation Program
G6LVB has a really nifty website , which includes plans for a neat little PIC powered antenna tracker. The writeup says that it used the ...
Another weather satellite pass…
Well, during a road trip with my wife to San Diego and back, I managed to begin to type up my notes for an upcoming ...
Fixed a few bugs…
I got some time today waiting for the furnace guys to show up (they never did) and managed to figure out a few of the ...
Cool Song…
It’ll be apparent what’s going on halfway through the song. ...
How not to watch The Incredibles
Okay, I admit it. I have a special place in my heart for The Incredibles . It was my first opportunity to work for Brad ...
Merry Christmas to all BrainWagon readers
I’m sitting up in bed, laptop buzzing away, with my wife sleeping next to me. Within the next hour, we’ll have showers taken, coffee brewing, ...
NORAD tracks Santa on Youtube
Okay, I know I’m going overboard on this whole amateur radio kick I’ve been on, but with all the satellite stuff I’ve been dinking with, ...
A Christmas Medly, played on a PDP-1
Not getting your daily geek on? Try the PDP-1 playing a Christmas Carol Medley . Via PDP-1 Music ...
You can hear Genesat telemetry too…
Okay, I was bored waiting for potential Ande passes, so I tuned into Genesat. I got a few telemetry packets, although the frequency seemed to ...
Ande Still Lives at 21:53Z
Around 21:53Z, I got two packets for the NO-61, otherwise known as ANDE ANDE-1>BEACON:T#002,002,010,009,004,003,01000000,000 ANDE-1>APRS2,SGATE::BLN2ANDE :ANDE stays awake for 30 secs after last pkt heard. ...
SO-50 pass this morning…
During the SO-50 pass this morning, WA8SME was asking if I was using a preamp, and whether I had any difficulty with receive sensitivity. On ...
Google Maps can find you without a GPS
Google Maps for mobile phones apparently has a new feature that enables you to automatically determine your position by triangulating your location from cell towers ...
Tonight’s AO-51 pass…
I managed to work WD9EWK from my car using only my Kenwood HT and the omnidirectional whip mounted on the roof of my SUV. I ...
Interesting paper on phased antennas…
More interesting reading , from Tom Clark on the AMSAT mailing list. ...
Narrow versus Wide FM
While discussing my experiments with weather satellite reception, I talked about how I made my recordings using the “WFM” or wide FM settings on my ...
Chatting on AO-51
It was positively chatty on the westward pass of AO-51 this morning. For fun, I reduced power to just 1w on my HT, and nobody ...
More weather satellite stuff…
Yawn. Recorded another satellite pass. Decoded it with my software. Played with it in GIMP. Part of the pass spoiled by an oddly synchronous signal, ...
Wow… RFI overload on the AO-51 downlink
I tried to work AO-51 from the parking lot at work tonight. It was a low pass, and just about every noise source in the ...
NH7WN and WA7SDI on AO-51
Robert (NH7WN) was my first QSL card for a contact via AO-51. I still owe him a QSL card, but to be fair, I haven’t ...
Packets from ANDE
Well, didn’t get any packets relayed through ANDE, but I did receive some W6SMU during its pass just before lunch. I have sworn that I ...
Bouncing Packets off the ISS
Using information from the post I mentioned earlier about operating via packet on the ISS, I decided to give it a try. It was a ...
43 Days to Delfi-C3 launch
This was mentioned on the AMSAT mailing list. In 43 days, the Delfi-C3 cubesat will be launched. After a 90 day mission, it will have ...
Basic Packet Setup for ARISS
Here’s a nice, concise overview of how to setup a conventional packet station to transmit via the ISS or via PCSAT-1. I might do a ...
The AO-7 Log and Resource Site
The amateur satellite AO-7 was launched on November 15th, 1974. It was thought to be lost for years, until recently when chemistry changes in the ...
Occidental Grand Flamenco Xcaret
Here is the Google satellite map of the area around the Occidental Grand Flamenco Xcaret where we stayed on our Mexico vacation. Toward the bottom ...
Acoustics at Chichen Itza
While touring at Chichen Itza, your guide will undoubtedly ask you to clap your hands while standing on the broad field in front of the ...
Chichen Itza
The blog has had no updates in the last week. The reason is simple: I was on vacation. Far away from the land of the ...
Daytime Satellite Pass, with some image processing…
Well, I was awake for a decent daytime pass of NOAA17, so I wandered out into my front yard, and recorded the pass. It was ...
Another night time satellite pass…
I haven’t had the time to record some of the NOAA17 passes during the day, but once night falls, I’ve managed to record a few ...
Night NOAA17 pass…
A bit of image processing with gimp yielded the following on a night time pass. It wasn’t particularly good with respect to noise: on the ...
I <3 Kitties
Lest you all think I’m merely a robotic automata without any sense of sentimentality or soul, I present the following. Thanks Alex for the link. ...
David Taylor’s Weather Satellites
Lots and lots of good information, rather Euro-centric (they seem to have lots more fun with satellites than we do here in the states) but ...
Best Satellite DX so far…
I was monitoring a routine pass of AO-51 this morning, just listening to some rag chewing, not really diving in myself, until we heard XF4YW ...
More weather satellite passes…
Well, I’ve been experimenting a bit more with some weather satellite reception, and on the off chance that anyone cares, I thought I’d write down ...
First attempt at receiving and decoding weather satellites…
Okay, this isn’t that impressive, but let me explain. Larger version of the same… I recorded about 4.5 minutes of audio from one of the ...
$25 TNC
Terminal node controllers are the “classic” approach to doing packet radio. They are basically dedicated modems that are used to implement a set of features ...
A PRACTICAL ROTATOR SYSTEM (APRS)®
I mostly just wander out and wave my antenna around when I work satellites. Someday, I might want an automated system, and this can be ...
Decoding APT weather satellites
With all the satellite mucking around I’ve been doing, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of building a little setup to receive weather satellite information ...
Filed under the heading “Daily Crackpot”….
Try reading some of this drivel. Rebel Science News ...
Asterisk on an FPGA
From the Beer, Coffee, and a little DSP » Blog Archive » Asterisk on an FPGA Over the past couple of years a few people ...
First real qso via GO-32…
I was experimenting with APRS messaging via GO-32 this morning, after being simply overrun by Mexican hams earlier in the morning on AO-51. W7KKE runs ...
Digipeated APRS Fix via the ISS
I looked at oscar.dcarr.org , and noted that the ISS packet radio feed appeared to be back up. We had a 15 degree pass to ...
ANDE deorbit website…
In about a month, the ANDE satellite (otherwise known as NO-61) will deorbit. Last night I was out hunting for it, and heard a single ...
To PCSAT-1 on 5w into an omni…
Now that I have a DC power converter in my car, I am able to run some experiments. Last night I left my radio in ...
APRS Hardware
Just a link to a webstore that carries stuff of interest to amateurs interested in APRS tracking. They have a chinese import HT for $90 ...
Android Developers Blog
Android is the mobile phone platform released by Google today. Here is a link to the Android Developers Blog . Google has promised $10 million ...
Causes of Death Are Linked to a Person’s Weight – New York Times
Causes of Death Are Linked to a Person’s Weight – New York Times About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight ...
The 500 KC Amateur Radio Experimental Group
I’ve been interested in low frequency radio (so-called “lowfer” operation) for quite some time. Because of the incredibly long wavelengths, lowfer operation relies on efficient ...
San Jose Mercury News – Google unveils mobile-phone software strategy
San Jose Mercury News – Google unveils mobile-phone software strategy the big news is that Google has gone generic, offering free software to anyone who ...
Two more contacts via AO-51…
I caught the westward pass of AO-51 tonight that began at 9:18pm local, and caught K7WIN (DM41) calling by his lonesome on the satellite. After ...
Dan Piponi is one hoopy frood…
Recently it may be hard to believe that I’ve read anything except for ham radio crap. I still read other stuff, I just haven’t been ...
Wall-E
This guy is now in our lobby at Pixar. You should be seeing him next June on the big screen. ...
New serial cable works, scripting for the TH-D7A
One of the reasons that I chose the Kenwood TH-D7A(G) as my hand held transceiver is its integration with packet radio. It includes a TNC ...
Earthquake… again…
Yep. Another earthquake. I had just gotten of the phone with Carmen when I felt the slow, periodic roll of an earthquake. The shaking was ...
First QSOs via AO-51
Well, I’m not much for operating really, but I have been trying to work up the courage actually talk on the AO-51 amateur satellite. It ...
How I track satellites…
I was chatting with my brother about my recent attempts at satellite tracking, and he expressed the opinion that it would be nice to present ...
AO-51 appears to live!
I was going to present a link the cool OSCAR Satellite Status page by KD5QGR because it can be useful for beginners to see which ...
Batting averages
It’s the third game of the World Series, and the score is tied 0-0. If you can’t find any enjoyment in the reality of the ...
Buried in an AO-27 Pileup
Well, I’m trying, but I’m finding that I need a third hand to work satellite handheld. Maybe some kind of tripod ala K7AGE would free ...
Programming the Kenwood TH-D7A
Modern ham transceivers are complex. Really complex. They have dozens and dozens of settings, hundreds of memories, and they are kind of a pain to ...
First Successful Satellite Communication!
Hey, a milestone for me. During my morning commute, I managed to actually send a position report to the amateur radio satellite GO-32, which got ...
More Satellite Stuff…
Well, I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything good this weekend. I spent some time mowing my lawn, pulling weeds, fertilizing, and ...
Pacificon
I spent yesterday wandering around Pacificon . Nothing too exciting to report: I picked up a book or two, no major purchases. The QRP related ...
The photon/XOR system
It’s 8:22AM, and I’m just waking up, checking my email and surveying my usual blogs with Google Reader. I don’t have time to explain why ...
Haskell Workshop 2007
In a break with my recent focus on radio related topics, I return to another topic that I’ve enjoyed before. The 2007 Haskell Workshop has ...
AO-51 Crashed?
From the AO-51 status page: AMSAT – AO-51 Control Team News At 1848Z 11 OCT over Europe, the software on AO-51 crashed, shutting down both ...
Hey, I can hear AO-51 from my car…
I noticed that a 56 degree elevation pass of the amateur satellite AO-51 was going to occur just after 9:00am this morning, while I was ...
FCC-1 Assembled
Last week I got my FCC-1 kit from the Norcal QRP club. It’s a nifty little PIC based frequency counter, and is quite inexpensive. It’s ...
AO-51 Special Event Station
Well, this is a bit late, but earlier today I read that the amateur satellite AO-51 was going to be a “special event” station. In ...
Baseball Memories: On this Day, 2003 — Oakland 5, Boston 4 in 12
Well, there is no post-season joy for the A’s this year, but as I glance in the left margin, I recall one of the most ...
What does RTTY look like?
I recorded some in Audacity. Here you can see the spectrum display. It wheedles back and forth between two tones which are clearly visible. You ...
Pascal Implementation
Pascal is one of my least favorite languages, but reading about how compilers work and examining real code of the (actually fairly simple) system works ...
Signals from the Galapagos — HC8N
While tinkering with my little TenTec receiver, I’ve been hearing a ton of radio teletype signals. Apparently it’s the CQWW RTTY contest this weekend, which ...
TenTec 1056, in a case!
Well, I finally bored some holes in the case (kind of banging it up a little in the process, next time, I’ll put tape over ...
J.S. Bach is probably rolling over in his grave…
Courtesy of the Good Math, Bad Math blog, check out the following video entitled: How to Write a Fugue. Oh, did I mention that it ...
Pattern for My TenTec 1056
Well, i was playing with the TenTec some more, and noticed that it wasn’t very mechanically stable . The VFO wanders considerably just from the ...
Recording from my TenTec 1056
Well, I feel stupid. After days of figuring out why I was getting an ugly feedback squeal coming everytime I tried to plug in my ...
National Talk Like a Pirate Day!
It’s that most auspicious of holidays: National Talk Like a PIrate Day. All ye scurvy dogs, y’ed best be ex-agg-eratin’ yer ayes and arrs lest ...
Ten Tec assembled, and it appears to work!
Well, I decided to tack together my Ten Tec 1056 receiver kit. It took me about three hours to assemble. It was pretty straightforward to ...
I’m the Cool Nerd King!
I blame Josh for making me take this test. ...
YASI — Amateur Radio Interferometry
Wow. This is just too cool. I got my TenTec 1056 receiver kit in the mail the other day, and was just randomly searching for ...
Technical Description of PSK31
The best description that I’ve found of PSK31 decoding is actually in the WinPSK Technical Manual. Its remarkably informative. WinPSK Technical Manual ...
Part of the 40m band, viewed graphically
This isn’t really all that amazing, but I thought I’d place it here anyway. As part of my experiments in decoding PSK31, I recorded a ...
Linus is channelling me!
Heh, I was following an innocuous link this morning, and found this little rant by Linus (yes, that linus) about the use of C instead ...
Rob Pike on Newsqueak
Rob Pike is an interesting guy. Formerly Bell Labs researcher, now at Google, Rob Pike has not only done more innovative and development in operating ...
Homebrew Ham Radio Reading
Yep, I’m still on my radio kick. Ran across a link to this interesting book, available for download as a bunch of PDF files that ...
Copper Plating and Etching Altoids Tins
So called “steam punk” has been getting fairly popular lately. The idea is to take modern implements and reimplement and restyle them as if they ...
On Ham Radio…
In one of my previous posts , reader Jim suggested that: The use of digital modes in amateur radio really puzzles me. The beauty of ...
Huzzah! PSK31 on my Drake 2-B
Well, after listening to one of the soldersmoke podcasts which described the old Drake 2-B as one of the premier communications receivers of all time, ...
Rear Panel of My Drake 2B
Well, not the rear panel of my Drake 2B. The markings on the back of mine have faded considerably, so much so that it is ...
Apple Infuriates iPhone Early Adopters
The original Apple iPhone was released on June 29th of this year. 68 days later, Apple announces that they are cutting the price by $200. ...
SolderSmoke
Recently, my brain has shifted back into ham radio mode. My license had expired back in May, and I decided to renew it, and as ...
Oscilloscope Demo
YouTube – Youscope (oscilloscope demo) Awesome. ...
Tuesday Morning’s Lunar Eclipse
Those of us on the west coast are going to be treated to a pretty nice lunar eclipse on Tuesday morning. Check out the details ...
Predicting Satellite Orbits
I was interested in figuring out when the next pass of the ISS was going to occur, and was reminded of the interesting mathematics involved ...
Decades of NASA photos, video coming to the Web
All I’ve got to saw is awesome . Decades of NASA photos, video coming to the Web | Tech news blog – CNET News.com The ...
Juan Buhler / Morning Fun
Juan Buhler, fellow Pixarian and exceedingly talented photographer, has a new gallery of cool photos up today. He said in his email: I was in ...
Viewing the Sky
The latest version of Google Earth has a mode where you can view objects in the sky as well. Very neat! Viewing the Sky – ...
PSK31 Web receiver
I’ve got quite a bit going on lately, which is why I haven’t been posting all that much. For some reason, I’m back in a ...
Damaged shuttle Endeavour lands safely – Yahoo! News
This morning I was listening to a local 2m repeater on the way into work. They were rebroadcasting the NASA feed which happened to be ...
Crystal Radio Patent
I was reading one of my books about crystal radios the other day, and they mentioned this patent. It’s hard to imagine the time period ...
NASA – Mira: A Star with a Comets Tail
Had you asked me what Mira was before this week, I would have (correctly) told you that it is the name of a variable star. ...
Hacking the Hot Wheels Radar Gun
It’s amazing how inexpensive technology can be. The new “toy” Mattel Hot Wheels radar guns have, well, a real radar gun inside. As in a ...
Examining Will Crowthers Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky
Digital Humanities Quarterly has published a fascinating article about Will Crowther’s original Adventure game. It turns out that it is closely modelled on a real ...
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Well, the latest installment of the Harry Potter series was down to a mere two showings per day so I figured if I was gonna ...
Tears of St. Lawrence
Well, I wasn’t going to stay up past midnight to see the best of it, but I did wander outside tonight at around 11:30 for ...
The LAMBDA-Method For Fast GPS Surveying
I spent some time today looking at technical information about GPS receivers. I had known for some time that it was possible to determine the ...
Phew, back from SIGGRAPH
Well, I’m back. Hope you all didn’t miss me too much. I ‘ll try to provide links to some of the papers that I liked, ...
Defcon 15: Undercover reporter flees
I proudly accept the label of “hacker”. That word gets tossed around alot , and means different things to different people, but I mean it ...
Matt Blaze: California voting systems code review now released
Keeping in the entire “hacker” theme, I read today on Bruce Schneier’s blog that code reviews of three voting machines that are proposed for use ...
Puppy vs. Kitten
I’ve written before about my cat Scrappy: the partially feral cat who now bitches at me if I don’t pet him enough. He went through ...
Late night hacking…
I was tired and cranky all day. My wife is asleep, but I’m hacking on my laptop in the dark. How lame is that? This ...
Bugs Bunny, greatest banned player ever
U.S.S. Mariner » Blog Archive » Bugs Bunny, greatest banned player ever The exclusion of non-human players like Bunny is another shameful example of the ...
Schneier on Security: Conversation with Kip Hawley
Bruce Schneier was invited to come to Washington to talk with Kip Hawley, head of the TSA. He’s currently putting up a five part article ...
Apologies for brief not-so-brief downtime…
I was attempting to upgrade some unrelated packages on my FreeBSD server, with the net result that something truly horrible happened (and which I don’t ...
John’s Combinatory Logic Playground
All this mucking around in the ICFP contest (I decoded the all the gene tables yesterday, woohoo) has sent me back thinking about simple machines ...
Playing with the ICFP contest…
Well, I didn’t have time to actually do the challenge this year, but I’m trying to work through it here. I made some significant progress, ...
Happy Birthday Brainwagon!
Today, five years ago, I posted my first message to the newly christened brainwagon.org. Now, a couple of thousand posts and a thousand comments later, ...
Tallyho! ICFP Contest Underway
Well, I am still on vacation, but took time out this morning to skim the problem description for the 2007 ICFP programming contest . It ...
Oakland Athletics…
have just dropped their 8th game in a row, in truly ugly style. They now are 12 games back of the Angels, and 10 back ...
False Copyright Claims
One of my personal pet peeves are companies that try to assert intellectual property rights over material which has entered the public domain. It’s everywhere ...
Odd plays…
Okay, I haven’t posted anything about baseball lately, so I thought I’d remark about the oddest play I’ve heard of this week. No, it wasn’t ...
I hate Integrated Development Environments
Why do people think these things are a good idea? I don’t get it. Yesterday, I received an Arduino microcontroller board in the mail. These ...
Eating your own food…
I love food. I mean I really love it. I love the culture. I love the taste. I love the social aspects of food. I ...
iPhone Field Test Mode
This came across a mailing list I’m on: Inside the iPhone field test mode – Blog – WirelessInfo.com Basically if you dial: *3001#12345#* Then you ...
EFF receives documents on FBI abuses
The EFF filed a request for documents pertaining to invesigations within the FBI on abuses of National Security Letters. They replied with over 1100 pages ...
Web Development for iPhone
Here’s Apple’s documentation for developing web stuff for the iPhone. It’s not all that surprising mostly, but it is good to keep a link to ...
My List of Ten Improvements Needed for the iPhone
Okay, I bought one. I’ve had it for 24 hours, and I really like it. It’s slick. It’s got lots of cool features. And it ...
OpenMoko
It seems only fair that I give a link to a new telephone product that has more of my ideals in mind: witness openmoko.com , ...
Are 80 Columns Enough?
Slashdot asks the question “Are 80 Columns Enough?” Luckily, we have several hundred years of “best practice” in trying to typeset material for maximum legibility ...
Brainwagon Radio
For those relative newcomers to my blog, it might shock them to find that I actually used to record a rather geeky podcast. After recording ...
Gyroscopically stabilized CD-player(s) in microgravity
Here is an awesome demonstration of gyroscopic stabilization, as well as a sure indication that duct tape is useful, even in space. YouTube – Gyroscopically ...
Transformers on the Wii: It Blows
I felt like I needed a new game. I was at Best Buy. I saw the new Transformers game on the shelf. I thought it ...
50 Dollar Paint Job
I’ve seen some bad paint jobs on cars recently. One guy had some kind of Franken-car that looked like half Gremlin, half Honda, lowered, with ...
Happy Independence Day!
In between cookouts, fireworks, going to see movies about giant robots or rat chefs , I hope that some of you will take a moment ...
Weekly Geekshow Podcast
I’ve been listening to some new podcasts today. A particularly nice podcast dealing with geeky topics such as video games, and showing particularly insightful comments ...
Ongoing Construction…
Well, I shook up the blog a little bit, and as is typical, a few things broke. Most notably, my feedburner feed was screwed for ...
Ten Largely Irrelevent Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone
I must admit it: I’m beginning to contemplate purchasing an iPhone. They are just very, very cool. I mean, really cool. I know it won’t ...
Ratatouille/iPhone Caption Contest
Why didn’t I think of this? Check out the Ratatouille/iPhone Photo Caption Contest over at Steve Ivy’s monkinetic blog. [tags]Ratatouille,iPhone,Contest[/tags] ...
The Brain Wagon
Len Peralta has a nifty little website called monsterbymail.com . For a modest fee, he’ll draw you a monster with the name you specify, and ...
Theme Instability
I’m sick of my default theme. I’m starting with something minimal, and then trying to improve it. Consider the look to be somewhat in flux. ...
What’s wrong with cell phones, and why the iPhone might change the game…
Okay, my previous post detailed why I think most criticisms of the iPhone are off target. But what features the iPhone does or doesn’t have ...
Topsy Turvy
ɹÇÊŒÇ buıɥʇ ʇsÇ1ooÉ” Çɥʇ ʇsnظ sı sıɥʇ ...
QOTD
Too old for Facebook? « Scobleizer I’ve been on Facebook about a month now. I have just about 2,000 friends. I think I’d categorize this ...
DVD homebrewing…
Every once in a while, I try to make some actual DVDs using software that I have lying around the house (namely, an Ubuntu box). ...
Dramatic Chipmunk
This just made me crack up this morning: YouTube – Dramatic Chipmunk Addendum: It’s a prairie dog, not a chipmunk. ...
TechShop Open House
Yesterday and today, the TechShop in Menlo Park held an open house. I had heard of this place before, but it is in Menlo Park, ...
Whacky Computer Music Story of the Day…
Boing Boing: Symphony for old IBM mainframe In 1964, an Icelandic IBM 1401 mainframe engineer figured out how to get the machine to emit beautiful, ...
Best iPhone Quote of the Day
From Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog: Let me say right up front that I have not accepted the Jesus Phone as my personal Lord ...
Ratatouille Opens! iPhone arrives!
Phew. I was on Ratatouille for almost two years, and today it’s finally in theaters. I wonder if all you crazy people camped out waiting ...
So Long Brown v. Education…
I hope that the ghost of Chief Justice Earl Warren rises from his grave to haunt the Supreme Court. Prepare to set your clocks back ...
A Visit from Atlantis
Holy spy satellites Bat Man! Check out this awesome image of the ISS taken from the Clay Center Observatory in Boston with a 25″ telescope. ...
Morse v. Frederick
First of all, I’d like to just say one thing: BONG HITS 4 JESUS How many of you felt that this phrase was trying to ...
Schneier on Security: Risks of Data Reuse
I know I’ve been a bit over the map with my postings lately, but I’ve been catching up on my blogroll, and there are some ...
Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time…
Over on Eric Wolf’s blog, he writes an interesting post about the Internet boom phenomenon: Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise ...
SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers
I was reminded that the deadline for cheaper prices for attending SIGGRAPH is this Friday. That reminded me that I had not gone out and ...
25th Anniversary of BladeRunner
Slashdot had an article today marking the 25th anniversary of the release of Ridley Scott’s vision of Bladerunner , and points at Mythbuster Adam Savage’s ...
Hydra Console Game Dev. Kit
The Hydra Consome Game Developer’s Kit is getting quite a bit of play on various blogs. It’s a little game console based upon the Propeller ...
Reports on Mogo, a computer program for playing Go
I’ve read quite a bit about computer chess and checkers (although my own program, Milhouse, has been fairly stagnant for over a month). I’ve read ...
A quick test of ocropus
If you wandered into my office, you’d probably be shocked by the vast amount of just raw paper I have lying around. I scribble notes, ...
Early patent on mechanical television…
I was noodling around, and found reference to a patent on an early “mirror screw” version of mechanical television. Don’t know that that is? Don’t ...
Code Challenge
If you read the same blogs as me or if you watch the same nerd TV show as me, you might have an inkling about ...
Your Taxpayer Funded Robotics Software Available for Download
NASA has released their CLARAty framework for robotics to the public for download. JPL Robotics: News CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. ...
Vinyl Data
Show a kid a 3.5″ floppy disk today, and he might look at you in quizzically. Show him a 5.25″ floppy, and he’ll think you ...
Web Interface for Chess Endgame Databases
Ran across this rather nice applet that lets you probe the Nalimov endgame databases to evaluate chess endgames. Very nice! Web Query for Nalimov Endgame ...
ICFP Programming Contest 2007
It’s about a month until the ICFP programming contest begins, and I’ve found out that I’m scheduled to return from Vegas the day of the ...
Nintendo Wiimote Theremin with Moog Little Phatty
Tom and I have briefly discussed how someone might use a Wii controller in performing and controlling electronic music. Here’s a simple example, originally snarfed ...
A Couple of Capsule Movie Reviews
This weekend was a double-movie weekend. On Friday night, I went out to see the new Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer movie with ...
Just what the heck is Ratatouille, anyway?
With the release of our movie just a couple of weeks away, you might be asking yourself “what is Ratatouille, anyway?” It’s not a very ...
Nandsynth
It’s been a while since I posted a link to anythng about making annoying sounds music, but it’s Friday, so this link is for Tom. ...
QOTD: Was teaching kids BASIC as a first programming language really fatal?
Dijkstra once famously claimed (well, perhaps not anymore, since fewer and fewer learn BASIC): It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that ...
Cuckoo Hashing, Theory and Practice
In an effort to try to continue to claim that I know something about computer science, I’ve been trying to find some good blogs in ...
Happy Birthday Don Newcombe!
Scanning my list of baseball birthday’s at the right, I see that today is the birthday of Don Newcombe. Newcombe was the subject of one ...
How Skype & Co. get round firewalls
I didn’t know how this worked. Now I do. Interesting. ...
Gorgeous Couple at The Ratatouille Wrap Party…
Well, it is a few days later, but here is a picture of me and the missus at the Pixar Ratatouille Wrap party. The picture ...
WiFi enabled digital cameras/cards: a good idea?
I was reading the article linked below about why WiFi enabled cameras or cards aren’t a good idea. » Wi-Fi-enabled digital cameras: Five reasons why ...
Modern Device Company
Modern Device Company has an Arduino like microcontroller board for only $15 in kit form, $22 assembled. That’s just too cheap for words. Maybe my ...
A physics teacher begs for his subject back
It’s no secret that I believe that primary and secondary education in this country is basically abysmal, with minor pockets of competency and occasional bright ...
More Panorama Noodling…
Okay, since I went to the trouble of actually doing a bit of panorama stitching on Linux, I thought I’d go ahead and make a ...
San Francisco From Angel Island
Yesterday, we had our group wrap-up-party excursion. We settled on a leisurely bikeride around Angel Island, accompanied by barbecued ribs and chicken. It was a ...
Ratatouille Wrap Party Highlights
Well, we wrapped up Ratatouille production (well, almost) with a wrap party on Saturday at the Masonic auditorium in San Francisco. Carmen had a lovely ...
Meraki
One of the mailing lists I was on suggested that the best way to provide network access to a neighborhood was to use a mesh ...
Interesting Documents According to MC
I was engaging in a little computer archaelogy this morning, looking up some historical information, and discovered this page chock-a-block full of interesting reading. Lots ...
JP Brown’s Serious LEGO – CubeSolver
One of the mailing lists I’m on pointed out the following project to make a LEGO robot that could solve the Rubik’s cube: JP Brown’s ...
Security, Counter Measures, Half Measures, and The Real Thing
Security is mostly theater: you are forced to take off your shoes or surrender your shampoo, but random testing of airport security checkpoints reveal that ...
The Slug Lives Again!
I brought up my old Linksys NSLU2 again, after upgrading it to the unslung firmware and installing a 512Mb usb stick to serve as the ...
May 25th is Towel Day
Carry a towel around tomorrow. Why? In the words of the sage: A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar ...
Homebrew CPU Home
The other cool project that I saw was Bill (sorry, can’t remember his last name, and I couldn’t find it on his webpage) Buzbee’s homebrew ...
My Favorite Thing @ The Makers Faire: Tom Zimmerman and his DIY video microscope
I saw lots of cool stuff at the Makers Faire, but the thing which evoked the greatest “this is a cool idea that I could ...
Yesterday the Makers Faire — Today, Bay To Breakers!
Yep. Despite the fact that I’ve let my exercise program lapse, I’m off for the 7 point something mile race from the Bay to the ...
To the Maker’s Faire!
Today I’m heading to the Maker’s Faire! Perhaps I’ll see you there! ...
Idle Python inspired by Idle Thoughts on FoxMaths
I have a number of mathematical blogs in my blogroll: one I have found to be reasonably interesting is FoxMaths. Today, he had some idle ...
Subtlety in Algorithms: Binary Search and Alpha-Beta
John Bentley demonstrates quite adequately in his book Programming Pearls that to write even the simplest program, say, one that does binary search, is frequently ...
Random Thought — What happened to Prolog?
Back when I was in college, there was considerable interest in Prolog and logic programming languages, but you scarcely hear about it at all anymore. ...
Rounding the first marker…
Was at work till midnight last night, and that was the highlight of my day. One remaining shot is kicking my ass, but other than ...
Curt Schilling has a blog?
Who knew? Probably every baseball fan on the Internet except me. He actually had some interesting things to say about the signing of Roger Clemens ...
Minimum Sudoku
As I worked on my checkers program, I’ve gone to a number of bookstores looking for books on checkers. Unfortunately, checkers has gone the way ...
Entering the home stretch…
If all goes well, by Friday I should be done with Ratatouille. If all doesn’t go well, I’ll be more tired and I probably still ...
Boredom, 10% of your Brain, and The Awesome Power of Spare Cycles
I spend what I think is a very substantial part of my life thinking. Not the usual kinds of thinking, like what am I having ...
Checker Endgames with only Kings
I haven’t had any time to work on my checkers program with any degree of concentration. I was trying to work out some of the ...
A few notes..
I’m on what is scheduled to be my last week of production on Ratatouille. If my blog isn’t fascinating in the degree that you have ...
Jonathan Coulton made me laugh today…
My wife has been trying to get me to listen to a song called “Code Monkey” from someone named Jonathan Coulton . I didn’t have ...
Overpass Collapses, Many People Annoyed for Months
I dropped in at work over the weekend (we are in the final death throes of production on Ratatouille, so I’m basically doing 7 days ...
More on Flash Video…
My brother mocked my use of ffmpeg to create flash video as I did a couple of days ago. He sent me this set of ...
Struggling with Milhouse…
My checkers program has developed some annoying quirks (read: bugs) and I haven’t made any good progress in figuring them out, except to assertain that ...
Micro-Max, a TEENY chess program
During my lunchbreak, I ran across this miniscule chess program. Very, very neat. Micro-Max ...
Historic Paper on Transposition Tables
Today was a miserable day for my checkers program. I suspected that some of the cases that were causing me some difficulty in the puzzles ...
More links on search and computer game playing
Bruce Morleland has some excellent stuff on his Computer Chess page, including some details on transposition tables that seems useful. ...
The Internet Movie Database
I didn’t realize that the data for The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was available for download as plain text files. Did you? Thanks to the ...
Progress with Milhouse
My checkers playing program milhouse is currently advancing at a good clip. I’ve added iterative deepening and a transposition table, and probably will add a ...
Lennart Augustsson on Automatic Differentiation
Lennart has a nice writeup on automatic differentiation in Haskell. I keep trying to come up with a reason to learn more about Haskell, and ...
Cat on video…
Caught Sam’s cat on the wireless webcam, but mostly this is just a test of the embedded flash player. Addendum: Here is WP-FLV, the WordPress ...
Baseball and Programming…
Well, I had maxed my vacation time out again, so was forced to take a day off. Oh darn. My son and I decided to ...
Milhouse still has some confusing bugs…
Well, I’ve got my first trivial attempts at alpha-beta search working, and my confidence in the general framework that I had constructed was growing, when ...
Why I don’t leave the ballpark early…
If you are one of those people who leaves the ballpark early, all I can say is shame on you. SHAME! Today was an excellent ...
Milhouse solves its first (trivial) Checker Puzzle
With white to have the first move, my checkers program was able to chart its way to a win for white. Here’s the log. It’s ...
Gutenberg Gem: People’s Handy Atlas of the World
Sure, it’s from 1910, but it’s a free atlas. Maps are kind of cool. Enjoy. People’s Handy Atlas of the World [tags]Public Domain,Project Gutenberg[/tags] ...
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84
Sadly, one of my favorite authors has joined the choir invisible. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 – BOOKS – MSNBC.com I want to stay ...
More reading…
Combinatorial Generation by Frank Luskey . Seems generally useful for a variety of puzzles that I have been pondering lately. Addendum: I didn’t find this ...
Logos
I wanted to augment a webpage that I use to keep track of MLB games with team logos. Here they are. <td> <img decoding="async" src="https://brainwagon.org/images/mlb-logos/atl.gif"/ ...
Debugging…
I didn’t have much time to work on my checkers program this weekend. Still, in the back of my head, I was troubled by something: ...
Was Hank Aaron really that good?
My son innocently asked “was Hank Aaron really that good?” while they were flashing stats showing how various active players might have a shot at ...
Checkers, Milhouse, and Poe…
In some of my reading up on checkers, I encountered this quotation from Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue : I will, therefore, take occasion ...
Thank you Stanford: Copyright Renewal Database
The usual easy rule to deciding whether a particular book is under copyright (at least in the U.S.) is to examine its publication date: works ...
Lincke’s Thesis: Exploring the Computational Limits of Large Exhaustive Search Problems
Thomas Lincke invented a technique called “drop-out-expansion” for the automatic construction of opening books. That seemed like a pretty nifty thing: it’s used by Martin ...
Another paper on endgame databases in Checkers…
Dodgen and Trice talk about their 7 piece perfect play endgame database, which can be used to guarantee wins or stall defeats as long as ...
Lego Robot Bowls Perfect Game on Wii Sports
Truly, this guy has more metachlorians than I do. BattleBricks: WiigoBot, The Perfect Game [tags]Wii,Lego[/tags] ...
Triangular Peg Solitaire
Courtesy of The Unapologetic Magician , check out George Bell’s paper Solving Peg Solitaire on arxiv.org. [tags]Mathematical Recreations,Games[/tags] ...
Welcome to Google TiSP
Find out a bit more about Google’s new free wireless broadband service! Frankly, I bet it stinks. ...
Things like this make my head hurt…
I have thought about dusting off my never-finished (or even really started) checkers program that I aborted work on about three years ago. I basically ...
92 ways to place 8 queens on a chessboard…
such that no queen attacks any other queen. It’s a simple (really simple) program to write, but I can’t remember having done it. So I ...
Claude Shannon on Chess
Claude Shannon’s paper Programming a computer to play chess from 1950. Good stuff from the history of computer science. [tags]Claude Shannon, Chess[/tags] Addendum: A terrific ...
Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles
Cool. Scans of Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles . Neat! Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles [tags]Puzzles[/tags] ...
Morning Baseball Learnin’…
I was bored with the scouting reports on XM this morning, so I surfed over to channel 200 where Bob Dylan was playing music with ...
Cool Superconductor Video
Thanks to Tom for calling this to my attention. ...
Why is it so hard to find a file with the MLB schedule in it?
Shame on you Major League Baseball. I was hoping to find a file that contained the date and times for all the major league games ...
The Debate On Net Neutrality by Hsing Kenneth Cheng et. al…
A few weeks ago, I remember this research getting a bit of press, but I didn’t have the time to track down the link to ...
Calendar File for Athletics Games
I know it is incredibly gauche to still use ancient Unix utilities like calendar(1) to keep track of things, but then, I am incredibly gauche. ...
Popular Works involving Mathematics
As you can tell, I’m on a bit of a mathematics bender lately. While digging around for new material, I found this rather nice bibliography ...
The Angel Problem has been Solved! (Maybe)
Over at Neighborhood of Infinity, there’s a mention that the Angels and Devil game might have been solved. Don’t know what it is? It’s a ...
2, 23, 2357, …
If you take the sequence of primes, and concatenate the first n of them together, how many of these are prime? It’s not hard to ...
Pet Food Recall
Apparently a pretty serious pet food recall is underway. I caught this on the news, and since I’m such a softie for the well being ...
357686312646216567629137 is a prime number
Big deal you say? Strike the initial 3 off. The remaining number is also prime. Continue striking them off, one at a time. All the ...
Thinking about sex…agesimal numbers
Ever wonder why our clocks divide hours into sixty minutes of sixty seconds? What’s up with the sixty? I mean, factors of five and ten ...
Hypermiling: Extreme Fuel Conservation by Unorthodox Driving
We’d all like to get better gas mileage from our cars. Well, me especially. My Ford Expedition isn’t exactly the cheapest car to put on ...
Gutenberg Gem: Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
I know a couple of readers of mine are interested in woodworking, so when I saw Handiwork in Wood come by on the recently completed ...
Building a RayTracer in a Weekend
I’ve done this before, it’s kind of a fun little project to do. “Under your desk, you’ll find a computer and a C compiler. Write ...
Don Knuth’s Dancing Links and Algorithm X
Tom does probably as much if not as more code tinkering as I do, and his is probably more interesting. At lunch today he mentioned ...
Flight Simulation Papers
I was pondering the universe of flight simulation last night. Found some online references which I’ll archive here for fun: Npsnet: Flight Simulation Dynamic Modeling ...
Gutenberg Gem: A Field Book of the Stars by William Tyler Olcott
Need an introductory guide to the stars? You could worse than downloading William Tyler Olcott’s A Field Book of the Stars . It’s not the ...
Pi Day – Einstein’s Birthday – A National Science Holiday?
While I was up in Truckee this weekend with some of my old college buddies, David said that his daughter had received an assignment which ...
Reno — a trip of some firsts…
Carmen and I got back from a trip to Truckee/Reno. She wanted to take skiing lessons, so we did. We both did well and had ...
Gosper’s Acceleration of Series
While working on my various and sundry Ï€ programs, I kept finding references to Gosper’s paper Acceleration of Series , so I thought I’d find ...
Serbian vampire hunters prevent Milosevic come-back
You just can’t make crap like this up. ...
Billionth Hex Digit of π
Well, after tinkering around with my implementation of the BBP algorithm a bit more, i was able to get it to work out until about ...
Cornell University has scans of Scientific American
As part of Cornell Uniersity’s Making of America , they have scans of Scientific American from 1846-1869 . Very nice, albeit with their rather obtuse ...
Online Math Textbooks
Textbooks are expensive, but useful. Check out this collection of links to online mathematics textbooks . I found this link in a posting on the ...
Bit Twiddling Hacks
I had need for a reminder of a bit twiddling hack that I had forgotten, and found this useful page that included many I don’t ...
Hex Digits of π
The 10 hex digits of π starting at the 10 millionth place after the decimal point (is it really a decimal point if you are ...
History of Knot Theory
Courtesy of the Unapologetic Mathematician , here’s a link to a History of Knot Theory from Jozel Przytycki’s book on the subject. I’ve got a ...
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, courtesy of Librivox
Need something to listen to on a really long trip? Librivox has just completed a huge audiobook version of the sixth edition of Charles Darwin’s ...
Pi, 10m digits, 3m11s, 20 minutes to program…
While playing around with the <a http://gmplib.org">GNU Bignum library and Mersenne primes, I decided to code up a simple program to compute pi to an ...
Recreational Math: The Kruskal Count
This is the kind of paper I read when I have a lunch hour by myself at the local sushi bar. [math/0110143] The Kruskal Count ...
SeisMac
Through some convergence of factors (namely, my experience trying to read the accelerometers in the Wii remote, last night’s earthquake, and this mornings blear eyed ...
Yet another quake…
A pretty good jolt this time, really close (epicenter only a couple of miles away) with some pretty good rolling. Recent Earthquakes – Info for ...
Compute the largest known prime, from a .signature file
Okay, most of the ones of these I’ve written have been at least a little obscure or obfuscated. This one is entirely straightforward, and is ...
Fun computing mersenne primes…
sieve completed... 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**3 - 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**5 - 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**7 ...
Canada rejects anti-terror laws
It seems that our neighbors to the north have sobered up on the whole anti-terrorism laws issue. Their Supreme Court recently revoked a law that ...
A Big Prime
Take the numbers from 82 stepping down to one, and write them all out together. You get a very big number. 828180797877767574737271706968676665646362616059585756555453525150494847464544\\ 43424140393837363534333231302928272625242322212019181716151413121110987654321 It’s prime. ...
An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation
My daily sail upon the seas of the Internet blew me ashore on An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation , a book on implementing ...
Cat wheel II by Richard Norton
Perhaps this could be adapted to help me get exercise…. YouTube – Cat wheel II by Richard Norton ...
Pet Peeve of the Day
C’mon folks. It’s 2007 for pete’s sake. Why are there still programs which can’t be built on 64 bit machines ? Yes, it can be ...
Classic Texts in Computer Science
A great collection of links to Classic Texts in Computer Science . ...
Simple Nested Dielectrics in Ray Traced Images
A discussion of how to properly handle liquid inside glasses in a raytracer made me look up the scheme that I had implemented once before, ...
Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
Over twenty years ago, I first read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs , which I still consider to be the most amazing computer science ...
OpenGL Pitfalls, or how I wasted most of an evening…
I’ve worked on computer graphics for over twenty years now. Through some quirk of fate, I have spent nearly all of my time programming batch ...
Motion Capture Done Dirt Cheap
I had the vaguest recollection of a SIGGRAPH sketch on creating an armature wired with potentiometers for creating an inexpensive motion capture setup. A bit ...
Chaos and Feigenbaum’s Constant
Years ago, I read Gleick’s Chaos , and my recent diversion into calculating various numbers to high degrees of precision made me think about Feigenbaum’s ...
Why Understanding Programs is Hard
It’s actually not just hard in the sense that you normally think of as hard. You might think that if you worked hard, you could ...
Goofing around with the Wii Remote
In between sessions of zelda (currently in the Lake Temple, total elapsed time just over fourteen hours), I’ve been considering just how cool the Wii ...
Macrovision’s Response to Steve Jobs’ Open Letter
Dear me. Macrovision has its panties all in a bunch over Steve Jobs’ recent “Open Letter” which has received a lot of attention in the ...
Osama Team Hunger Force
Regular Expression Matching Can Should Be Simple And Fast
Yesterday Tom mentioned this article linked from Lambda The Ultimate the other day, and I finally got around to reading it today. Regular Expression Matching ...
Wii have liftoff…
Yep, Carmen stood in line for three hours at our local Toys R Us this morning, and now I have a Wii. Couple of quick ...
Spigot program for computing e…
I went ahead and coded up a version of the spigot algorithm for computing e. It makes a nice three line .signature program. Here are ...
I’m apparently Dr. Doom!
Your results: You are Dr. Doom Dr. Doom <td> <hr ALIGN=LEFT NOSHADE SIZE=4 WIDTH=65/> </td> <td> 65% </td> </tr> <tr> <td> Apocalypse </td> <td> <hr ...
Spigot algorithms for computing decimal digits of Pi
Check out the paper linked from this blog post. I haven’t read this one before. More later if I get the chance, maybe even some ...
Now appearing the “Hope Springs Eternal” department…
Wired: Monkeybites Internet Software Blog from Wired.com There are still major issues. I haven’t had any stability problems, but there are bad memory leaks. Gran ...
Robot Ride
This just so totally rocks… [tags]Robot,Amusement,Google Video[/tags] ...
Animation Test from Ratatouille
I don’t plug my employer very often, but I must admit, I’m having enormous fun working on our current project, and received a message from ...
Ed Felton on Jobs’ DRM Comments
The net is abuzz with the comments that Steve Jobs made about DRM the other day. The best commentary that I’ve found (meaning, the person ...
Spring Cleaning…
I may bring this website down for a bit of spring cleaning this weekend. It’s been running without problem for somewhere close to six years, ...
Comet Between Fireworks and Lightning
Check out the amazing “Astronomy Picture of the Day”. Damn, wish I could have seen that. ...
DRM on 9/11 Commission Report
A bunch of different blogs are complaining about the fact that the important 9/11 Commission report is protected by DRM. If you try to copy ...
If Google’s motto is “do no evil”, then…
apparently Lycos’ motto is “never miss an opportunity to piss off your customers”. Addendum: Lycos? Are they still in business? ...
Boston LED terror scare, oh dear lord…
Just read the coverage. If LEDs and batteries are the telltale signs of terrorism, I can only hope that nobody searches my house. Still, I ...
Hubble Space Telescope Main Camera Disabled
The Hubble’s main ACS camera appears to have suffered a short circuit that has resulted in the camera powering down and entering a safe mode. ...
Isn’t it time to move on?
Today, Microsoft has finally released their long coming upgrade to the venerable XP line. I’d say that now is the perfect time for you to ...
Adam Dunkels’ Contiki Operating System
Adam Dunkels Contiki operating system sported a full TCP/IP stack, and ran on very small microcomputers such as the Commodore 64. Apparently now he’s submitted ...
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
Apparently, this memo has been out for a while, but I hadn’t seen it before. I know, I like to rant about Microsoft a lot, ...
Some Interesting Books, Licensed under Creative Commons
Here are a bunch of books that are licensed under the Creative Commons and for the most part can be freely downloaded, read, and even ...
Folding Paper in Half Twelve Times
On Mythbusters tonight, they covered an interesting myth: that it is impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than seven times. My ...
Gutenberg Gems: The Outline of Science, Volume 1 of 4, by J. Arthur Thomson.
I like to read old science books. They serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come, or just as often, how ignorant we remain. ...
Teleramics – Insulator collecting UK
Every once in a while, you encounter a person who collects something truly odd. This guy has a website dedicated to the insulators that are ...
WordPress 2.1 Ella
The new WordPress 2.1 Ella was released about 17 hours ago, and since this coincided with a few minutes of boredom, I upgraded. Check out ...
Flatland: The Movie
When I was probably ten or twelve years old, I remember that the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott somehow came to my attention, probably through ...
Wii didn’t get up early enough.
We woke up and got in line for the Best Buy in hopes that we might get a Wii. They had fifty. We were fifty ...
Mostly on Stuff Related to Origami and Papercraft…
I’ve mentioned it before: when you are interested in as many strange things as I am, web surfing can be dangerous to your time. Lately ...
The NHL’s All-Star voting disaster
Let’s face it: I’m not Canadian, so I don’t really care about hockey. But still, I found the following story to be both amusing and ...
Pinhole Camera
During a stop to the new Coppola winery in Healdsburg, I noticed that they had a kit for a pinhole camera on sale for a ...
The Mistake Some People Make
You only need to make one mistake when it snows in Portland: that’s trying to drive at all. Here’s a clue: walk to your car. ...
Viewing a V4L webcam with mplayer…
This took me a few minutes, but I figured it out, and archived it here so I wouldn’t need to spend that time again. mplayer ...
The Art of Computational Science
It’s sometimes odd to think of the ways that the eddies and currents buffet you around while reading on the Internet. Frequently, you encounter odd ...
Of the Just Shaping of Letters
When I dropped into Tom’s office earlier today, he mentioned that he had found a copy of Albrecht Durer’s Of the Just Shaping of Letters ...
Comet McNaught
I should have mentioned this before, but in case anyone didn’t know, there’s been a naked eye comet visible in the west as the sun ...
A Paint-Brush Laser Range Scanner
Another link stashed away for safe keeping: A Paint-Brush Laser Range Scanner It’s really quite clever in the way it uses a double frame to ...
First experiments in computer vision…
Despite having done quite a bit of computer graphics over the years (even getting paid to do it), I haven’t really done much in the ...
Low Cost Motion Capture
Just thought I’d stash a reference to this paper on low cost motion capture . It uses two webcams to track the lower half of ...
Apple introduces iPhone
Unfortunately, it won’t be available until the middle of the year, but Apple today announced the iPhone, which isn’t just a phone, but in fact ...
Back to work…
Well, after an extended vacation, today is my first day back at work. My desk is as messy as I remembered, and I’ve got a ...
Could I have sold a lot of baby food, or what?
During my visit last week, I scanned some of the family pictures, including this cute one of, well, me. Honestly, how cute is this? ...
Visiting “The Rock” — Alcatraz State Penitentiary
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for almost sixteen years, but there are still many tourist-y things that I have never done. Often, it requires ...
Tactical nuclear slide rule – Google Patents
I was mucking around doing patent searches on Google, and came up with the following interestingly titled patent: Tactical nuclear slide rule . A calculational ...
Upgraded WordPress…
I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.05. It seems to have gone smoothly, but as always, if you spot something amiss, bring it to my ...
ASQ test
I got 37. I’m not really surprised. ...
Dusty Paper on the Hough Transform
The Hough transform is a fairly standard computer vision algorithm for detecting lines (and with extensions, more general shapes) in images. I hadn’t thought about ...
Happy New Years!
Goodbye 2006, and good riddance. Hello 2007, be kind. [tags]Happy New Years[/tags] ...
Zito keeps his Bart Pass, pockets some extra change…
Major League Baseball : News : Major League Baseball News Left-handed pitcher Barry Zito has agreed to a seven-year, $126 million contract, according to The ...
More minor shaking…
I woke up at 5:30 this morning to let the cat out (he has me trained really well) and thought that I might have felt ...
HD Video Capture Via Mac
Today I was goofing around with hooking a firewire cable to the Motorola DCT-6412 DVR that Comcast provides, and seeing if I could capture HD ...
John Baez’s Stuff
I found John Baez’s stuff because he mentioned Poundstone’s book Fortunes Formula , which is about the relationship between mathematics, information theory and gambling, topics ...
A Flexible New Technique for Camera Calibration: Zhengyou Zhang
I was rereading Tsai’s paper on camera calibration, and was reminded of this more recent work by Zhang at Microsoft. I thought I’d dump a ...
Gutenberg Gem: Wood-Block Printing by F. Morley Fletcher
I admit to a fascination with most methods of print making, so it’s nice to see a rather nifty treatise on wood block printing in ...
Who’s reading my blog with a new Christmas Gadget?
I’m curious: some of you are undoubtably unboxing and firing up you new gadgets, like computers, Wii systems (you lucky bums) and cell phones. How ...
Merry Christmas
On this Christmas holiday, I’d like to extend my best wishes to all my readers and their families. Hope you all have a safe and ...
Another quake…
A twin to the one we had a couple of days ago. Preliminary report say 3.6 (the other one was a 3.7) and it occurred ...
Yet another one…
Wow, three in three four days. This was pretty minor. I heard a door in our house rattle in a stacatto, but felt no rolling ...
Interesting Paper on Inexpensive Laser Scanning
Here’s a pointer to a cool technique for scanning 3D objects . It’s cool in that it uses very simple equipment: a cheap webcam, a ...
Quake!
Just a couple of seconds ago, I was cutting some salmon and we had a bit of a quake. Very little ground shaking, but all ...
Sloan Foundation funds Internet Archive
Boing Boing links to this CNN story about the Open Content Alliance: a group which is trying to scan and make available books of considerable ...
Mount St. Helens rockin’…
Mount St. Helens woke up with a bit of a rumble today. Here’s the seismograph. It’s not exactly unprecedented, but kind of cool. [tags]Volcanic Eruption,Mount ...
Christmas Card Fodder
The fromoldbooks blog had this nice engraving of the Nativity available for download (it’s from a book old enough to be in the public domain, ...
No Wii for Mii
Well, one of the many Wii locator websites suggested that area Target stores might get them in today, but alas: it was not to be ...
FCC Eliminates Code Requirements for Amateur Licenses
I must admit, I haven’t been a particularly active ham (in fact, I’ve been completely inactive for a number of years), but I was still ...
I may not believe in God, but….
My mom has had a tough week. Send some good thoughts her way. Send any extras to my brother. Send the left overs to the ...
Google Patent Search
Google has a patent search now. You can use it to find my sole issued patent. Or you could look up the Slinky Dog patent. ...
Rum and Monkey: The Historical Lunatic Test
Which Historical Lunatic Are You? From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey. Frankly, I think it far more likely that Charles VI is a ...
The Piddler on the roof
For some reason, I find this hilarious. [tags]Humor,Funny,Google Earth[/tags] ...
The Prime Game
Recursivity: The Prime Game Ask a friend to write down a prime number. Bet them that you can always strike out 0 or more digits ...
Fab @ Home
As part of Pixar’s exhibition at the NYC MoMa, we created a rather large zoetrope of some of our Toy Story characters. You can see ...
Two-scale Tone Management for Photographic Look
I found out about the SIGGRAPH site while trying to jog my memory about a paper I remembered reading, but couldn’t remember the title. It’s ...
Not Even Wrong
This article about a teacher is really, really terrible, and sent Good Math, Bad Math blogger Mark Chu-Carroll into quite a tizzy. It is quite ...
Seymour Papert hit by motorbike in Vietnam, in a coma
MIT Technology Expert in Coma in Vietnam – New York Times Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus Seymour Papert, 78, was among more than 100 ...
SIGGRAPH Encore
SIGGRAPH has a nifty website that allows you to watch lots of presentations from the 2004 and 2005 conference, including paper presentations and sketches. Lots ...
Life Hint: Wear a Santa Hat!
If you’re like me, sometimes the pressure of the holidays gets to you, and you end up feeling a bit grumpy. It’s hard to take ...
Decorating the Blog for Christmas
Well, it’s the holiday season, and that means it is time to decorate the blog for the holidays. More holiday cheer to follow. Just be ...
A Report on an All Sky Video Camera
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a link to a nifty video taken from an video camera attached to a fisheye camera. Here is ...
Skull on Mars? Call Hoagland!
If you look carefully in this image of the Guysev crater taken from the Spirit Rover , you can see what appears to be a ...
Tony vs. Paul
Awesome stop motion animation: Tony vs. Paul ...
Nutcracker Suite Played Exclusively on Bicycle Parts
What more needs to be said, other than to simply say “Awesome!”? Nutcracker Suite Played Exclusively on Bicycle Parts [tags]Christmas Music[/tags] ...
Grabbing Single Frames From the WVC54GC
One of the slightly annoying things about the video camera I mentioned is that it doesn’t actually have a “just return me a single frame ...
Visitor to the Front Door, Caught on Webcam
In a previous posting , I mentioned that I bought a Linksys WVC54GC wireless webcam. I can’t say that I really think it’s a good ...
Why Haskell? Indeed…
I’ve been fascinated by functional programming languages for at least twenty years, but I must admit, despite my rather academic interest, I’ve simply not found ...
Gutenberg Gem: Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt
I was persusing the top 100 downloads on Project Gutenberg, and noted that they had a fairly nice illustrated book about one of my interests: ...
Dodge Tomahawk @ the SF Auto Show
In what has become a bit of a minor tradition for us, we carted our bodies into San Franscisco this afternoon to attend the SF ...
Unusual Stuff
Sometimes strange stuff happens, and you just want to mention it. I saw a fox on my way up to the observatory on Friday. I’d ...
Rockin’ Meteor Video
I mentioned on my blog that the Leonids were peaking a few days ago, but it was cloudy and rainy here, so I didn’t get ...
Email from Jack the Ripper…
I was listening to the classic The Hounds of the Baskervilles for the last few days as I ran around doing shopping for my Thanksgiving ...
Happy Thanksgiving, with Video
Here at brainwagon central, I’m about to put a turkey and a ham in the oven, I’ve got the potatoes ready to go, I’ve made ...
Fox News Preps News Satire Show
Fox News Preps News Satire Show “The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see uses the same talking ...
Happy Birthday J. D. Drew!
I noticed by my sidebar that today is J. D. Drew’s Birthday, and I thought I’d thank him by providing a link to the most ...
Playstation 3 Seller Attacked, Robbed In La Palma
Yeah, I know, I said this kind of story didn’t appeal to me. I’m a hypocrite, just rubbernecking my way through life. Let’s move on. ...
Stories I don’t care about…
The news over the last few days has been obsessed with a number of stories that I care very little about. I thought I’d get ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Encyclopædia Britannica,Volume IV – Part 04 of 04
Well, Project Gutenberg has another installation in their Encyclopaedia Britannica digitization effort. This one includes a number of cool (well, I think they are cool ...
EECS Revamps Course Structure
Twenty plus years ago, back when I was in graduate school, I got my first copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson ...
Not happy with the Linksys WVC54GC
Well, I decided somewhat on the spur of the moment to get a wireless webcam for a monitoring application, and I must say, I’m overall ...
Chronicles of Scrappy
Well, my silly cat is at it again. A couple of days ago, I came home and called out the back door for our partially ...
Nice picture of recent Mercury Transit
Loren sent this around our mailing list at work. The original was a huge gif, I converted it into a reasonably small SWF file. Here ...
Ancient Egyptian Fractions
Mark Chu Carroll over at the Good Math, Bad Math blogs has a fascination with bizarre bits of math as I do. Today, he had ...
Big Hurt rumored to be taking a Big Trip
ESPN is reporting that Athletic slugger Frank Thomas could be about to sign an agreement with the Toronto Blue Jays. Sniff. I really hoped that ...
Installing the Zune… sucked – Engadget
Apparently Engadget wasn’t overwhelmed with the out of the box experience. To be honest, I pretty much hate iTunes too, but it wasn’t as grossly ...
Brainwagon quotes from the Movie Quote Generator
Brainwagon quotes from the Movie Quote Generator Gort! Klaatu barada brainwagon! Too cool. ...
Free Coffee? No. Open Source Java? Yes!
Lycos News Computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. said Monday that it had begun to make its Java technology an open-source software project ...
Josh Justifies Gadget Purchase…
Apparently the weather was pretty bad up in Hillsboro, Oregon. Josh had just got a nifty little UMPC, and despite having his power go out, ...
A Chick with a Grenade Launcher
Check out Kumoon , a first person shooter starring a chick with a grenade launcher. It has versions for both Windows and the Mac. Click ...
Flying Spaghetti Monster spotted in Germany
YouTube – Flying Spaghetti Monster spotted in Germany ...
How to be interesting
As an individual with varying degrees of inner security, I can’t help but consider the idea from time to time that I’m frightfully boring. I ...
Historical Anatomies on the Web
Check out the NIH’s Historical Anatomies on the Web for lots of, well, admittedly gruesome art from important historical works on anatomy. [tags]Public Domain,Anatomy[/tags] Addendum: ...
Ghetto Astrophotography
Well, today was the transit of Mercury (actually, it’s still going on at the moment, but I have work to do, so I’ve folded my ...
Why I don’t post quite as much as I used too….
Work has been picking up a bit. [tags]Pixar,Ratatouille,Movies[/tags] ...
Peter Samson and the PDP-1
I spent a good chunk of my Saturday at the Vintage Computer Festival , which was an opportunity to see some of the old eye-burning ...
Revised Version of Wirth’s Compiler Construction
Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth was revised, but Addison Wesley decided not to republish it. That’s fine because now it is available as a PDF ...
Upcoming Transit of Mercury, Nov.8
Mercury will transit in front of the disk of the sun on Wednesday. It’s kind of a cool thing to witness (only happens about 12 ...
Gutenberg Gem: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3
The 11th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in 1911, and is the last edition of that work which is currently in the public ...
Kent Hovind PWNED
Legendary creationist con-man Kent Hovind was convicted on 58 charges relating to tax evasion yesterday, and is now jailed awaiting sentencing. The maximum sentence would ...
Happy Halloween!
Well, it’s Halloween again, and that means it’s the anniversary of the 1938 broadcast of Orson Wells production of The War of the World . ...
Phrase of the Day
Circadian Disorientation Good God I hate this time switch stuff. I feel like crap. ...
St. Louis Cardinals — World Series Champions
Congratulations. ...
Prime Number Pathology Courtesy of Good Math, Bad Math
I look forward to reading the Good Math, Bad Math blog, especially on Fridays. Often there is a pointer to an interesting computer language that ...
Building a Robotic Dalek Pumpkin
EXTERMINATE! ...
300 APIs
I’ve been experimenting with more and more web services. Below is a link to a site which contains links to over 300 APIs which you ...
Good News For Scott Adams
Scott Adams, creator of the amusing Dilbert comic strip, has suffered from a condition known as Spasmodic Disphonia, a normally incurable and largely untreatable disorder ...
Kenny Rogers Cheating?
Ah, controversy! During Game 2 of the World Series last night, Fox showed closeup video stills of Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers’ hand that seemed to ...
ICFP programming contest 2006 results
Some time ago, I spent an afternoon or two working on the ICFP programming contest for 2006, not as a competitor, but just because I ...
Forbidding Vistas: Windows licensing disserves the user
Here’s a really cool article detailing some of the nonsense in the new Windows Vista licensing. Wendys Blog: Legal Tags: Forbidding Vistas: Windows licensing disserves ...
Watch for Nukes!
The first indication that the North Koreans may have tested a nuclear device came from the the seismic data coming from the USGS. I thought ...
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin
Wow, this site contains a huge number of works by Charles Darwin. 50,000 pages of searchable text. 40,000 pages of images. Lots more to come. ...
Ralph Griswold died
Courtesy of Lambda the Ultimate came the report that Ralph Griswold , creator of the computer languages Snobol and Icon, passed away about two weeks ...
Meshing around with Wireless Networks and WDS
I’ve still been having some difficulties with my MacBook and my home wireless networks. When running on battery power, as well as more infrequently when ...
Random disconnects with Airport on a MacBook Pro
Hmmm. This thread had some ideas on my MacBook disconnect problems. I’ll try them out later and let you know what the deal is. DD-WRT ...
Oakland Athletics Season Wrap Up
I’ve given the weekend’s baseball a day or two to sink in, and now I think I’ll take the opportunity to wrap up. The Detroit ...
How Many of Me?
Dan Lyke pointed me at a website which could tell you how many other people had your name in the United States. Below you’ll find ...
Cool Pipe Organ Construction Page
It’s been a while since i had anything music related, so here’s one from the Make blog for Tom: My homebrew pipe organ [tags]Music,Pipe Organ,Make[/tags] ...
Ybox
An interesting project that took 2nd place at the Yahoo! HackDay that I went to, but unfortunately incredibly sparse on any details as to construction. ...
Former A’s Pitcher Cory Lidle Presumed Dead in Manhattan Plane Crash
This hasn’t been confirmed yet, but apparently the small plane which crashed into a building in a Manhattan today wasn’t flown by terrorists, but did ...
More on the word I don’t want to hear anymore…
I feel like the Knights of Ni sometimes. I get to hearing certain words, and they just make me crazy. It isn’t really the word ...
Bach Toccata & Fugue in D-minor Free Download
I was trying to dust off some music for Halloween and remembered that I had used Timidity to produce a free version of Bach’s Toccatta ...
North Korea announces successful nuclear test
The news is alive with the announcement from North Korea that they successfully performed an underground test of a nuclear device. Seismic monitoring stations recorded ...
Amazing physics
Even if you don’t understand the physics of superconductors (and I don’t) this still looks pretty cool. YouTube – Amazing physics If you want to ...
Athletics vs. Tigers for the ALCS
The Yankees are out. Detroit is in. The team that lost three games against the Royals to drop out of first in their division on ...
No baseball tomorrow, and I couldn’t be happier!
I had tickets for Saturday, but looks like I don’t get to use ’em: the A’s completed a sweep of the Twins today at McAfee. ...
Help the Cylons
Tonight is the premiere of the new season of Battlestar Galactica. I found this picture on flickr, and it made me chuckle, so I thought ...
I love postseason baseball!
I’m tempted to act like a shill and mindlessly repeat “I live for this!”, but it seems a little bit over the top. Still, the ...
Victoria Crater on Mars
A deserving Astronomy Picture of the Day. [tags]Astronomy,Mars[/tags] ...
Simple Yahoo! Maps “Hack”
It is far too elementary and unclever to even be considered a hack, but I wanted to create a map that showed the location of ...
All you can do is roll your eyes…
Before the presentations of the individual hacks at Yahoo! Hack Day, they showed a bunch of photos and then some short video clips from the ...
Hacking, Innovation and Indigestion
Well, I didn’t spend the entire night at Yahoo! last night, but I did eat a great deal of their pizza, with the net result ...
HackDay 2006 and Where’s Mark?
I’m spending the day at the developer presentations at Hack Day 2006 at Yahoo in Sunnyvale. You can check out the pictures here . As ...
Bug Attacks Germany!
From Google Maps, a continuation of my previous big bug theme . Quick, get those two tiny Japanese girls to summon Mothra! [tags]Big Bug,Google Maps[/tags] ...
My MacBook drops connection regularly!
The one problem that I have been having with my new Macbook is with its network. I have a Linksys WRT54GS router with the DD-WRT ...
Mirror grinding machine
Courtesy of Hack A Day , here’s a pointer to all sorts of telescope making stuff, including a nifty mirror grinding machine . I’ve got ...
Oakland Athletics, AL West Champions, 2006
Well, the inevitable finally happened: the Texas Rangers beat the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles California or whoever those guys are, and Oakland beat Seattle, ...
Remote Flying with VR Goggles and a Camera
Cool combination of gadgetry that gives you the feeling that you are a bird, by using VR goggles mounted atop an RC plane. As you ...
Yahoo! Hack Day Is Coming
Yahoo! Hack Day Is Coming , and it looks like fate has conspired to force me to go. I’ve maxxed out my vacation time again, ...
Arduino Microcontroller Board
How good of a microcontroller board can you get for $32 in quantity one? A pretty nifty one. My robotics project has stalled, but this ...
ICFP proceedings
Courtesy of Lambda the Ultimate , it appears that the ICFP 06 is over, and some of their stuff is available online. In particular, I ...
Two of My Pet Peeves
Blogs that don’t allow comments. Blogs which remove comments (real comments, not spam or abuse). I’m periodically deleting blogs in category 1 from my blogroll. ...
Big Bugs!
Ants herding a caterpillar. VideoSift I for one welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I ...
Hey, I resemble that remark!
Weird Al is the greatest. YouTube – White & Nerdy ...
MT15 computer
This guy is even more crazy than me: he built a computer entirely out of surface mount transistors (well, nearly entirely, it’s got a few ...
Transit of ISS and Atlantis in front of the Sun
Here’s a rather remarkable photograph of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle as they passed in front of the sun. Thierry Legault – ...
New Gadget: An Apple Macbook
Well, yesterday morning I got notification that my new Apple Macbook had shipped from Suzhou, China, and later that day, it had arrived in Anchorage, ...
Crazy Baseball: San Diego Padres/Los Angeles Dodgers Box Score Monday September 18, 2006
I normally only closely follow the Oakland Athletics on a day to day basis, and sometimes try to see what else is going on in ...
Trigonometry and Making Stuff
I must admit: I’m a bit of a math nut. Solving interesting mathematical problems makes me feel cool. But I must admit that I’ve suspected ...
PeakStream, plus a story
This begins as a product announcement, but is really just a clumsy way of introducing a story. Flipping through my usual news sources, I’ve seen ...
Why Programming is Hard…
If you get a degree in computer science, you end up taking classes on the theory of computation. Here you learn about something called a ...
Time to Recite the Pirate Alphabet!
Aye… Eee…Arrr… Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day . All ye scurvy dogs, brandish your cutlasses and send yer enemies to Davy Jones’ ...
YouTube – Qui veut gagner un neurone ?
It’s not just American’s who have a lamentable education in the sciences. Witness the question above. Note that this French gentlemen had to resort to ...
Gutenberg Gem: Dinosaurs, by William Diller Matthew
We’ve learned a lot about dinosaurs since 1915, when this book was published, but heck, who can resist a book about dinosaurs? Dinosaurs, by William ...
Bits on Pickles & Cucumbers…
I wrote a long rant about Scoble’s latest whine , but when I proofread it, I couldn’t imagine that anyone cares. Shortly after, I had ...
Live at Nintendo’s NYC Wii press conference
As someone might know, I’m a big fan of Nintendo. I never had the old NES, but I’ve had at least one of every game ...
How Movie Theaters Might Thrive in an On-Demand, Long Tail World
It’s been a while since I checked in on Amy Gahran’s blog, but today I’m glad I did, because she has a thought provoking idea: ...
You think I am hard on Microsoft?
Checkout some of the keywords from this article on the Guardian . “…elephantine parturition … Security vulerabilities come free with all version. … interminable corporate ...
New PSP Game: Locoroco
Carmen bought me a new game for my PSP today: Locoroco I must admit, despite the fact that PSP hardware rocks all over the DS ...
Sexual urges of men and women
Not my usual fare for this venue, but it made me laugh . ...
Quickest Patch Ever
While I’m still in a rant mode, try looking at Bruce Schneier’s latest column on Wired: Wired News: Quickest Patch Ever Now, this isn’t a ...
The word I don’t want to read in blogs anymore…
The word is: conversation . What’s wrong with that rather innocent word? Scoble and his commenters seem to love it. The topic under consideration is ...
YouTube – Light-emitting shirts!
Coolest thing ever! ...
HR 36 Assembly House Resolution
From our legislature… WHEREAS, Recent astronomical discoveries, including Pluto’s oblong orbit and the sighting of a slightly larger Kuiper Belt object, have led astronomers to ...
It’s the Bombe!
Courtesy of Flutterby , it appears that the cryptography museum at Bletchley Park has actually completed construction of their Bombe , the machine designed by ...
Grilled chocolate sandwich
Some of the people at works are real choco-holics. Hence: Grilled chocolate sandwich . Their suggestion? Use pound cake instead of bread. Damn, I’m off ...
Creating Vector Artwork from Raster Scans
A couple of days ago, I got bitten by the bug again to think about trying to actually commit some of my braincells to the ...
Toying with a lesser known Goldbach Conjecture…
While reading Beiler’s Recreations in the Theory of Numbers , I ran across this rather odd conjecture attributed to Goldbach: that all odd numbers are ...
Recreations in Mathematics – Google Book Search
I’ve begun exploring Google Books a bit, since they promise to make many books which are out of copyright available for free download as PDF ...
Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs
I was trying to dust off some of my books (mostly unread and completely unabsorbed) about the Maya Calendar, and ran across Mesoweb Resources , ...
Fixing Fixed an annoyance with the CU500
Earlier I mentioned that I had come across a fix for the annoying Java permissions problem of my LG CU500 . Yesterday, I finally got ...
Dummies Book Cover Generator/Maker 2006
[Dummies Book Cover Generator/Maker 2006][1] ...
Add Another Core for Faster Graphics
Lately, Intel has been trying to promote the idea that with the advent of multiple processor cores on their machines, raytracing computer graphics scene in ...
ImageMagick Examples
While surfing, I stumbled upon this page of ImageMagick v6 Examples . It’s kind of strange, but I still do a rather large amounts of ...
LibriVox
I was reminded recently of the existance of LibriVox : a site in which volunteeers read books and shorter works and creates public domain audio ...
Gutenberg Gem: Banbury Chap Books by Edwin Pearson
Today’s gem from Project Gutenberg is the Banbury Chap Books by Edwin Pearson , which contains a huge number of kind of cool woodcuts that ...
Estaban Loaiza, I apologize…
I’ll admit it, I was giving Oakland Athletics pitcher Esteban Loaiza a hard time. I can’t say it was totally undeserved. In the month of ...
Cheap Gadget: Sandisk Sansa m230
I’ve been trying to get back into exercising at the gym more, which is always a time of intense boredom. I’ve brought my Axim x50v ...
Microsoft Rant of the Day….
While putting in a dozen miles on the stationary bike, I was reading my blogs on my LG CU500, and found Robert Scoble’s post on ...
First Ubuntu Billboard spotted
From the Ubuntu Blog: First Ubuntu Billboard spotted I really like Ubuntu. Might even lure me away from FreeBSD. [tags]Ubuntu,Linux,Open Source Operating Systems[/tags] ...
Fixing an annoyance with the CU500
I mostly like my new LG CU500, although, like many gadgets, it’s not without its annoyances. For instance, the builtin WAP web browser is just, ...
On a similar note, e
Yesterday I wrote a simple program in C to compute pi to a useless number of decimal positions. A few minutes of thought told me ...
Take that, William Shanks!
Every once in a while, I get the urge to write a program for the sheer fun of it. I wrote my first (and second, ...
Zombies Invade San Francisco!
Rats, I missed the zombie attack that happened in San Francisco yesterday. I was gonna go down there and snap some pictures, but life intervened, ...
Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula
I was doing a bit of web research about quines, and came up with this link on Wolfram’s MathWorld website about this rather unusual formula: ...
Pathological Programming in SNUSP
I have a pretty keen interest in programming languages, and sometimes this leads me to esoteric or even perverse extremes. For instance, I had fun ...
Ripping 3gp Video with FFMPEG
I admit that I was spoiled to a certain degree by my old Motorola mpx220 smartphone: it would play windows media files, and with the ...
Speed Test of the LG CU500
Josh wanted to know how fast the HSDPA networking built into my new LG CU500 is, and recommended going to http://www.dslreports.com/mspeed to check it out. ...
My New LG CU500
Well, my venerable Motorola mpx220 has been acting unreliably lately, and after over two years of service, I figured it would be a good time ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Science of Fingerprints
I think I’ve been watching too much CSI, but I’ve become interested in some of the science of forensics. That’s why I’ve found this to ...
Random Bits and Pieces: ICFPC 2006 UM implementation in 100 Lines of Common Lisp
(or: Feeling the Bits between your Toes)
I’ve had lots of fun playing with the UM virtual machine described in the last ICFP contest, and found this page by Michael Weber detailing ...
GIMPing around…
Not perfect, but kind of fun. ...
Moonlight Perseids
Picking up the newspaper this morning, it reminded me tonight is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor showers. You can look on skytonight.com to ...
Comparison of NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units
I’ve been wanting to do some GPU programming for quite some time, and tried to take a step in the right direction. I picked up ...
Creation: The Time Fountain
Here’s an inspiring little project: The Time Fountain on cre.ations.net. Basically it is a tiny fountain which drops small drops of water tinted with a ...
Stellafane 2006
Every year since time immemorial, the Springfield Telescope Makers hold a telescope making event called Stellafane. People get together to show off their telescope projects, ...
Back from SIGGRAPH
Posting has been a bit light lately, mostly because I was off in Boston for SIGGRAPH. I’ll try to post a summary of some of ...
First time at Fenway…
Yesterday I saw my first game at legendary Boston’s legendary Fenway Park. One of my fellow SIGGRAPH Sketch jurors, Daniel Maskit, had a spare ticket ...
ICFP Programming Contest, 2006
Tom reminded me that the ICFP Programming Contest, 2006 was last weekend. I didn’t notice, nor did I have time to compete, but I really ...
California ISO System Status
Somebody at work pointed me at the California ISO System Status page, which points out how many megawatts of power that California is consuming, and ...
Zoo Trip and Prairie Dog Love
Yesterday the mercury crossed over 100 degrees here, so to stay out of the heat, we ended up going to the San Francisco Zoo. Mission ...
Free at last!
Last night, I finally reached a breaking point. I have an aging 1.6ghz Sempron laptop that I was using to run Windows XP. I use ...
Globe
I worked out some of the math for creating maps using the globular projection . The diagram below shows that it worked. I have a ...
Book Review: New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley
I love Sherlock Holmes. I think that Conan Doyle’s portrayal of London’s most famous fictional detective are some of the most fun and yet also ...
Zidane headbutt outrage on the Register
Carmen pointed this collection of Zidane silliness on the Register . It gave me a chuckle. ...
My Top 5 Must Read Blogs
Josh Bancroft decided to post My Top 5 Must Read Blogs , and I realized something: I hate blogs about blogging. And public relations. And ...
British Fighter Jet Crashes at Oregon Airshow
Got this link from Josh Bancroft , but was just talking about this with my Mom this morning. She lives very close to the Airport ...
Public Domain Art courtesy of the USNO
Some neat artwork from the U.S. Naval Observatory , including high resolution scans of some works by Hevelius, Flamsteed, and Bayer. Some of them are ...
Funny Math
Without further explanation: [tags]Mathematics[/tags] ...
Book Review: Beginning GIMP — From Novice to Professional
It’s no secret: I’m a big fan of free software. That’s another way of saying that I’m too cheap to buy Photoshop. If you are ...
What I don’t understand about baseball…
Yesterday, Carmen took me and Adam and his girlfriend to the Atheletics/Angels game as a belated Father’s Day present. It was a fabulous day to ...
The Trackball Telescope
Jerry Oltion designed created The Trackball Telescope , a telescope which rotates around on a spherical ball. It’s not that unusual to see these “ball” ...
Cracking the Secret Codes of Europe’s Galileo Satellite
Cornell university researchers have apparently cracked the scheme used by the new European Galileo satellites. Galileo is the European version of GPS, but unlike the ...
Communications over 100 miles, using modulated LED lights…
Not only did this Tasmanian amateurs do something really interesting in establishing voice communications using LED light sources and Fresnel lenses, but they also have ...
More on Intelligent Design, the Future…
Dear Lord, it actually gets worse. Like most of the stuff on ID The Future, this one lies right out of the gate: It is ...
Darwinism’s great appeal: Empowering the ignorant
I read a lot about the conflict between science and pseudoscience, which is to say, I read a great deal about the conflict between biology ...
Trying to get digital cable installed, take #2…
Well, Comcast was supposed to come by yesterday and install my digital cable, but they were a no-show. A call back to them this morning ...
Something you don’t see everyday…
While driving through Gilroy today, I saw something that I just don’t think you see every day. Stapled to a telephone pole was a sign: ...
Windows Vista Feedback ~ Chris Pirillo
Apparently the thing that is most worthy of critical comment from Microsoft Vista is that fonts and colors don’t please Chris Pirillo . While these ...
I don’t get Gnomedex
Can someone tell me what the point of Gnomedex actually is? I’ve asked this question before , and I’m still just as mystified. Josh has ...
$9 billion dollar windfall for film industry
The BBC is reporting that the FBI has arrested thirteen individuals who are part of a massive film piracy ring. They claim that these individuals ...
Is Podcasting “efficient”?
As pointed out by Robert Scoble , blogger Peter T Davis questions whether podcasts are an efficient means of content delivery . He says: But, ...
Happy Kooks’ Day!
According to this article on blogcritics.org, June 26 is recognized as “Kooks’ Day”, a day dedicated to all things crazy and loony. This holiday was ...
Baseball!
Friday night, the A’s stole a game with late inning heroics. Yesterday, the Giants returned the favor when Ray Durham hit a three run homer ...
Virtual Percussion Objects
Ah, the occasional benefits of working at Pixar: UC Berkeley researcher Cynthia Bruyns is coming by today to give a technical seminar on her work ...
Stunning views of Saturn’s Moons
Courtesy of the Bad Astronomy blog , check out these amazing pictures of Saturn’s moons taken by the cameras aboard the Cassini probe. [tags]Cassini,Saturn,Astronomy[/tags] ...
Hitler or Coulter?
I missed three. In every case, I attributed statements to Adolph Hitler that were in fact actually made by Ann Coulter. In this respect, it ...
Starting to Make Stuff
Sorry if I’ve been a bit distracted lately: there are a number of factors which are conspiring to keep me from updating my blog as ...
Printable Robots
I’m on a bit of a robotics kick lately, so this article on the possibility of using inkjet printer technology to “print” robots was very ...
Megabyte Does a Handstand
Megabyte is a robotic whirling dervish of destruction. I’ve seen him obliterate many a robot, throwing tires, axels, body armor in all directions. But I ...
we hates software
Courtesy of Dan , I’m now subscribed to we hates software . Reading it is like group therapy for all that is frustrating with computers. ...
Robogames 2006 – a photoset on Flickr
Here are my photos from Robogames 2006 as a Flickr photoset. Later, I’ll get all of my video files uploaded onto YouTube (they are much ...
Happy Anniversary to Me!
Today Carmen and I are celebrating our sixth anniversary! Thanks for putting up with all my crap honey! And now… a musical interlude. We are ...
Perfect Lemonade Recipe and a Rant on the Simple Pleasures
It’s getting to be the time of year when cold icy drinks are the ticket to bliss, and I just found this recipe for lemonade, ...
NASA – A Meteoroid Hits the Moon
Interesting report from NASA (with video) of a meteoroid striking the lunar surface . These are one particular type of transient lunar phenomena : temporary ...
Sidenotes via JavaScript
I like the ability to create sidenotes. What are sidenotes? You can go here to find some JavaScript code that implements them. Neat. I’m not ...
Carmen’s Burning Mouse
Carmen came down this morning with a mouse in her hand, asking “Should this thing be hot?” She of course knew the answer, “No”. I ...
Risch algorithm
This is another one of those postings that I make almost entirely for my own benefit. Today at lunch I was having a discussion with ...
Record meteorite hit Norway
Early reports are that a record explosion (measuring in the kiloton range) may have happened in Norway as a meteor crashed into it. More news ...
How Pixar Made Cars
If you want some information about how Pixar made Cars, check out the comments on this thread on Digg . True, most of them are ...
Historical Articles on Pinhole Photography
While I was trying to find the formulas for picking the optimum size for pinholes in pinhole photographs, I found that Lord Rayleigh had published ...
NIST Image Group’s Fingerprint Research
Don’t ask me why I found this interesting, I just do, and wanted to bookmark it for later perusal. NIST Image Group’s Fingerprint Research ...
Quick summary of Ubuntu “Dapper Drake”
I spent some time getting Ubuntu’s new Dapper Drake release installed on my HP AMD64 box. It seems to work fine now, but it wasn’t ...
More proof that Microsoft is just evil…
As if more were actually needed… It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed ...
Identify this tree!
In Emigrant’s Pass, I stopped to take some photos from their stunning vista point. One of my pictures included this tree (click on it for ...
Diet Coke and Mentos
This is just unbelievably cool. ...
Engines of Creation available online
In the late eighties, I was fascinated by the possibilities of nanotechnology as raised by Eric Drexler. Here we are twenty years later, and I ...
Unboxing The Past: The Nintendo Virtual Boy
Podcasting inspiration Josh Bancroft has a new venture entitled unboxing.com , a veritable shrine to gadgetitis, with all sorts of pictures of people unboxing their ...
Movie Review: The DaVinci Code
For the most part, the critics have been really panning The Da Vinci Code , the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s hugely popular book of ...
Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Just a fun little sight seeing via Google Maps: Indianapolis Motor Speedway . Update: a nasty freak accident sent a piece of a wing sailing ...
Bee Picture
The cool thing about digital cameras is that you can just keep snapping pictures until you get one that you like. Check out the following ...
Movie Review: X-Men: The Last Stand
To open our Memorial Day weekend, I decided to join some of the Pixar Morlocks and go see the opening of X-Men: The Last Stand ...
Scrappy does some light reading…
Just a picture I snapped this morning of my cat as he was reading. As soon as I got the camera out though, he flopped ...
Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…
Last night, the A’s managed to lead the Rangers 7-0 going into the bottom of the sixth inning, and still managed to collapse sufficiently to ...
Hacking the Hummer DTV Game
I found this rather nifty website detailing how you can hack a Hummer DTV Game that you can buy from Radio Shack for $18.00. Why ...
Finished Me and My Katamari!
I really enjoyed the Katamari Damacy game for the PS2, so when I heard that there was a Katamari game for the PSP, I knew ...
Liam’s Pictures from Old Books
Wow! An incredible website of pictures scanned from old books , nearly all of which are in the public domain. There are nice pictures of ...
Be a hoopy frood! Celebrate Towel Day!
Carry a towel tomorrow. ...
Baseball Trivia: Baseball Leap Year Babies!
Don’t ask how this subject came up, it won’t make any sense, but somebody asked me how many major leaguers were born on Feb 29, ...
Video-game from 1952 – OXO, a tic-tac-toe
From Boing Boing , a link to edsac.net , a site dedicated to the first stored-program computer to operate a regular computing service. It was ...
Happy Birthday Sir Arthur!
If you have a peek at the Google Search page , you’ll see that it features a Sherlock Holmes motif. That’s because May 22nd is ...
Bay to Breakers!
Well, it’s 6:39AM, and I’m just about ready to head off to the Bay To Breakers, a 12K race (which I will be walking the ...
San Francisco Arts on Fire
Last night, Carmen and I trudged off to see the San Franscisco Arts on Fire show at Candlestick Park. All sorts of artists which use ...
A New Podcast! With Reviews of XM Radio and the Panasonic DMC-TZ1
What can I say? I was bored on the way home yesterday, and decided to record a 23 minute podcast , reviewing two of my ...
Why YouTube is winning out over Google Video
Recently Google Video decided to allow uploads directly from the web browser, and promised that they would expedite the approval of video (it took several ...
STANFORD Magazine features Donald Knuth
STANFORD Magazine has a nice article about mathematician/computer scientist Donald Knuth , worth reading (as is virtually everything Knuth himself has written). [tags]Donald Knuth[/tags] ...
Another question for Microsoft…
Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger » Microsoft Word generates clean HTML for blogs? Lots of Microsoft program managers push back and say “normal people don’t ...
PDP-1 Restored At the Computer History Museum
Well, it’s kind of late, and I’m just back from my trip to the Computer History Museum, where they unveiled their restoration of a DEC ...
Night Pictures
Here’s a picture of the 36 inch telescope at Chabot Observatory, with an 8 second exposure and some GIMP work to bring out some of ...
Marin Human Race
This weekend’s activity was Marin Human Race , a 4 mile race (which we did at a walk, naturally) in the neighborhood of the Marin ...
Games, Puzzles and Computation
An as-yet unfinished draft of Bob Hearn’s MIT PhD thesis Games, Puzzles and Computation is online.  I first became aware of some of these ...
Quote of the Day
John Kenneth Galbraith – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia “It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put ...
Happy Birthday to Me!
Ever do something stupid? I did. It’s my birthday. I’m finding it hard to be enthused about it. I wish I wasn’t so freakin’ retarded. ...
Fuel for Rants
Richard Cohen thinks that algebra is highly overrated. Here’s the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it ...
Book Acquisition: Johnson’s Natural History: The Illustrated Animal Kingdom
Well, I couldn’t resist. I was in a rare bookstore in Salt Lake, and saw that they had both volumes of Johnson’s Natural History: The ...
The world has changed…
While flying back from Salt Lake City this evening, the fifty something year old women sitting next to me had a RAZR phone, a video ...
Sketches Committee
You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit lax in updating my blogs. The reason is simple: I have been preparing for, and during ...
Plasma Pong
Courtesy of Kevin Bjorke and a few extra minutes during our SIGGRAPH sketch committee meeting, check out Plasma Pong : a very strange pong game ...
That’s the way the cookie crumbles…
[bokstavskex.framtid.nu – automatic biscuit image creator][1] ...
Ah, nothing like a 1-0 ballgame…
Especially when the A’s win! A terrific game against the Halos this evening. Barry Zito went 7 2/3 innings, getting 4 strikeouts, walking two, and ...
The Fountain of all Programming Fonts
Keith Devens has a nice collection of Programming Fonts with links on his website. I must admit to liking the new Microsoft Consolas font, but ...
Printing Holograms on a Laser Printer
Well, the other day I was scanning the logs of what people had accessed off my site, and found that someone had apparently found my ...
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day
Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day : a day where a simple hole and the wave nature of light conspire to create art. I was ...
Digital Inline Holography with a Laser Pointer
I hadn’t heard of inline holography before, but apparently it was proposed decades ago by a short article in Nature by Gabor. Basically it is ...
little tips about making rc micro_helicopter
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 ...
SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers
This week I’m busy at work trying to complete dozens of SIGGRAPH sketch reviews, so it seems like an opportune time to present the usual ...
Gutenberg Gem: Latin for Beginners by Benjamin Leonard D’Ooge
Ever wanted to learn Latin? Well, perhaps it is just me then, but if you ever had the urge, you can check out Latin for ...
From bits to bytes…to bots
Apparently Bruce Shapiro was showing his “eggbot” at the Maker’s Faire, but I didn’t get a chance to see it. But his instructions online give ...
I made the big time!
Engadget mentioned me in their Maker’s Faire writeup! Yes! Front row! I hope my poor little server can handle the strain! [tags]Maker’s Faire,Atari,Atari 2600,Enigma[/tags] Addendum: ...
Dear Lord: Why are your minions so stupid?
What kind of blunt force trauma made someone stupid enough to actually publish this? Math Proves Christ’s Resurrection? [ Via Good Math, Bad Math. ] ...
Maker’s Faire Update
Well, I spent all day yesterday demoing my Enigma 2600 project in Hall A at the Maker’s Faire. I printed out sixty little info sheets ...
Scoring a Baseball Game ala Project Scoresheet
David Cortesi has a nice page on scoring baseball games. Â I haven’t done this myself, but I think it might be a cool way ...
Gutenberg Gem: Raggedy Ann Stories, by Johnny Gruelle
Children’s books are kind of cool, especially for the illustrations. Try checking out The Project Gutenberg eBook of Raggedy Ann Stories, by Johnny Gruelle for ...
The Enigma 2600
I’ll be showing off my Enigma 2600 at the Maker’s Faire this Saturday in San Mateo. Click on the link to read more about the ...
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. The best online resource is the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, which has over ...
Procrastination
I found the following chart of post office branches that will remain open late useful. Â Â Unfortunately. ...
Birdhouse Webcam
Check out the cool video of a pair of tufted titmouses who are building a nest in a birdhouse that has been equipped with a ...
Mathematical Musings on Baseball
My recent purchase of the book Baseball Hacks has made me dust off some my (I must admit impossibly rudimentary) knowledge of statistics and probability ...
Le voyage dans la lune
Via archive.org, you can download a Divx copy of George Meiles Le voyage dans la lune. This classic 1902 silent film may qualify as he ...
Illegal prime – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If you think that our intellectual property laws make a whole lot of sense, try keeping a straight face as you read this. Illegal prime ...
1986 World Series Game Six Re-enacted in RBI Baseball
One of the most famous games in all of baseball history must be Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which pitted the Mets against ...
Jumpy eggs caught on camera
Good thing this isn’t my tax dollars at work: After two years of work, with a purpose-built steel machine wired up to high-speed cameras, microphones ...
Incredible Machines
When the Japanese aren’t trying to figure out if spun eggs bounce, they are productively employed in constructing all sorts of incredible Rube Goldberg machines. ...
How to Make Liquid Magnets – Synthesize Ferrofluid
Via hack-a-day, here is a link on creating your own ferrofluids . My first exposure to these was as part of the SIGGRAPH art show ...
Baseball Hacks
Sometimes you find a book that seems uniquely written for your interests: such is Baseball Hacks , the latest O’Reilly book in their illustrious “Hacks” ...
MAKE: Build a Baird Televisor
A while back, I did some research on the early days of television, and provide some links that might help you create your own replica. ...
Intelligent Design the Future: Heddle on Sagan: Billions and Billions of Errors
Today’s rant on the subject of Intelligent Design is going to be a little difficult to follow, so try to stick with me. Today, on ...
CD quality field recording rig
It’s been some time since I posted anything of interest to the musicians in my target demographic, or those who are interested in field recording. ...
Zito back in the groove against the Mariners…
After a shaky opening day performance, Barry Zito came back and pitched six innings, giving up only one hit against the Mariners. Relievers Calero, Kennedy ...
How to pull an all-nighter
This blog article reminded me of a part of my life that is long past: the times of the all nighter.  Back in my ...
The Art of Living by John Stuart Mill, 1848
Big thoughts that resonate with me today… The Art of Living by John Stuart Mill, 1848 Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions ...
Episode III: The Backstroke of the West
From one of our internal mailing lists, witness the mighty translating skills displayed in this illegal copy of Episode III. It’s strangely compelling. [tags]Engrish,Illegal DVD,Bad ...
Tomorrow…
On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. [tags]Moments ...
Cartoon Version of Me
Today I had a bit of spare time, and so created a new avatar for myself using inkscape and an old photo. It’s not too ...
Renaissance (2006)
During lunch today, we had a preview screening of the new French sci-fi film Renaissance (2006), I posted this review on imdb.com: I highly recommend ...
Another Blog on Evolution/Creationism/Intelligent Design
I don’t know why Wesley Elberry’s weblog hasn’t gotten onto my reading list before, but today I found an interesting article detailing how ID luminary ...
Any truly funny April Fool’s gags?
Let’s face it, finding a Good April Fool’s Day gag is pretty much like trying to find diamonds: you process tons of ore in a ...
Turn back the clock…
A couple of week’s ago, my old boss from my days in the RenderMan group, Tony Apodaca stopped into my office with a bit of ...
Meet Me at the Maker’s Faire!
I’ve decided to pack up one of my geekiest projects, my Atari 2600 Enigma Machine and bring it to the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo ...
The Great Robot Race
You can view the entire Nova episode The Great Robot Race on the PBS website. It is all about the 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge Race, ...
Red State Rabble
Most often when I link to someone else’s blog, it is because a particular article has tweaked some small bit of my interest. These blog ...
How Much Better Were Things in the Good Old Days
I am not alone in my assertion that the good old days weren’t that good. “The idle chatterer is the sort who says that people ...
Picture Earth From Space
For some reason, today I decided to make a picture of the earth from space, using the NASA Blue Marble Next Generation dataset, some infrared ...
Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
USA Today is running an article announcing the publication of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can order your own copy from amazon.com. ...
Another Rider of the Apocalypse: Desperate Housewives, The Video Game
Can the Apocalypse be far off? Buena Vista Games Inc. said on Friday it plans to release a PC video game based on the popular ...
Windows Vista Faces Crisis
It was announced today that Microsoft was facing a software crisis: their short sighted engineers only allocated space for a two digit total for the ...
Excuse of the Day
I need to call in sick for work. I’ve got nintendonitis. (via my wife) [tags]Humor,Excuse,Nintendo[/tags] ...
Toy gas fired missile and launcher assembly – Patent 6055910
Read the abstract of this patent carefully. A toy gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail ...
A Little GPS Hacking..
Today I learned something interesting while surfing the web: that somebody had made a simple program that can be used to compile your own custom ...
YouTube – Game abuse strikes back
Funniest…video…evah. [tags]YouTube,Game Violence,Video,Humor[/tags] ...
In our lobby this morning…
Sometimes coming to work at Pixar surprises you with odd sights. Today, it was this Porsche Carrera in our atrium, which had been modified to ...
On Converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and Back
I pride myself on being able to carry out calculations in my head that cause most people to go for the calculator. Need to calculate ...
Spring is Here!
Well, today is the the vernal equinox, known more informally as the first day of spring. It’s a blustery, rainy day here, and it probably ...
Movie Review: V for Vendetta
Well, it’s Saturday again, and once again Carmen and I trundled off to the movie theater. In spite of our misgivings about the state of ...
Yoda Cookies from ILM
Well, those generous guys at Industrial Light and Magic decided to send us cookies to help us celebrate Pixar’s 20 year anniversary. They were all ...
As the world churns…
ReadyMade Blog has a nice article on making your own butter, ricotta cheese, or cottage cheese. Â I may give the ricotta a try sometime, ...
NPR : Fun with DNA
This is just too cool! Need to make a few million nanoscale smiley faces? Rothemund has developed a computer program that can analyze a shape, ...
Payment and Apology
A couple of days ago I pointed out the hypocrisy of Isaac Hayes in accepting payment for episodes of Southpark that ridiculed religion but adopting ...
Gutenberg Gem: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Today is the Ides of March, and as such, it seems appropriate to place a link to Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, and to remind ...
101 Cookbooks – Thin Mint Recipe
Have those little sirens of cookiedom (otherwise known as Girl Scouts) lured your diet onto the rocks with promises of Thin Mint cookies? Me too. ...
Happy Pi Day!
Today is 3/14, also known as Pi Day. Wish a “Happy Pi Day!” to your coworkers, and be forever branded as a math geek. Bonus ...
Isaac Hayes, in a huff, hangs up Chef’s hat
Southpark has lampooned, roasted, poked, prodded and generally mocked religion at every turn since its very beginning. It’s mocked Catholics and Jews, Hindus and Muslims. ...
Making Your Own Greenscreen/Bluescreen or Backdrop and a Stand for It
I’ve wanted to make one of these for quite some time. [tags]Video,Film,Special Effects[/tags] ...
Drivel from Intelligent Design the Future
Oh dear. Check out Intelligent Design the Future: Percival Lowell, Mars and Intelligent Design Today’s Google icon pays homage to Percival Lowell, the 19th century ...
Peel a potato in one step – Lifehacker
Courtesy of a Japanese TV show, learn how to peel a potato in one step.  Well, to be fair, it’s not really one step. ...
From metamerist: Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies
Metamerist was musing abut Pigeonholing Algorithms & Self-fulfilling Prophecies this morning, a subject that I’m kind of interested in as well.  We’ve all used ...
Google a map of Mars
Carmen noticed that the Google home page had a logo that included a telescope looking at Mars. Â A moment’s digging revealed that there is ...
Weekend Musings
Did you ever have one of those weekends when you had too much rattling around in your skull to make any headway on any of ...
WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.2 Security Release
There is a new security update for WordPress , which I’ve already installed without any serious mishap/problems. If you run WordPress, you might think about ...
3D Lego Fractals
For the Lego fans out there, check out K’s Legobrot: 3D Lego Fractals. I ran across it while looking for something completely different.  The ...
MRO to be new Mars moon on Friday
Phil Plait reminds us that in about three hours, around 10:30PST, the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter will fire a 27 minute retro burn and enter a ...
I don’t buy Bonds…
I often listen to sports talk shows while commuting (especially now that I’m on hiatus from my commute time podcasts and baseball season is coming ...
Help me with a VOIP experiment…
I’ve been experimenting with voice-over-IP telephony using the Asterisk open source PBX system, and I’m at the point where I’d like you to help! I’ve ...
Movie Review: Ultraviolet
Yesterday I took Carmen to go see the latest film in the genre of “hot chicks with weapons”: Ultraviolet starring Milla Jovovich and directed and ...
Real Life Simpsons Intro
Just some early morning fluff courtesy of YouTube: someone filmed a real life version of the introduction to the simpsons. I’m guessing that it was ...
Minor Earthquake
A few minutes ago, I noticed the second minor earthquake of the day. I estimated the strength to be a little lower than a three, ...
Homebrew Photolab
By way of the ReadyMade Blog , check out how to use common kitchen ingredients like coffee as photographic developers. I’ve had an interest (mostly ...
The World Baseball Classic
It begins today, with Korea playing Chinese Taipei at 6:30ET on ESPN. I don’t expect much from this particular game, but I must admit that ...
Gutenberg Gem: Animal Children by Edith Brown Kirkwood
Want some cute animal pictures? Try checking out this minor gem: Animal Children by Edith Brown Kirkwood from Project Gutenberg .  It’s got lots ...
Check out Re-Imagineering
I must admit: I haven’t a clue as to how the whole Disney-acquires-Pixar thing is going to work out, but I do know one thing: ...
The Evil Dead (1981)
Well, Carmen and I haven’t gotten out to see many first run movies lately, but tonight Pixar’s Monday Film series stumbed on an old favorite: ...
Tick destroying rover
Courtesy of hack-a-day comes this awesome story of a student project to make a robotic rover whose purpose is to eradicate ticks.  It basically ...
Save a Snowflake for Decades – Popular Science
We don’t get much snow here, but I thought I might archive this for future reference, just because it’s cool. Save a Snowflake for Decades ...
M4 Message Breaking Project
You might have noticed if you are a long time reader of this blog that I’m fascinated by codes and ciphers, particularly the kind that ...
Boing Boing: Cat piano
I’m sorry, but this is just wrong. Terribly wrong. ...
Microsoft Ipod Packaging Parody
I laughed out loud. Scoble didn’t think it was funny, and just said “Ouch”. Of course all that is truly funny is true. This is ...
Build Your Own Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer
What more needs to be said? [tags]Nuclear Bomb Computer,Slide Rule[/tags] ...
Darren McGavin stalks into the night…
Phil Plait’s blog is the first mention I’ve read that actor Darren McGavin had passed away. Phil and I must have been watching the same ...
Aztec + Lego
It’s a strange fact that any two words (or interests) that you might have will eventually find a webpage that illustrates them both. Of course, ...
National Archive movies available on Google Video
Via Ars Technica is the announcement that many films from the National Archives will be made available via Google Video. Their pilot program had 104 ...
James Bond can’t drive a stick…
Okay, a total fluff link. How lame is it that actor Daniel Craig, poised to replace Pierce Brosnan as the latest James Bond, can’t drive ...
I’ll be at the San Mateo Maker’s Faire in April
It looks like I’ll be attending the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo coming up on April 22nd and 23rd. My proposal to show my Atari ...
Science Word of the Day: “Shrimpoluminscence”
Apparently the peakcock mantis shrimp packs a mighty wallop, which can even shatter the glass of aquariums. They also are responsible for the introduction of ...
Intelligent Design the Future: Make Mine Ham and Pineapple
The perversion of intelligent design can be seen in Cornelius’s Hunter’s title and opening paragraph on ID The Future: The main problem with our red ...
Maps for ipod, the Juan Buhler way…
Juan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod ...
Pencil Drawing
Josh over at tinyscreenfuls is digging some of the fancy “pencil sketch” effects that the Mac can do with its internal camera. Â Back in ...
1001 things to do with liquid nitrogen
I was a little bit disappointed when I found out the total was a bit short of what the header proclaimed, but you should still ...
Ten reasons Microsoft thinks I should buy Vista…
Michael Desmond, writing for PCWorld, wrote this article called Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista. Me? I’m completely unconvinced. Let’s walk through what he thinks ...
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
Houston Police Chief Wants Surveillance Cameras In Private Homes “I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that ...
Alcohol Breath Test Pen
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 ...
Happy Birthday Eric Byrnes!
Well, even though he’s no longer an Athletic, I’d like to wish Arizona Diamondback Eric Byrnes centerfielder a happy birthday. I loved to watch Byrnes’ ...
A Complete Plan for DIY VoIP
I must admit, my experimentation with VOIP phones using my new Sipura SPA-3000 is going a bit slower than I like. Still, I hope to ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved by William A. Williams
Well, “gem” is perhaps not the right term. Perhaps I should start a new category: Gutenberg Coal. I’ve been interested in (and have from time ...
The Art of the H-Bomb
Courtesy of Bill Gurstelle’s Technology Underground , check out the U.S. Navy’s collection of paintings of nuclear tests on the Bikini atoll. Very cool stuff. ...
Need some free classical music in ogg format?
Either pick what you want from Wikipedia’s free list , or be lazy and greedy like me, and… wget -r -A.ogg -l1 -H -np -nd ...
If this is your colon, where is the semicolon?
This is just a strange project that I can’t help but pass along: Knit Your Own Digestive System [tags]Knitting,Crafts,Bizarre Bazaar[/tags] ...
Run Linux on a JuiceBox
Via the Make Blog, LinuxDevices tells you how to run linux on a JuiceBox. Â I bought one of these a while ago, and haven’t ...
How you can be popular!
It’s been some time since I mocked Robert Scoble, mostly because I’ve mostly stopped reading him. I guess i just don’t find seesawing between promotion ...
3D Painted Rooms – 2Loop.com
I’m just passing along a link from Eric’s email to me today: 3D Painted Rooms – 2Loop.com These rooms are painted so that, when looked ...
Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin…
Q: If Charles Darwin were alive today, what would he be known for? A: Longevity. He’d be 197 years old. For some reason, churches around ...
On caring for partially wild kitties…
It’s now 4:04AM on Monday, and I’m up, typing on my laptop. Not by choice, mind you. Like most people, I have 40 hours to ...
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
Gravity is a very, very weak force. Back in 1798, Cavendish used a torsion balance to try to estimate the value of G, the gravitational ...
My New Lamp
Well, Scrappy did end up spending the night at the vets. They decided to anesthetize him, install a drain and then make him suffer the ...
Lay Siege to Your Enemies!
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 ...
HL2 Rube Goldberg Device: Reloaded
I remember seeing some of these Rube Goldberg devices setup using the Halflife 2 physics engine before, but not many are this elaborate and complicated. ...
Poor Scrappy Redux
Well, it’s been about 11 months since our adopted cat Scrappy last got in a fight but he’s back at the vet’s today. He apparently ...
Followup on Augustine Island Volcano
Several weeks ago, I blogged about the volcano on Augustine Island in Alaska, including a link to the Google satellite map of the area. Now, ...
VoIP for free with the Sipura
According to my UPS tracking code, my Sipura SPA-3000 should be awaiting me when I arrive home today, and in a timely fashion, I found ...
Parasites on the Brain
Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about on this fine Thursday, check out this interesting article: Damn Interesting » Parasites on the ...
Criminal Mastermind
Honestly, with criminals this smart, how hard can a cop’s job be? Lori Menzel of the town of Kewaskum said the burglar left his Yahoo ...
I’m on the way out…
Find out how popular your name has been over the years. Â “Mark” seems to have peaked in popularity in the 1960s, while my dad’s ...
LEGO Technic Difference Engine
Need I really say more? An implementation of Babbages Difference Engine, capable of evaluating 2nd and 3rd order polynomials with two or three digits of ...
An Anniversary of Sorts…
Fifteen years ago today was my official hire date at Pixar Animation Studios. Because nobody works for a company for fifteen years anymore, I thought ...
PAP2 Acquires New Brain, No Longer Speaks to Me
A while ago, I wrote about how you could unlock a PAP2 and use it on Free World Dialup as a simple, cheap VOIP adapter. ...
James Randi in the hospital
According to Phil Plait, James Randi ended up in the hospital for a heart problem that required bypass surgery.    Randi is probably ...
Super Bowl XL Commercials on Google Video
Overall, I didn’t think much of the commercials that played during this years Superbowl, but just in case you missed one that everyone seems to ...
Halftime! Steelers Win!
Seattle: 3 Pittsburgh: 7 Carmen’s got 0-0 and 6-7 in her football pool, and narrowly missed hitting either at the end of the first and ...
HOWTO propagate an urban legend
Boing Boing presented a link to this: HOWTO cook an egg with two mobile phones The only problem? It doesn’t work. It can’t work.  ...
Bush administration aggressively prosecutes war… on science.
It seems that a collection of public relations officers appointed by the Bush administration are giving NASA a black eye by trying to “recast” (if ...
Google Maps Updates View of Area 51
No mysterious saucers are visible on the ground, but at least it isn’t still just a blur on the ground. read more | digg story ...
Score: Virus 2, Mark’s Windows PCs: 2
Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call from my son who informed me that the virus scanner on his Windows box was disabled, and that ...
My Nerd Score – Just Had to Do It
I beat Josh by a single point, which probably will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. ...
DIY Projection clock
Courtesy of the Make Blog , go surf over and check out these instructions for building your own projection digital clock. Â The idea is ...
WordPress 2.0.1 Release
Yep, it’s another release of WordPress, mostly fixing some open bugs/problems from the 2.0 release. I’ll be upgrading to this in the next couple of ...
Warty Visitor
Well, this evening I was staring out the door into the darkness to see if our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy wanted to be let in for ...
Blogzilla: DRM-a-go-go
What’s wrong with Microsoft’s DRM strategy: “We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees ...
Croaking
Using the multi-shot capability of my nikon, I grabbed sixteen small exposures of the frog croaking, extracted them, aligned them by hand, and made the ...
Dark Chocolate Brownies
What can I say? Life sucks today, but there isn’t a day so bleak that isn’t improved by a massive plate of brownies. Over at ...
What is so damned fascinating about The DaVinci Code?
I just finished listening to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code and I can’t help but shake my head and wonder: Why the hell is this ...
Monday Malais
Well, I’d hoped to announce the results of some of my experimentation with Asterisk , but the weekend didn’t conspire with me very well. My ...
70mph to zero in a Smart Car
I saw some of these little cars while in Paris, and of course wondered what they would be like in collisions. Check out the video ...
Boing Boing: Google logo redesigned by Students for Free Tibet
I usually don’t post links to Boing Boing stuff, since everybody in the known universe already reads Boing Boing, but I thought this logo design ...
What I know and don’t know about Asterisk…
Well, I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but here is what I know: It’s not hard to compile asterisk for the amd64, but… ...
Folding T-Shirts
If you haven’t mastered the cool Japanese way of folding T-shirts , you could always watch this video (complete with Nintendo soundtrack) on making a ...
It’s a Small World After All…
Check out these cool landscape photos by Olivo Barbieri . He takes photos of landscapes, and then modifies them to make them look as if ...
Simplest DIY motor demo
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] ...
Athletics pick up former White Sox 1B, Frank Thomas
Bitchin’. The A’s pick up White Sox veteran Frank Thomas for a one year deal. He gets a guaranteed $500,000, plus up to $2.6 million ...
Sushi Eating HOWTO
I must admit: I love sushi. Even basic nigiri and sashimi show a degree of concentration that we don’t often see in the west.  ...
My new PC…
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 ...
Downgrading my Axim X50v
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 ...
Busy Day
Well, today I was off at the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference at the SF Marriot. I’m mostly an interested bystander of the VOIP universe, but ...
Cat Helmet, or how bored do you have to be to come up with this stuff….
Honestly, just click the link. I hope sometime to have the necessary creativity and freetime to come up with this kind of project to while ...
A Tulip
Well, the tulip bulbs that I planted last October are finally blooming, and I grabbed my little Nikon 4500 and shot this photo just to ...
Inexpensive (well, relatively) Panoramic Video
Nice notes on building a panoramic video system.  It hooks six firewire webcams together to record full motion video over 360 degrees.   ...
Warning! Do not proceed if you are a complete idiot!
This is a few years old, but still… Because I had completely sealed the PC case the only opening near top was the DVD drive. ...
NASA’s Top 10 Pictures
Need some fresh wallpaper for your computer Desktop? Try checking out NASA’s top 10 Pictures , including the rather nice pictures of an active lava ...
I, for one, welcome our mouse-eared overlords…
The blogosphere (can’t believe I’m using this word) is abuzz this morning with the notion that Disney is going to acquire Pixar. Technorati Search: Pixar ...
The Irreversible Thermite Reaction
Burning a hole in a car with thermite Best quote: This is a car. It’s been chosen for destruction because it’s old, it’s white, but ...
Wow! A computer built from 12v relays…
This is just completely nuts, an 8 bit computer constructed entirely from 12 volt relays . It consumes 12 amps at 13.5 volts (160 watts). ...
Creating a Mobile Hotspot With a Wireless Router and a Cellphone
I’ve seen a lot of projects like this, but this one has some nice twists: they modify a cheap router that runs the OpenWRT firmware ...
Full length Vampire movie, 9200 dollars
I’m fascinated with low budget film making, so I was interested in this Wired article I found on Digg. Director Roger Ingraham is a mere ...
Sudoku enumeration
Here’s a page that answered some of my questions about Sudoku. Sudoku enumeration Now, if only it could answer the most pressing question I have: ...
Google Innovates: You Can Now Discard Your Email Easily!
No more clumsy dropdowns! Another first second bold innovation , well, feature from Google. And, predictably, their stock is down over 10 today. 🙂 [tags]Google,Google ...
No comment from Dembski on E. O. Wilson…
I know, I know, I’m on an Intelligent Design kick. I’ll move on sometime soon, but I couldn’t help noticing that luminary of the Intelligent ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Botanical Magazine, by William Curtis.
It’s been a while since I posted a link to a Gutenberg Gem, so here’s to help make up for lost time. This neat little ...
The unholy idiocy of philosophers
The unholy lust of scientists / It may be time to curtail public financing of scientific research I’ll only add that it might be time ...
New Horizons in Hold
I’ve got Realplayer fired up and watching NASA TV and the impending launch of the Atlas V launch vehicle that will carry the NASA New ...
Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy
As part of my usual scuffling around, reading about intelligent design, I ran across this article: Typical Objections to Intelligent Design by Bob Murphy which ...
Project Oberon
You can download a number of books on the Oberon system, designed at the Compter Systems Institute at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. This ...
Intelligent Design Isn’t the Future
As some of you might know, I’m fascinated by psuedoscience. When I was a young child, I had a deep interest in all sorts of ...
Flying Objects!
SimplyPhysics has a nice page of objects which have close encounters with the magnets inside MRI machines .  Now I know why people with ...
Dot Matrix Printers as musical instruments…
Another of those musical projects, this one comes via the Make blog. Paul reprograms old dot matrix printers (does anyone younger than me actually remember ...
Official Google Blog: Google Earth in a Mac world (PC too)
Some of you Apple/Mac people might want to get in on the fun Google Earth action, now you can: it’s been released for OS X. ...
Stardust – NASA’s Comet Sample Return Mission
Reader Bill Harris reminded me that tonight is the night that Stardust, NASA’s comet sample return mission, will return to earth carrying its cargo of ...
Check out this short film, shot with a still camera…
Got this from digg , this entire short film was created by using the burst mode of the Canon 20D. The shots look really nice, ...
Movie Review: Hoodwinked
Last night we had a screening of Hoodwinked , the new animated feature by director Cory Edwards and co-directed by Todd Edwards. It’s a retelling ...
Bonus Movie Review: Old Hope vs. New Hope
Tonight, I had the pleasure of being able to watch a copy of the original video disc release of Star Wars: A New Hope. You ...
Satellite Imagery of Volcano at Augustine Island, Alaska
Yesterday I mentioned the live webcam views of the Augustine Island volcano, today I thought I’d give you a link to Google’s satellite view of ...
Sun: So close!
In another one of those “close, but no cigar” moments, Bill Joy remarks about the recent switch of Apple to Intel processors: “We got very ...
Cooking For Engineers
Occasionally I’ll post about some of my culinary endeavors. A few years back I decided to start trying to improve the quality of the food ...
School bus camper conversion
Courtesy of the new forum section of the Make blog, check out Jake von Slatt’s incredibly impressive conversion of a 1989 Thomas Saf-T-Liner bus into ...
On the difficulty of Technical Evangelism
It was time for my daily dose of Robert Scoble, and once again he providing some thought provoking fodder for me to go on about. ...
New Lego Blog
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 ...
Sony Thwarted Again – PSP 2.60 Hacked – First Homebrew Emerges!
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 ...
Alaska Volcano Observatory
In keeping with my recent reading on volcanos , here is a link to the Alaska Volcano Observatory which is observing the increasingly active volcano ...
Lightbox JS
Here’s a useful little chunk of Javascript which can probably be put to good use on your website: Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script ...
Microsoft Losing Browser War at Brainwagon
Here’s something faintly interesting I noticed while scanning my logs at statcounter.com. Back in March of last year, I lamented that 60% of my readers ...
Book Review: Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883: Books: Simon Winchester
For quite some time, I’ve been meaning to read Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 , but haven’t had ...
Intel Stammers Apology to Customers: “They aren’t dull!”
Apple’s current TV ads apparently are not all that popular with Intel’s other customers. The voiceover apparently claims that Intel’s processors have been “trapped inside ...
Live Coverage of Macworld Expo 2006 Keynote
MacDailyNews will present the MacWorld 2006 keynote here, beginning at 9:00AM PST on January 10th. [tags]Apple,MacWorld,Steve Jobs[/tags] ...
snowman 2006 – Google Video
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 ...
MacWorld Announcements
Well, Steve is still up there, but the big news (as yet unreflected on the Apple website) is the announcement of a new Intel based ...
Webcasts of Courses from UC Berkeley
Check out these free [tag]webcasts[/tag] of courses going on at UC Berkeley. Among the more interesting ones are Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and ...
WordPress FeedBurner Plugin
Quite some time ago, I started using Feedburner to republish my RSS feed. It’s nice because you can actually see who is reading your blog ...
Cooking with sugar
Dan Lyke’s Flutterby! has an interesting article on cooking with sugar. I haven’t looked into this as closely as Dan apparently has, but I am ...
New Find Pushes Back Date of Mayan Writing
I’m a bit of a nut about ancient writing (probably as an outgrowth of my interest in codes and cryptography) and one of my interests ...
What’s Up 2006
Courtesy of Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Blog, here’s a link to a book entitled What’s Up 2006 , a collection of astronomy related ...
What will Apple announce this week?
Well, it’s time for MacWorld San Francisco.  I’ve used the Democracy plugin to create a poll in my sidebar on the right. Any ideas ...
The Kelly Criteron in Blackjack, Sports Betting and the Stock Market
I’ve been reviewing some papers and math regarding the use of the Kelly Criterion in gambling, and found this link to Ed Thorp’s paper on ...
Optical mouse based scanner
Courtesy of hack-a-day, a student did something which I thought was rather clever, he disassembled an optical mouse, and hooked the tiny image sensor (18×18 ...
ScanJet Music
Wow, now that’s what I call a waste of time! Â The HP ScanJet apparently supports an unofficial command (documented in one of their old ...
The DIY Multi-Level Desk
Courtesy of the make blog, and saved for future reference. ...
In Digital Music, Its Gates Vs Jobs
Om Malik writes about what he sees as an inevitable collision of industry juggernauts, Microsoft vs. Apple, Gates vs. Jobs in a battle for downloadable ...
Fascinating glimpse into the past
Wow. You find some interesting things on the web when you look. Here’s dozen years of internal email for Atari , providing a fascinating glimpse ...
Currency goes Bananas!
Check this out! Collectors go ga-ga over any bill which has a printing mistake, and this one is a doozy: a Del Monte banana sticker ...
God to Robertson: You don’t speak for me…
I think Pat Robertson deserves a Dumbass Lifetime Achievement Award. Robertson Links Sharon Stroke, God’s Wrath I can’t imagine any God worth worshipping has Robertson ...
Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote
Engadget blogged with Live coverage of Bill Gates CES keynote , and I’m left with a couple of questions/remarks: Is this really what a keynote ...
Christmas 1980
While i was home visiting my mom, we spent some time going through my mom’s collection of old photographs. We ran across this old Polaroid ...
DD-WRT
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 ...
All your bricks are belong to us!
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 ...
“I have a feeling that about 60% of what you say is crap.”
I suspect that David Letterman was channeling Jon Stewart. ...
I feel useful today…
There is an old joke about what men are good for: the punch line reads something like killing spiders, barbecue and oil changes.  I’d ...
King Kong
Last night was the first opportunity that Carmen and I felt we could spare the three hours necessary to view Peter Jackson’s latest blockbuster film, ...
Further Storm Updates
Well, not just one, but three four separate segments of the fence which borders the back property line are down. It’s now a job that ...
Cat Calls 911 to Help Owner, Police Say
I don’t know if I buy this story, but it’s pretty cool if it is true, a cat hit the speed dial for 911 when ...
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0
Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Like all previous upgrades that I’ve performed, this one seems to have gone without a hitch, and all things ...
Exterminate! Exterminate!
Courtesy of the Make Blog, here is a construction article on how to construct your own 1/4 scale Dalek . I’ve podcasted about creating your ...
Back!
Whew. Back from my “vacation”. I-80 was open earlier today leaving Truckee, but it took 2 hours to go 4 miles to the area where ...
Dangerous Ideas
Via metamerist , some new thinking to jumpstart the new year: The World Question Center asked lots of smart folks “What is your most dangerous ...
Leap Seconds
Unnoticed amidst last night’s revelry was the passage of a scheduled leap second. If you ever wanted to know more about them, you could review ...
Possible Downtime on January 2
I think I’m gonna try to upgrade to WordPress 2 on the 2nd. If you can’t reach this site, you’ll know what’s up. See you ...
Weather!
It’s ugly ! I’m spending some time in Truckee, CA with some of my old college chums, and currently we are getting hammered by rain ...
Notes from the Technology Underground
William Gurstelle, author of a couple of my favorite books, Backyard Ballistics and The Art of the Catapult , has a new book, Adventures from ...
WordPress 2.0 Released
It appears that version 2.0 of WordPress is available for download . I’ll try to give a head’s up when I’ll upgrade. ...
Nice view of Saturn Rings
Check out the the spiffy view of Saturn’s rings and their shadows taken from Cassini . ...
Using FFMPEG to make PSP video
I spent a little while trying to figure this out, apparently the -r argument is significant: ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg \ -title "Superman: The Mechanical Monsters" ...
Christmas Dessert: Apple Tart Tatin with Homemade Puff Pastry
After a delicious supper of prime rib, mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus, what could top it off? Well, I gave Emeril’s Apple Tart Tatin with ...
Use Google Earth to Track Santa
He’s hopping around the Middle East as I type this. Google Earth is pretty cool for a free download too, so check it out. Ho ...
Time for Christmas Pasta…
For tonight’s dinner plan, I’m doing the same thing that I did last year, a variation of Rachel Ray’s Christmas Pasta recipe . I find ...
A Visit From Saint Nicholas, by Clement C. Moore
A seasonal Gutenberg Gem: A Visit From Saint Nicholas, by Clement C. Moore. Enjoy the classic with illustrations. ...
Moon to Occult Spica
Sadly, it won’t be visible here in California, but for much of the United States, Christmas morning will feature a rare occultation of Spica by ...
Merry Christmas 2005!
To all the readers of my little experiment in self-therapy, I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas! ...
Dave Slusher leads to “Geek Christmas Carol”
Checking in on Dave Slusher’s blog, I found that he was a voice in something called Geek Christmas Carol , which I find you can ...
iLog
You know what’s more useless than those tapes and DVDs of a fire burning in the fireplace? How ’bout the same thing, but formatted for ...
DIY Laser Engraved Toast
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a number of eBay auctions for religious figures which appear spontaneously in grilled bread items. It seems to ...
Dad sells son’s XBOX 360 Xmas Present for 100 Bucks.
Didn’t we see this story last year, and the year before, and probably the year before that? I mean it was a Nintendo DS, or ...
R.I.P. Brainwagon Radio
Well, I wish my experiment in podcasting was going out with a bang instead of a whimper, but for now, I’m closing the saga that ...
It’s a Colorful Life!
Okay, I know this is an atrocity, but you might still find Recolored to be an interesting program for adding color to black and white ...
Audio player WordPress plugin
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 ...
Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover School District
The 137 page decision in the Kitzmiller case in Dover Pennsylvania has been handed down: Kitzmiller Decision: Plaintiffs Prevail The proper application of both the ...
Mistake Number…
Well, the last 48 hours has been fun. I am taking a few day off before Christmas to go visit my mom and brother up ...
The History of Electronic Musical Instruments
Here’s a site for Tom and anyone else interested in strange musical instruments: Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 – 1990 . From the musical telegraph to ...
Microsoft Moves Graphics out of the OS
Techworld.com – Microsoft to move graphics outside OS kernel Microsoft will move the graphics for its next version of Windows outside of the operating system’s ...
Golly Game of Life
I remember playing around with xlife and thinking it was a pretty good implementation of Conway’s cellular automata, but it’s got absolutely nothing on Golly ...
The CDROM Crystal Radio
I’ve had this project in a pile of bookmarks that I was sorting through, and am linking it here so that I can find it ...
Floam, Floam on the Range
Actually, you don’t need a range. This recipe has shown up in my inbox twice today, so I guess I have to blog about it. ...
Make Your Own Copy-Protected CD with Passive Protection
While not as openly hostile as the kind of stuff that Sony was doing with their active-rootkitting stuff, it’s actually not that hard to create ...
Podcasts? Humbug!
Penguin Books is releasing the classic Dicken’s tale A Christmas Carol as a podcast. Go here and you can subscribe to it, or just download ...
Documentary On Japanese Sushi
This Documentary On Japanese Sushi on Google Video is just too strange for words. Check it out. ...
Game Time With Milton Bradley
The Oakland Athletics announced that they acquired outfielder Milton Bradley and infielder Antonio Perez for top prospect Andre Ethier . It can’t really fault Beane ...
Photo Fraud on Survivor!
Last night I watched the final episode of Survivor Guatamala (yeah, I know, reality television is the opiate of the masses, so sue me) and ...
The Wireworld computer
I’ve been interested in cellular automata for a very long time, dating back to when I was a kid. One of the first BASIC programs ...
Flash Boil!
A couple of days ago I mentioned the idea of supercooled water existing in liquid form well below the freezing point. Perhaps more dangerous is ...
Paris By Night
Stumbleupon sent me to this incredible nighttime panorama of Paris taken somewhere near Notre Dame (you can see the big rosette window in one part), ...
Phil Plait v. Bart Sibrel
Some of you may remember hearing the story about Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching some lunatic who was trying to badger him into swearing on ...
A really boring math trick…
This showed up on digg, but turned out to be one of the most absurdly transparent “math magic trick” I’d ever seen. Imagine that your ...
Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Went to see this last night with my wife Carmen, and all I can say is wow . Really well done. We both enjoyed it, ...
Terrible User Interface Design
Well, as a stop gap measure to replace my dead Philips DVP-642 DVD player, I went ahead and picked up a TruTech TT 320 DVD ...
DVD Player Craps Out…
Bummer. My 6 month old Philips DVP-642 crapped out. Seems like the drive just went belly up, it doesn’t spin up at all or eject. ...
Cuff him! He might get angry!
In today’s installment of “I Kid You Not”, 42 year old Donald Pirone was cuffed and cited when he handed a fellow passenger who was ...
Color Photos taken 96 years ago!
This post does two things. It provides a link to a cool collection of antique color photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, and also tests ...
3D Without The Glasses
A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about a screencast I did that showed how you could convert stereographs into red/blue 3D anaglyphs . Jim ...
Supercooled Water
Courtesy from digg , check out this article with video dramatically demonstrating the freezing of supercooled water. If you ask most people with the freezing ...
SETI@home a security risk?
This rather wacky report talks about the possibility that ETs could infect the earth’s computers with viruses by transmitting certain signals which cause (say) buffer ...
What this geek did in Paris…
Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble is apparently over in Paris, and decided to blog about the stuff he did in Paris , of which he only ...
Remember Girls!
The Free Information Society has links to a bunch of WWII era propaganda posters, including this rather amusing one linking promiscuity with dating Hitler . ...
I just don’t get fashion
The world is just not fair. I mean really, if I wore this pink and black striped tie, people would laugh at me. But if ...
CPU disappears in a puff of logic!
Check out this video on Google showing an overclocked AMD Duron vaporizing . They clocked it up in both frequency (3.8ghz) and I believe also ...
metamerist: Computational Photography Link Roundup
Metamerist has linked to me before, it seems only fair that I should return the favor, especially since he came up with this terrific Computational ...
WorldNetDaily: California homicides dwarf Iraq deaths
Sigh. Idiocy. WorldNetDaily reports that recently released crime statistics show the homicide rate in California is 265 percent higher than the death rate suffered by ...
Depth of field using 35mm lenses
This is kind of a crazy Rube Goldberg project for budding videographers: a scheme for creating depth of field using 35mm lenses . Most digital ...
Canons are great!
Pixarian and Pentax camera user Juan Buhler sent out an email proclaiming that “Canons are great” linked to this rather expensive coffee table. Heh. ...
Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings
Need some fun holiday mashups? Try Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings on for size. ...
Linksys continues to court Linux Hackers
Linksys has sold a bazillion of the old WRT54GS routers. It’s probably due in some small part to the many alternative firmware upgrades you can ...
A’s Baseball: Gone, but Not Forgotten
Well, it’s still several months till preseason baseball starts up, but there is still some baseball news going around. The Athletics scored free-agent Esteban Loaiza ...
That’s no moon!
The Saturn probe Cassini snapped another nice photo of Mimas using the narrow-angle camera on October 13, 2005. It’s very nice, even if the sight ...
Caffeine boosts short term memory
Austrian scientists have found that people are better able to remember a sequence of letters after taking 100mg of caffeine , otherwise known as a ...
Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems
Matt Blaze and company have a new paper just out entitled Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems , which details a number of problems with the ...
The Cinnamon Bear
Last year, I wrote a script to eek out one episode of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear each day leading up to Christmas ...
Update: It’s officially over!
I’m personally declaring that the whole “more cowbell” thing is officially over. It was funny when Walken did it. It was perhaps amusing the next ...
Where is Patty O’ Cinnamon?
Each of the last two years, I’ve made mp3 files of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear available here. This serial ran from November ...
Pong is 34 years old today! Happy Birthday Pong!
According to digg , pong is celebrating its 34th anniversary today. Feh. I’m older than that. Sniffle. Bonus links: Wikipedia has some nice info, including ...
Sorry for the lack of updates..
I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog since before Thanksgiving, mainly because I’ve been doped up on expectorants in some attempt to shake this nasty ...
Gutenberg Gem: Little Wars by H. G. Wells
Earlier in life, I was quite a wargame fan: I had dozens of games by Avalon Hill, and even experimented a bit with miniature wargaming. ...
Re: Why IP owners should worry
Slashdot recently linked to [this rather strange article by Melanie Wyne against the OpenDocument][1] standard. She’s apparently executive director of the [The Initiative for Software ...
Happy Thanksgiving!
I’d like to take a moment to thank all of my readers and listeners and to wish them all the very best on this Thanksgiving ...
It never fails…
I always seem to get sick around the holidays. Starting yesterday afternoon, my throat started getting sore, by the time I was home I had ...
Gutenberg Gems: Watch and Clock Escapements, by Anonymous
If you aspire to be an horologist, you don’t have to done fishnet stockings and hot pants, you merely need to study up on the ...
I hate CSI: Miami!
Oh, dear, lord. Could the episode I watched have been any more ridiculous? In the episode Urban Hellraisers , the plotline featured a gang of ...
Those Geniuses at Apple
I bought Carmen a video iPod a few weeks ago, and she loves it. You can apparently play video on a regular TV, but you ...
Planning a Thanksgiving Meal
I admire those people who cook fifteen different dishes from their cookbook that was handed down for ages. I just don’t have the kitchen or ...
Physical Audio Signal Processing
While digging up a reference on digital waveguide synthesis, I found out that Julias O. Smith has published his textbook PHYSICAL AUDIO SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR ...
Anaglyphs, in color!
Check these out with the red/blue 3D glasses. Kind of cool, huh? If you followed my tutorial on how to do this with black and ...
Visualizing the code of Atari 2600 games
Ben Fry has some cool graphics which visualize the code in several old Atari 2600 video games . Basically, he disassembles code and marks all ...
Creating an Anaglyph from a Stereograph
A couple of weeks ago, I was playing with creating red-blue anaglyphs using the GIMP and images from the Library of Congress collection of stereograms ...
Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
well, despite having been linked on Slashdot, I think that the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is pretty cool. They digitized thousands of old Edison ...
The Core Pocket Media Player
I just noticed that there was a new version of The Core Pocket Media Player available. When I upgraded my Dell Axim x50v to Windows ...
Problems with the $100 laptop
Lee Felsentstein writes about what he thinks are the Problems with the $100 laptop , and I think many of the issues he raises are ...
More DIY Musical Instruments
By way of the Make Blog , check out this terrific collection of homemade musical instruments . I rather liked the Aeolian harp, and may ...
Brainwagon Radio: Problems with Bluetooth Installation
Does it bother you when hardware doesn’t behave the way it is supposed to? I recently bought a new Bluetooth dongle to use with my ...
Tinkering with Tinkertoys Zometool
Zome is a nerd toy that allows you create all sorts of amazing polyhedral models. Some people are more serious about them than others. Addendum: ...
Schneier on the Sony Rootkit
Wired News is running a terrific editorial by cryptography and security expert Bruce Schneier. He poses a question that I hadn’t considered before: Initial estimates ...
Brainwagon Radio: Sony Rootkits Their Customers, and Thanksgiving Food
Where your host briefly displays his anger about Sony rootkitting their customers , but then happily lapses off into musing about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday ...
Sony, what were you thinking?
Dan Kaminsky has been trying to figure out how many sites have been infected by the Sony DRM rootkit. He found that over half a ...
Strangely named products…
Josh over at tinyscreenfuls.com was off at the Portable Media Expo, and posted his photos on Flickr. Does anyone else’s mind go straight to the ...
The Story of Eddie Gaedel
I must admit, I’m a fairly unschooled student of baseball history, which is part of the reason why I’m trying to read up on the ...
Still more anaglyphs…
A bit racier, but kind of cool. Wish the source material had a bit better dynamic range. ...
The Real Value of Podcasting
If you really are doing it for the love, why bother assigning a number to it? Let’s put it another way: if my goal is ...
Another anaglyph…
This is tuned to be a little less eye straining, I think. ...
Insight of the day…
From Raph Koster’s Home Page: But there are no games that are user-built the way the web is. An interesting look into the destiny of ...
Goofing around with making red/blue anaglyphs…
If you’ve got a pair of red/blue stereo glasses, try looking at the ones below: I’ll comment more on how I made these later. ...
More on Pat Robertson
Jim Rogan writes in the Philadephia Enquirer: Pat Robertson, bless his pointy little head, has done the good people of the Dover Area School District ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics
Wow. Very cool to take this step back in time and see what young hackers in 1913 were doing. A lot of lame stuff, but ...
Darth Vader Holiday Edition
Can the apocalpypse be far away? ...
More thoughts from the weekend
clipclip seems cools This remote control seems promising I should experiment with simulated evolution . Google may be powerful, but it isn’t always obvious how ...
Thoughts from the weekend…
I really should learn more about Squeak . The toplap guys are crazy . You can make interesting musical instruments out of PVC . ...
Pat Robertson Displays his Christianity, again…
The people of Dover, Pennsylvania recently had an election for their local schoolboard. In a fairly close election, every member of the school board that ...
Water Rockets
This week’s episode of Mythbuster attacks this Japanese gameshow video showing a would-be astronaut launched by pressurized water rockets . For those who haven’t seen ...
Aren’t gnomes supposed to be tiny?
Look at this dump from the system monitor on my box at work: This box has a staggering 4gb of memory, and half of it ...
Fun with ball bearings…
A couple of days ago I published some images that I made by shooting video of a shiny metallic juggling ball. I went out yesterday ...
Partying in the for Street
Athletics closer Huston Street has won the 2005 American League Rookie of the Year . Street finished 2005 with a mark of 5-1 and 23 ...
Bad Video Panorama
I’ve been playing a bit of with video taping reflections from a shiny reflecting ball, and then undoing the map to construct a 360 degree ...
Chicken Little
This weekend’s movie was the new Disney animated film Chicken Little , starring the vocal talents of Zach Braff. Young Chicken Little is, well, a ...
Brainwagon Radio: Headset, Reset and Videora Ipod Converter
Another podcast recorded on my Dell Axim x50v after upgrading to Windows Mobile 5. Quicky review: it works, seems to have a few things cleaned ...
Groklaw on Plotline Patents
Wow. It’s hard to comprehend just how bad an idea plotlines patents actually are. I think I’ll need a bit more coffee before I could ...
Brainwagon Radio: Headset and Sunset
Yesterday, I received a package in the mail from Dell including a new headset for my Dell Axim x50v PDA, as well as the upgrade ...
Light Field Photography with a Hand-Held Plenoptic Camera
A group at Stanford has created an interesting new camera using a combination of conventional camera and a microlens array to form a “plenoptic” camera. ...
It’s not a bug…
I was scanning the right sidebar of my blog to see what ballplayers were born today, and uncovered what I (at first) thought must be ...
First Light
Over the last couple of days I managed to skim a bunch of reports that scientists had discovered the light from stars which formed only ...
Nice Font Archive
Lifehacker presented the SimplytheBest Fonts archive : a nice place to find free fonts. I liked the Vitamin font, and used it to create the ...
Windows Live!
Microsoft announced “Windows Live” yesterday. What is it? Well, that seems to be the question of the hour. Apparently lots of Robert Scoble’s readers are ...
The Haunted House, by Walter Hubbell
The Haunted House, by Walter Hubbell begins amusingly with this introduction: The manifestations described in this story commenced one year ago. No person has yet ...
Happy Birthday Hack O’ the Day
I’ve been meaning to do a unique (well, fairly unique) hack for a while. I’ve had the database of major league baseball players from The ...
Halloween Screening
Well, to avoid pigging out on tons of candy that we bought “for the kids”, we decided to spend Halloween doing something else (apologies to ...
Blogthings – What Advanced Degree Should You Get?
What a surprise! You Should Get a PhD in Science (like chemistry, math, or engineering) You’re both smart and innovative when it comes to ideas. ...
Hetemeel.com : Dynamic images
Make Einstein write whatever you want. I love stuff like this. ...
Trick or Treat: A Halloween Treat for Your MP3 Player
On October 30th, 1938, Orson Wells’ Mercury Theater broadcast what is quite likely the most famous radio play ever created: his own version of the ...
Pluto has not just one moon, but three…
Breaking news from Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog: Pluto has two previously undiscovered moons circling it. Neat! Nice press release, go read it. ...
Brainwagon Radio: My Wife Reviews the Video iPod
Holy crap, it’s been a month since I published my last podcast. But today I managed to corner my wife in the car and we ...
Halloween Music
Need a spooky mp3 for your halloween party? Try this brief mp3 of Bach’s Toccatta and Fugue in D minor. I created this myself from ...
Success!
Well, I have achieved a modest amount of success! Yesterday, I burned my first EPROM for my Atari 2600 project. After figuring out what I ...
Copyright and the Evolution Wars. Copyfight: the politics of IP
Cory Doctorow thinks that the recent move by the NAS and NSTF to ban the use of their copyrighted materials as part of the Kansas ...
More cleaning/enhancing of frames…
I was watching the previously mentioned MPEG of The Phantom of the Opera with an eye toward cleaning up it, and found that by and ...
National Academy of Sciences and National Science Teachers Association Play Hardball
As the Kansas Board of Education review gut their science standards to appease creationists, the NAS and the NSTA have decided to revoke their permssion ...
An Interesting Optical Illusion
From Craig on our internal Pixar science mailing list: Mr Angry and Mrs Calm . ...
Doom (2005)
Last night there was not that much going on, Tivo showed nothing really worth watching, the baseball season is over, and Carmen and I needed ...
Congratulations White Sox!
Well, after spending five or so hours watching the game on Tuesday, I really didn’t feel like investing the same amount of time watching what ...
Why Microsoft Sucks for Programmers
Charles Petzold has some interesting thoughts in his essay Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? , but for me, it’s really this which illustrates why ...
Internet Archive: The Phantom of the Opera
The 1925 classic Phantom of the Opera is available as a download from the Internet Archive . Very cool, one of my fun memories of ...
O’Reilly’s Retro Gaming Hacks
BoingBoing ran a short bit about the publication of a book after my own heart: Retro Gaming Hacks by O’Reilly. My own project just requires ...
Digital Black and White
In an earlier post , I pointed at fellow Pixarian Juan Buhler’s awesome photography blog . Unfortunately, I missed our photoclub meeting, but he sent ...
Getting video onto your iPod
Ars Technica has a nice article on cobbling together a collection of free tools to rip high quality video for the iPod on your windows ...
Mars at Opposition
I haven’t blogged too much about things having to do with astronomy as of late, but last Friday I took time out of my normal ...
Principal says students can’t keep blogs or MySpace profiles
Wow, it’s hard to imagine a more idiotic or wrong-headed school policy than this one . At Pope John XIII Regional High School, principal McHugh ...
Reprogrammable Genesis cartridge
Raphael Assénat created his own reprogrammable cartridge for the Sega Genesis so that he could give a try at writing his own homebrew games. I’ve ...
The MINIX 3 Operating System
How did I miss this? Minix, the small OS designed by professor Andrew Tanenbaum to teach operating systems concets, is now in its 3.0 revision ...
Cartoon for your video iPod
I took one of the Superman cartoons available from archive.org and tried various command line tools to make a version that would play on the ...
Cleaning up old video…
While I was encoding videos over the weekend, I wrote a simple little filter to average consecutive frames to produce less noisy versions of title ...
Could a new browser get you switch?
I like Firefox. It works well, robustly supports web standards, and generally is just a lot more pleasant than using Internet Explorer. Given that I’m ...
New Sidebar Poll: World Series Bets…
I’ve started a new quickie poll. You only have a day or so to voice your opinion: will it be the White Sox or Astros ...
You can take it with you
Well, my wife and I are coming up on our 11th anniversary of our first date, an important holiday which she leveraged to get me ...
archive.org for your video iPod needs
Just in case you got tired of showing off Desparate Housewives on your new video ipod, you can surf on over to archive.org and download ...
KNBR Pays Tribute to Bay Area Broadcasting Legend Bill King
KNBR has posted a very nice tribute to Bay Area sportscasting legend Bill King. It’s amazing to me the breadth and depth of his experience ...
live-f1, a good hack
Scott Remnant is a bit of a Formula-1 buff, and so ran one of those cool Java applets that news agencies provide to keep track ...
World Series: White Sox v. Astros
Well, the table has been set, and it’s going to be the White Sox vs. the Astros in the World Series beginning Saturday. Brad Lidge ...
EPROM burner arrived…
Well, my EPROM burner from mcumall arrived, and I’m now got all the hardware bits ready to burn a cartridge for my old Atari 2600. ...
Bill King passes away
Legendary Bay Area sports broadcaster Bill King passed away today, and I must admit, it bums me out. A great talent, I know him mostly ...
How not to make it to the World Series
You begin by leading 4-2 in the top of the ninth, and then bring in your reliever to get two quick outs: – B. Lidge ...
Yarn… YARN!!!
Witness a pack of knitted zombies re-enact that classic Night of the Living Dead . Link courtesy of Boing Boing , who hardly need the ...
Andromeda Galaxy in IR
Courtesy of the Bad Astronomy Blog , some very nice images of our closest galactic neighbor M31, the Andromeda Galaxy taken with the Spitzer telescope ...
Comments now fixed
Mneptok let me know that comments on my blog were broken (I had forgotten to reinstall Image Magick when I upgraded the operating system). That ...
Of Prions and People
Wow: another terrific article from The Panda’s Thumb , which is quickly becoming one of my favorite destinations on the web. This article is discussing ...
DocuColor Tracking Dot Decoding Guide
Xerox printers use a watermarking technique to insert codes onto all printed documents from their Docucolor color laser printers. These identify date, time and printer ...
Mysteries of the Universe Revealed
I admit it: I hate it when I don’t know stuff. I find not knowing what’s wrong with my car infinitely more annoying than knowing ...
Big Blue Marble
NASA has released a series of Earth images entitled Blue Marble Next Generation , which includes maps of the entire earth rendered without clouds in ...
Thought of the Day
I’m currently reading ::amazon(“0670033847”, “The Singularity Is Near”):: by Ray Kurzweil, and it’s kind of an over-the-top utopian view about the future. His basic hypothesis ...
Origin of Noodleous doubleous
An awesome example of Intelligent Design , much more rigorous than the normal Intelligent Design hypothesis, and therefore is much convincing. ...
Apple unveils video iPod, new iMac | CNET News.com
Apple announced some stuff. Their website is slow , probably a good sign. Carmen already wants one of the new black iPods. ...
Water Molotov – A Street Photography Blog
Juan Buhler has just joined the staff here at Pixar, and is one of those insanely talented photographer types who has a much cooler blog ...
Oldest noodles unearthed in China
Irrefutable evidence that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is behind all of modern society. The remains of the world’s oldest noodles have been unearthed in China. ...
Expect some downtime today…
I’m probably going to have some intermittent downtime today as I work on upgrading my FreeBSD server box. Expect full functionality tomorrow. ...
MAKE: Blog: Waffle-making robot
From the Make blog, an ingenious inventor has created a waffle making robot . And now, to impress my wife and her coworkers who are ...
Free World Dialup
I spent some time this weekend playing around with Free World Dialup . What is that? FWD allows you to make free phone calls over ...
Yahoo! Podcasts
Yahoo! has decided to try to break into the podcasting arena. Apparently you can even use their Yahoo! Music Engine to download and listen to ...
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit Movie Info – Yahoo! Movies
The movie for the weekend is Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit , the first full-length Wallace and Gromit movie produced by Aardman ...
More about pot roast…
I’ve mused about potroast before on my blog, but it’s such a great (and now overlooked) dish when it came up on Slashfood I thought ...
The Long Now Foundation
BoingBoing reminded me that the Long Now Foundation has many of their very interesting seminars available for download via their online library. Far reaching, thought ...
Cervical cancer jab ‘in a year’
From the “It’s fun to be a Luddite” file, witness this bit of news from the BBC that Merck’s new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer ...
Traffic
I remember reading Russell Beattie’s blog, where he said that merely by posting something about the Apple or Macintosh, his traffic doubled or tripled or ...
Cool Robotics Links From IBM
This Make post links to a cool IBM developerworks article on quick prototyping of robots. Many cool nuggest, including the use of cardboard to prototype ...
‘Bride’ Stripped Bare
Editor’s Guild has a nice article on the creation of The Corpse Bride . Apparently the entire thing was shot with the Canon EOS-1D Mark ...
The War of the Worlds in 30 seconds with bunnies.
Heh. Courtesy of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog . ...
Creationism in the Supreme Court
Panda’s Thumb reports on the ties between Supreme Court Nominee Harriet Miers and creationism . The Valley View Christian Church that she attends apparently has ...
Note to self: beware portupgrade -R!
Well, last night I decided to try to fix a dangling problem with out of date versions of ImageMagick for one application completely unrelated to ...
How to make Microsoft announcements appear grander!
Get two industry giants to call a huge press conference to announce something which can only be classified as “beyond trivial.” Way to go Google! ...
How not to lose stuff…
I suppose that I’m in many ways your typical smart geek: I can probably identify 95% of all the quotes from Futurama, but I have ...
Serenity – Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
Orson Scott Card, author of two of the finest science fiction books I’ve ever read (and no, Ender’s Game isn’t among those two) has a ...
More retro programming…
Well, a few minutes of Postscript programming, and I created the label on the right for my Atari 2600 programming project. In the next couple ...
Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head
A 13 foot Burmese python tried to eat a six foot alligator. Results aren’t pretty: Warning! Icky picture might freak you out. Don’t blame me. ...
Nifty Swag from Taiwan
My neighbor picked me up this very cute print of a cat when he was in Taiwan to thank me for taking care of his ...
PidgeonBlog
Fellow Pixarian Jeff Pidgeon has a new PidgeonBlog to augment his Cafe Press Store Full O’ Swag . Follower’s of the Flying Spaghetti Monster might ...
Serenity First Weekend, $10.1 million
There simply is no justice in the world. ...
Verdict: I think its a stunt…
Wow, just when you think it couldn’t get any stranger in the Scobleized universe, we get this posting , quoting: Personal note to Steve Ballmer ...
Serenity
We had a screening of the new Joss Whedon movie Serenity in our screening room at Pixar. I have been awaiting the movie ever since ...
Gutenberg Gem: Half-hours with the Telescope by Richard A. Proctor
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a neat little astronomy book, published in 1873 by Richard A. Proctor. It lists a number of half hour tours of ...
Nifty Paleontology on the Panda’s Thumb
I’ve been interested in the world of pseudo-science for a long time, ever since reading Chariots of the Gods as a young boy, and then ...
Some one has to say it again…
James Robertson doesn’t much like OPML or RSS as file formats, and tells us why : Ye gods, it’s time someone came out and said ...
Brainwagon Radio: Comments on Scoble and Specifications
Twice in one day… Scoble responds to lots of criciticism that he’s evangelizing a crappy format , and really misses the forest for the trees. ...
Cooking when Sick
Well, today is one of those rare days when I miss two days of work: I’m home sick with body aches, a headache, stuffed head, ...
The Cyborg Name Generator
My Cyborg Name: Make your own. Thanks Carmen for pointing this one out. ...
Architeuthis On Film
You might know him as the giant squid, and Japanese researchers Kubodera and Mori caught him on film when he attacked a bait trap 900m ...
Turbo Slug
In a previous weblog posting , I mentioned that I had bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS (networked attached storage) device that I was hacking away ...
Another Scoble-ism
Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger Windows isn’t what whas broken. Windows DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES were what was broken. The two are intimately related. Can you honestly say ...
The Intelligent Designer’s Prayer
The Intelligent Designer’s Prayer , courtesy of the Panda’s Thumb. Our Intelligent Designer, Who art in the unspecified-good-place, Unknown be Thy name. Thy flagella spin, ...
Brainwagon Radio: Turbo Slug, Death of PC, and End of Baseball Season
Well, in this edition of my podcast , I lament the end of baseball season for the Oakland Athletics, talk about the modifications I’m making ...
Wifi for DS Homebrew
The Nintendo DS is kind of a cute little gadget, and what’s cool is that someone is already doing all the heavy lifting of getting ...
Brainwagon Radio: A Podcasting Duet
I have a special treat in today’s podcast : my wife makes an appearance. We chat about our experience at Friday’s Oakland A’s game which ...
Running NetBSD/vax
<img decoding="async" src="/images/vaxsmall.png" alt="Screendump of My Vax"/ class="centered"/> Well, above is a screendump of my latest computer acquisition: a Microvax 3800 which I installed NetBSD ...
Gallery 2.0
I upgraded my Gallery to version 2.0. It seems really slick, and is supposedly more themable than the older version. Check it out . ...
Grim!
Nola.com: NewsFlash – Poor New Orleans neighborhood floods again As many as 500,000 people in southwestern Louisiana, many of them already displaced by Hurricane Katrina, ...
Mustard Watches
It’s just like what it sounds like . ...
Cameraphone Picture Gallery
Wow. Why do all my pictures look like bad security cam footage? ...
Most useless toy I’ve ever wanted…
How about a plastic bunny that waggles his ears when you get mail ? Or you can use it to send instant message. Or songs. ...
Finding Blogs in the Short Head
I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to read. Unfortunately, it is often hard to find blogs that are interesting. I suspect that is ...
Bracing for Rita
Josh mentioned this Houston blogger as one of those who is going to remain in his home and ride out the storm. I’ll be checking ...
Eggs Stand on End at the Autumnal Equinox
Well, it’s hardly surprising, given that you can (with a little effort) stand them on end pretty much every day of the year. But today’s ...
Intel claims ultra low power breakthrough
This news item caught my eye: Intel claims ultra low power breakthrough Mmmm. Moore’s law continues it’s march to the future. ...
Happy Birthday Adam!
Well, Adam doesn’t read my blog, but today is his birthday. Happy Birthday, Kiddo. His girlfriend is coming into town this weekend, so we’ll be ...
“We’ll teach this elephant to dance. Really!”
I know, bashing Microsoft is becoming a theme with me over the last few weeks, but I keep reading stuff on the news and blogs, ...
Button, button, who’s got the button?
The gents at Forever Geek were saddened to think that they didn’t have one of those little 80×15 buttons to link to their site, so ...
XGameStation
I mused about a retro-style game console in today’s podcast, and over lunch I found xgamestation.com , who manufactures a simple video game system which ...
Oakland 7, Minnesota 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 6!
Whew. It’s September, and the A’s were two games back of division leading Anaheim going into last night’s game. Carmen had some homework to do, ...
Brainwagon Radio: Baseball, Atari 2600, FPGAs, you name it
Today’s podcast recaps a bunch of topics which have floated to the top of my conciousness: a recap of last night’s baseball game, my experience ...
Google WiFi?
Rumors have been flying around lately that Google will introduce some kind of wireless service, but now Google itself seems to be nearing some kind ...
Gutenberg Gem: Amusements in Mathematics, be H.E. Dudeney
A classic of puzzles (most of which I would call only marginally mathematical) Amusements In Mathematics , by Henry Ernest Dudeney. has been made available ...
htaccess Cheatsheet
My recent attempts to block hotlinking made me search for a few minutes to find the information contained on this handy htaccess cheatsheet . It’s ...
Théorie de la spéculation
I’m currently reading Poundstone’s book Fortune’s Formula , and am up the the part which discusses the French mathematician Bachelier, and his thesis that the ...
Why Consumer Software Doesn’t Please Me
Summed up neatly: “UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.” Doug ...
A Mini-ITX Computer that Boots from USB Flash
Exactly what it sounds like: XYZ Computing describes a project to get a M10000 Mini-ITX motherboard to boot from a stick of USB flash memory. ...
Telescopes are cool…
Contrary to appearances, I actually try to read blogs of people who are perhaps a bit different than me. I do this to help fight ...
The Basics Work…
Well, a couple more hours of debugging has made the basics of my Atari 2600 project work. Have I mentioned what it is yet? No? ...
San Pablo Dam Excursion
For reasons which actually remain entirely unclear, my wife has been muttering about renting a boat at the nearby San Pablo Dam and taking it ...
How to tell if you’re a racist…
Some stories just make you shake your head . “I’m not racist or anything,” he said. “It’s just, some people I hate, some people I ...
Blargg’s Video Game Sound Emulation
I was digging information up on old 8-bit video game ystem, and found Blargg’s Video Game Sound Emulation , which has some nice information and ...
Still more 2600 hacking…
Well, today I added a block cursor that I could move around (first real time I’ve written a general motion code for the player missile ...
Corporate Blogging
Boing Boing thinks that the Juicyfruit gum blog blows chunks for many of the same reasons that I mentioned in response to a WSJ article ...
PDC Scorecard
Robert Scoble thoughtfully provided a list of all the revolutionary stuff he thinks is being introduced at PDC . To his credit, he includes links ...
Progress on Programming the Atari VCS
My Atari 2600 programming projects needed two displays to enter characters on, so I built a little 5×6 matrix of characters (six characters are about ...
Lawsuit over intelligent design generates a modest proposal
From the York Daily Record: The attorney for the Dover Area School Board calls his client’s decision to include intelligent design into the biology curriculum ...
TiVo turns to the dark side…
Sigh. I’ve been flaming Microsoft for not listening to its customers, so it is sad to see that TiVo has decided to screw their customers ...
Camera Phone Test Image Gallery
Despite remarkably inconsistent remarks about the pictures (many are labelled with “sharp” which are not very sharp, and some are labelled “unacceptably blurry” which actually ...
Josh Scores New Gadgetry at PDC
Josh, one of the guys who convinced me (by example) to record my podcasts on my PDA scored a new Phone PC at PDC . ...
Platitudes Reach High Altitudes
I’ve been following the PDC blogging a bit this morning, and I can’t help but think that there is very little meat that is actually ...
Brainwagon Radio: eBay Buys Skype: Why?
Today’s podcast mostly concerns my confusion on why eBay purchased Internet phone company Skype. Well, not so much why they bought it as why they ...
Press Your Luck
A crazy story I found while using Stumble Upon: Press Your Luck . As someone once said: The generation of random numbers is far too ...
I won’t be buying an Xbox 360
It’s just not that I bought an original Xbox that died a month out of warranty (so Microsoft decided I needed to send them $129 ...
Using Geraniums as Photo Paper
I have seen lots of wacky science projects before, but I hadn’t seen this one before. Basically, the idea is to project a bright image ...
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Last night’s movie was The Exorcism of Emily Rose , which appears to be getting the lion’s share of this weekend’s box office. Despite the ...
A Year of Podcasting
One year ago today, I did my first podcast . I didn’t even call it a podcast, I think the term was yet to be ...
More on Scoble…
I must admit, I find Robert Scoble to be a fascinating blogger. I think it is because I see him just as a person who ...
Brainwagon Radio: Computer Chess at the Computer Hitsory Museum
Last night, I attended an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View entitled “The History of Computer Chess”. It was a panel discussion ...
Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Game
May you be touched by his noodly appendage . Hint: use the shadow to determine if you are over your converts. ...
Telecrapper 2000
Brilliant , courtesy of www.hackaday.com . First the TC2K computer (any standard PC) is connected to the phone line via a Caller ID modem or ...
Katrina Damage
My brother-in-law is in Alabama helping out kidney dialysis patients. He sent my sister this photo, which she notes: This was taken in alabama, Dave ...
More Retro Programming
I’ve been mucking around more with programming the Atari 2600, and have just begun to figure out the vagaries of moving the player missiles around. ...
Read carefully before registering your domain
Heh. Domain Rookie — Hilarious Domain Name Mispronouncings The most amusing: PenIsland.com. ...
Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Scoble…
Robert Scobe writes: Of course, I should be thanking Steve Gillmor. He has lowered expectations of Microsoft so low that our customers have even stopped ...
Brainwagon Radio: Retro Programming on the Atari 2600
Mostly this podcast concerns itself with my latest geeky project: writing programs for the old atari 2600. Why would anyone do this? Have a listen! ...
FPGA CPUs
This dive into the world of retro computing has rekindled my interest in field programmable gate array technologies. I found this page which contains interesting ...
Retro Programming
From time to time, I get this curious nostalgia for the computers of my youth. Don’t get me wrong: I love having megaflops to burn, ...
Athletics 12 Yankees 0
Top of the eighth. ...
He didn’t just say that, did he?
Oh dear lord. President Arrives in Alabama, Briefed on Hurricane Katrina We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we’re going to save lives ...
Astrophotographs from Australia
While looking for an entirely different CD full of image, I uncovered the original PhotoCD that my friend Jeff Eaton and I made when we ...
DigitalGlobe to make satellite photos available to Google Maps
DigitalGlobe, the supplier of imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps will make freshly updated satellite images of New Orleans in the next few days. ...
Drowning New Orleans
Scientific American published this article back in 2001. A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along ...
Testing Missiles
Well, the destruction (and hopefully, eventual replacement) of my old rotting redwood retaining wall has begun. The guys really tore it up good today, hopefully, ...
Governor: Everyone Must Leave New Orleans – Yahoo! News
Holy crap , they are evacuating the Big Easy because of uncontrolled flooding. Not good, folks not good folks. To anyone in the affected areas, ...
Bye Bye, Freeloaders
I received an email a couple of days ago from someone who thoughtfully noted that someone was stealing bandwidth from my by hotlinking to images ...
NASA Views of New Orleans Flooding
NASA has released some of the Earth Observatory images of the flooding in New Orleans . Ouch. ...
Goofing around with Digital Infrared
I took one of the infrared photos that I took on my recent Sonoma trip and tried tweaking it a bit in gimp to make ...
Impressive Satellite Pictures of Katrina
NASA has released a pretty amazing picture of Katrina as it approached landfall, with resolutions up to 6800×8000 pixels, and 250m per pixel. Click on ...
Can you tell when people lie to you?
Lisa WIlliams provided an interesting link to this Science article which suggests that most people are very poor at detecting liars . Catastrophically, most people ...
Dave Slusher Hacks a $25 Digital Camera
Dave went out and bought himself a couple of those single use, $25 camcorders that CVS is selling these days, and hacked them to allow ...
2005 / 2006 Intel’s chip lineup cheatsheet
Those sharp guys over at Engadget have the skinny on Intel’s upcoming processors . My brother and I were discussing how it seemed like a ...
Oakland A’s back on top of the AL West
Well, after a couple of weeks where they seemed to be firmly in reverse, the A’s have won five games in a row and are ...
SIGGRAPH 2005 Post Mortem
Leo has shamed us all by writing up a webpage detailing all the things he found interesting at SIGGRAPH 2005 . Very nice. ...
Katrina comes ashore
As I awaken, news reports are coming in from Lousiana and Mississippi regarding hurricaine Katrina. It doesn’t sound too good. They lowered the storm swell ...
My Day
Most of the time when I bother to blog about things that are going on in my life, I tend to do it in the ...
Video Game Sound Quiz
I got 14 out of 18 , from PBS. ...
More Flying Spaghetti Monster Links
More Flying Spaghetti Monster links courtesy of Boing Boing. There is even a button: I also found this one from here : ...
HOW TO make DVD Panoramas
Another cool project linked from Make: HOW TO make DVD Panoramas . The idea is simple: find a DVD that has some panning panoramic shot, ...
Google Talk
Everyone is running articles about Google Talk this morning. Apparently Google has settled on the Jabber protocol for instant messaging (gasp, a standard) and has ...
Brainwagon Radio: Podcasting via CompactFlash, and Google Talk
Today’s podcast gives some information about my experiments with getting podcasts transferred to a CompactFlash card so I can listen to them using my Dell ...
First Google Talk
Gordon Smith became my first contact on Google Talk, and mentioned that it was below freezing where was, which happens to be in rural Australia, ...
Brainwagon Radio: Watching my waist, and reality TV
Okay, for the second day in a row, I’ve got a new podcast . This one details my recent recommitment to losing weight and my ...
I’ll put this on my bumper…
Over at boingboing, bpowah has designed a “walking fish” graphic for Pastafarians . I love it. I want one for the bumper of my car. ...
Brainwagon Radio: Trying to get back into the swing of podcasting…
Yow. It’s been over a month since I recorded a podcast. If anyone out there is still listening, then here’s a fresh installment , detailing ...
It’s Monday, and I’d like to be anywhere but here…
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I just know I’m gonna be grouchy. Everything that I have to do (like go to work) ...
Flickr Magazine Maker
Fun toy of the day: a gadget to make phony magazine covers from Flickr Photos . Yeah, I know, every blog in the universe has ...
I’m converting to Pastafarianism
I got a chuckle out of this. Anyone who looks to Kent Hovind as the intellectual juggernaut of Creationism is obviously about as smart as ...
The Funniest Thing on The Onion in a while…
I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. …if you are in the San Diego area, do me this favor: Go to Sea World, walk ...
Macro Photography Rig
Hack A Day has a link to an article about constructing a rig to take macro photographs . It’s a cool gadget which uses a ...
Baby comes with brain repair kit for mum
New Scientist is running an article which suggests that stray stem cells from a growing fetus may colonize in the mother and repair damage to ...
Pixar Animation’s Joe Ranft Killed in Auto Accident
Holy crap, I spent the day at home today, and was scanning my usual blogs when I read this shocking article that Pixarian Joe Ranft ...
Applied Geometry homepage
This is mostly just a reminder to myself to look on the Applied Geometry homepage for these course notes on Discrete Differential Geometry . ...
Fluid Simulation for Games
Every once in a while, it disturbs me that there are parts of the computer graphics world that I rarely delve into, and simulation near ...
Dr.Weil on EGCG
The other day I was watching TV and saw an advertisement for One a Day Weight Smart Vitamins . Most of the diet plans that ...
Why does dry spaghetti break into more than two pieces when bent?
My tagline for this blog is “there is much pleasure in useless knowledge”. What knowledge could be more useless than trying to understand why spaghetti ...
Shane Ross on Dynamics, Control & Computation
In a thread on Slashdot on calculating spacecraft trajectories to Mars some helpful individual pointed at Shane Ross’ Dynamics, Control & Computation page . Lots ...
Virtual Street Reality
From one of our internal mailing lists at work, here is a link to some of the work of English street artist Julian Beever. His ...
Plane struck by lightning imagery
Wow. Check out these plane struck by lightning images . Crazy. I found a link to this on Fark . ...
Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans
Need some cool high resolution scans of old time Hollywood actors and actresses? Look no further than Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans . Courtesy ...
SMS Message Courtesy of Yahoo!
I found out that you can use this link to send SMS messages via Yahoo! . Cool. I bet you could script this pretty easily ...
Buffalo Chicken and Blue Cheese Dipping Sauce
While watching Food Network the other day, I saw an episode of Calorie Commando that featured a dish I thought I might like to try: ...
A Homemade PBX
Frequent readers of this blog will note that I’m a bit of a gadget junkie, and I’m particularly interested in people who build rather than ...
The Hidden Boot Code of the Xbox – Xbox-Linux
Slashdot pointed at this kind of cool article on how the hidden code on the Xbox was hacked . I thought it was pretty cool ...
Stealth
Warning, there will be spoilers below, so if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read further than this paragraph. I liked the movie, thought it ...
The Tears of Saint Lawrence
This weekend marks the annual return of the Tears of Saint Lawrence: better known to those of us in the amateur astronomy community as the ...
Best of Show from Renderman Users Group Meeting
Each year Pixar tosses a Renderman User’s Group meeting at SIGGRAPH. In the past few years, we’ve invited some of our users to present some ...
A’s Lead the AL West
For the second day in a row, the A’s pull out a come from behind victory over their rivals in the AL West, the Somewhere ...
Nightline discusses Intelligent Design
You can download the torrent of last night’s episode of Nightline which discusses Intelligent Design here . I’ll review and let you know what I ...
Digital Black and White
Courtesy of the Make blog, here is a nice article on using Photoshop to make better digital black and white photographs . The tutorial is ...
Paul Phillips on evolution vs. ID
I began reading Paul Phillips’ blog when Wil Wheaton mentioned that he was a poker player and a regular blogger. I’ve since found out that ...
Space shuttle Discovery lands safely in California – Yahoo! News
Because of poor weather in Florida, Discovery has been safely relocated to Edward’s Airforce Base in California . Welcome home, astronauts. Until the problems with ...
Invention Channel presents the Cozy Kitty
I was watching The Soup this morning, and their clip of the week was priceless: a commercial for a cat-shaped neck wrap. From their product ...
Apologies for the downtime..
While I was off at SIGGRAPH, I had a problem with Comcast which unfortunately took a few days to resolve and resulted in some downtime. ...
Hot Damn! Go A’s
Back on May 29th, I bitched about it being tough to be an A’s fan . On that day, they were 17-32, and looking at ...
Playing Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters
Oh yeah, while at Disneyland, we gave a shot at the new Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters ride. At the end, rather than trying to convince ...
Back at SIGGRAPH…
Sorry to both all of my loyal readers, but I’ve been off with the family enjoying a brief vacation stint at Disneyland. We took the ...
Doomsday Algorithm
Need to do calendar calculations in your head? Try this page which describes Conway’s Doomsday Algorithm , with lots of good links. Note: I found ...
List of unusual deaths
Think you are having a bad day? Try the Wikipedia list of unusual deaths . At least no vultures have mistaken my head for a ...
It was a dark and stormy night…
Or at least ( as Dan noted) it’s a dark day for fiction again, as the results for the 2005 Bulwer-Litton Contest are in . ...
SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Trailer Available
Next week I’ll be leaving for SIGGRAPH, the premiere computer graphics conference. Today I’m trying to work through my agenda, make lists of papers that ...
New “business” card…
I’ve been thinking for quite some time that I need to make some cards that I can hand out to people when I meet them ...
Shuttle Discovery Launch Today?!
I’m watching the live feed on NASA TV. They are in a pre-programmed hold at 9:00 till launch, which should go on for another twelve ...
Microsoft Virtual Earth is out…
This is getting a lot of play everywhere, but Microsoft’s new mapping application, Virtual Earth is now live. In most respects, I find it very ...
Humble Pie
If there is ever a time that I seem like I sound too smug and self assured, just whisper “39th out of 40, and only ...
Need more help with color blending?
I’m hopeless when it comes to color. But ColorBlender.com has a really nice interface that allows you to match and generate color palettes. Fun. ...
Extra Stuff: Gambling Ramblings
I picked up a new book on my trip to Reno: Extra Stuff: Gambling Ramblings by Peter Griffin. Griffin is the author of one of ...
Pixar Motorama 2005
Every year Pixar has a small auto show. People who work here bring in some of their classic cars, and a couple of local dealers ...
Anyone going to SIGGRAPH?
I’ll be trundling off to SIGGRAPH at the end of the month. Any attendees (who I don’t see everyday at lunch here at Pixar) want ...
The Rise and Fall of Popularity
I feel strangely sad by the following graph: ...
On the Free Software Ecosystem
Apparently some people concerned that recent donations to the Drupal project are being used to buy computers from Dell, an operation which has done relatively ...
Teaching a spam filter to play chess
Sometimes I’m amazed by webpages which answer profound or trivial questions that I’ve asked myself before. This time, I’m more amazed that someone would work ...
The Wall
The Internet Archive has a version of the 1962 documentary The Wall about the first year of the Berlin Wall, including the murder of Peter ...
DIY Stonehenge
Discovery Channel Canada has a cool video about Wally Wallington, a gentlemen from Michigan whose hobby is trying to duplicate the construction efforts of the ...
Holy crap it is hot!
Driving back from Reno, and man is it hot! Thank you science for air conditioning. Update: It hit 108 degrees a few miles further down ...
Relaxing
Nothing like relaxing with your new pair of Converse AllStars. ...
What the heck is an “anti-reaction”?
Microsoft propaganda minster Robert Scoble has remarked that news that Longhorn will prevent playback of DRM’ed video unless it is to a sufficiently “secure” or ...
Treason, Okay, Violence, Okay, but Sex?
I’ve been tracking Wil Wheaton’s amusing anecdotes about competing in the 2005 WSOP, but today the poker muse must have temporarily vacated him only to ...
Brainwagon Radio: About Weight Loss and Frustration
The first of two podcasts I recorded earlier this week but only recently uploaded to my server. It’s mostly a rant against skinny people, stereotypes ...
Brainwagon Radio: About Laptops as Textbook Replacements
The second of two podcasts I recorded earlier this week, where I give my thoughts on the relative lack of utility in giving children laptops ...
JuiceBox Revisited…
In a previous blog entry , I mentioned that I had picked up a $12 Mattel Juicebox that I was thinking about hacking. I’ve done ...
So Long, Thanks for the Fish
It’s kind of a sad day for this Athletics fan. The A’s have been busy on the trading block, and have dealt two of my ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Manual of Heraldry
Need to brush up on your heraldry before donning your armor and traipsing off to the Rennaissance Fair? Try checking out Project Gutenberg’s illustrated version ...
Miggy wins MVP of the Allstar Game
One of my favorite Athletics, and now my favorite Oriole, Miguel Tejada just won himself a Corvette for his performance as All Star MVP. Congrats ...
Electrostatic Machines
While sorting through some books that I had stacked on my floor, I found ::amazon(“0071373233”, “Homemade Lightning”):: on my shelf. Building a Wimhurst static machine ...
New Meme/Flickr Tag: Sign of the Apocalypse
I had a brainstorm while picking up groceries at our local Raley’s grocery store. Sometimes, you encounter something so bizarre, so strange, so downright wrong ...
Doesn’t anyone test anything anymore?
I snapped a picture of my Pac Man t-shirt using my Motorola MPx220 cell phone in its “self portrait” mode: where the viewfinder is echoed ...
Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight
Yahoo is carrying the following Reuters’ article: Blogs seen as powerful new tool in U.S. court fight which talks about the role that blogs could ...
The Incredible Edible Egg
Courtesy of lifehacker , here is the account of one intrepid hacker attempting to learn the secrets of egg poaching . Interestingly, he comes up ...
Today’s T-shirt
Today’s T-shirt comes from a simpler time, a time when computers had only eight bits, and all colors were simple primaries. It is just beginning ...
Cell service shut off indefinitely in 4 NYC commuter tunnels – UPDATED
Boing Boing documents the quick imposition and then reversal of a cell phone ban in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in NY . Apparently they ...
Fantastic 4
Yesterday I went out and caught the newest Marvel movie release Fantastic Four , the story of four (well, five really) individuals who are, who ...
Sh*t metal screws…
I, of course, meant “sheet metal” screws. Ever notice how the simplest tasks can become annoying because of abject stupidity? Consider this mornings tiny project: ...
Home Improvement, Round 2
Not content with merely screwing up one minor job, I had to go back to the well of human despair for a second time today. ...
Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal
This story of a Florida man arrested for using an open WiFi router has been making the rounds, and I’ve been holding off on posting ...
People helping people…
What doesn’t get reported in the media enough is all the little kindnesses that people can pay to one another when trouble unites them. I ...
Why can’t camera phones become better cameras?
I really like the convenience of having a camera phone for taking snapshots, but unfortunately, there is a vast gulf in capability between what a ...
Everything You Need to Know About Next-gen Broadband – New DSL flavors, DOCSIS 3.0, Bell TV, and more…
Broadband Reports has this cool overview of where residential networking is likely to go in the next few years . I’m currently stuck on cable ...
Brainwagon Radio: Terror in London, WiFi arrest, and Two Movies
I almost didn’t upload this podcast . I did twenty minutes in my car this morning, and then (as I usually do) played it back ...
Four London Blasts Kill 40, Injure 300 – Yahoo! News
Eesh. And I thought I was having a bad week. Four London Blasts Kill 40, Injure 300 – Yahoo! News Is it al-Qaida? Response to ...
Upgrade to WordPress
I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1.3 to help keep security up to scratch. I apologize for any temporary snafus. Polls seem not to work properly in ...
Some 4th of July Links
Need some audio material? Try the Colonial Williamsburg Past to Present Podcasts . Or, you could just download The Declaration of Independence, available from Project ...
Fireworks
Well, last year I recorded a simple quicktme of the fireworks using my little Nikon 4500 from Jack London Square. This year, I decided to ...
Maybe I need a break from blogging…
Blogging lately feels pointless. Which of course it is, but it used to not feel so pointless. Grump. ...
Deep Impact, the Movie
<br /> </table> <p> Check out this movie of the impactor as viewed from the flyby spacecraft. Cool. </p> ...
Pictures of Pennies
Got a few pennies lying around? Try building some of these impressive structures . Have lots of dollars? Try this page instead . Hey, you ...
No Dinosaurs Left on Tempel 1
Tonight the Deep Impact space probe impacted Comet Tempel 1. I’m watching the coverage life on NASA TV. We can expect to see a photo ...
Project Cryo
Need a kooky craft project for geeks? Look no further than Project Cryo , a spiffy mod to your mouse to… well… go have a ...
How to Build a Telescope
Courtesy of the Make blog , here are some instructions on building a very simple refracting telescope . I’ve done something like this before by ...
How to photograph fireworks : Lifehacker
Lifehacker is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs. They have all sorts of good info that seems strangely timely, like the following link on ...
O’Connor to Retire From Supreme Court
Well, it is O’Connor who is going to be the first to vacate a position on the Supreme Court, not Chief Justice Rehnquist. O’Connor to ...
Brainwagon Radio: Opera for Smartphone, Orb and Deep Impact
Where your host tries to shake off his morning jolt with some gadget news and a brief bit about some weekend fireworks in space . ...
Geek News Central Revealing Links & Useful Technical Information
Todd over at Geek News Central notes that the iTunes 4.9 release with podcasting is blasting him with traffic: I just checked my latest Libsyn ...
Fantasy Automobile
Right next to Pixar is a little outfit called Fantasy Junction that deals in customized and rare automobiles. Occasionally there are trucks parked outside delivering ...
More on Google Maps API
In the previous post, a couple of people noted problems with the API. Just in case nobody realized this: the key that you use is ...
Lose a little on every sale…
Make up for it in volume! According to this article on Slashdot , Gamespot claims that the Playstation 3 will cost $494 to make, but ...
Map Flickr photos with Google Earth
Well, that didn’t take very long. The first cool hack for Google Earth has already appeared. As is reported on lifehacker, there is a hack ...
FlickrBadge
Make your own. ...
Google Releases Google Map API
Now, you can embed google maps into your own websites. Like, well, this: Okay, it’s not working right yet. I’m still trying to figure it ...
Google Earth
I know, everyone and their mother already knows about this, but…. My brother called me at 11:15 last night to tell me about Google Earth ...
War of the Worlds, circa 1938
Today is the opening day for Spielberg’s War of the Worlds , but just in case you want to know what Orson Welles’ broadcast sounded ...
Udderly Ridiculous
This little bit of Shockwave madness seems strangely appropriate today. Today, after all, is the opening of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds , and it ...
Sage Words from Wil
Great minds think alike. Here’s a nice quote from Wil Wheaton: Here is the most important thing I can tell you: You do not need ...
iTunes w/ Podcasting Released
Everybody else seems to be yapping about it: got to apple.com and get your fresh tasty new iTunes, complete with support for podcast subscriptions . ...
Brainwagon Radio: Happy Birthday, Grokster and Gnomedex
Where your host sings Happy Birthday to his wife and then goes on to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Grokster, and his feelings ...
Supreme Court Rules in Grokster
Well, I haven’t had a chance to read the ruling yet, but it appears that the SCOTUS has unanimously gutted the Sony decision and made ...
George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead
It’s a rather curious fact that both I and my charming wife have a thing for zombie movies. You name it, if it has a ...
A’s Complete The Sweep
The A’s completed the sweep of their cross Bay rivals today with a 16-0 victory which has to be one of the most one sided ...
Google Video Search
Today Google released their own plugin for playing video on their Google Video Search page. Apparently it is based upon VLC, and you can get ...
Why Blog about Random Stuff?
I do monitor various weblog indexers to see who is linking to this blog. Most of the time, they are really good at finding my ...
Boffins create zombie dogs
I had to look up the word “boffin”. Seemed timely given the release of Romero’s Land of the Dead . News.com.au reports that scientists at ...
The Poor Man’s Raid Array
Dear God. Some hacking projects seems horribly misguided. I like the idea of using junk and recycled components as much as the next guy, but ...
The Cult of RSS
I keep scanning the news being blogged on Technorati about Gnomedex 2005 , and frankly, I’m still mystified. There seems to be a whole bunch ...
Nazca, Move Over…
Try Marree Man , as seen by Google Siteseeing. ...
As 6, Giants 3
Giants looked ugly, with five errors. Nice catch by Byrnes, who also had a bad running mistake on a Giants error. ...
As versus Giants
Second inning. Addendum: Wow, how crappy is the zoom feature on my camera phone? Rhetorical question. Serious answer: really crappy. ...
Testing…
Just testing some magic from A List Apart for doing CSS drop shadows. This requires all sorts of skullduggery with negative margins and the like ...
I’m curious about Gnomedex 5.0
Take a look at their announcement , especially concentrating on the What is Gnomedex… section. Someone, please, explain it to me. Why is Gnomedex significant? ...
A tree picture, posted automatically from Flickr…
I’ve tweaked my flickr upload template a bit to be a bit more WordPerfect friendly, and to use my existing style sheet instead of interjecting ...
Pear Photo
Pear Photo Originally uploaded by brainwagon . While in front of the Copia center in Napa last weekend, I tried snapping close up photos of ...
Personal Expression is Just a Fad…
Every once in a while, you read something that makes you just shake your head. Dave Slusher mentioned David Coursey’s anti-podcasting article . I’m not ...
BrickJournal
I have a couple of friends who are still Lego fanatics. Just in case they missed this, check out BrickJournal – the magazine for Adult ...
Dave Brain
While scanning for reference photos of brains, I found this baseball card for David Leonard Brain. He played for the Reds, the Giants, the White ...
House passes flag protection amendment for 6th time
The House of Representatives has (again) passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution banning desecration of the flag , It reads (in full): The Congress ...
Cool photo…
While browsing the photo and print collection at the Library of Congress , I found this really cool photo of a telescope set up in ...
Cell Phone Warning
Cell Phone Warning Originally uploaded by brainwagon . Sometimes the inspiration to blog something strikes me at odd moments. As I was gassing up my ...
Brain Science
The brain is a bizarre little meat computer. As proof witness this current article from nature.com : Quian Quiroga also found that a lone neuron ...
Call me a traditionalist…
When it comes to most things, I’m about as geeky and gonzo for gizmos as you could possibly imagine, but in some things, I’m a ...
I am not a number.
However… ...
Flutterby! : Kitty Cannon
My best was 681 930 982 feet. Does playing this make me a bad person? ...
Young Trekkie Persecuted
For those of you with a sense of humor, try reading this account of a young man who was suspended for reciting his own pledge ...
My weekend
Yeah, my blog was a little sparse on the nerd front this weekend: Carmen and I were off for a short anniversary getaway in Napa, ...
Return of Design – Individual Color
I’m not color saavy savvy enough to actually design a good color scheme for websites. What I did years ago was come up with a ...
More Food Thoughts…
While I was out touring wine country this last weekend, I began to think a bit more about something that I’ve only recently become to ...
JuiceBox Hacking
I can’t really stop geeking even when on vacation with my wife. We stopped in at the Target in Napa to pick up some toothbrushes ...
Picnic at Clos du Val
Picnic at Clos du Val , originally uploaded by brainwagon . Enjoying a picnic lunch of bread and cheese with Carmen. ...
On the Napa Wine Train
On the Napa Wine Train , originally uploaded by brainwagon . Having fun with Carmen ...
I can appreciate sarcasm…
If you can as well, try checking out this Open Letter to the Kansas school board who is struggling with the idea of teaching so-called ...
More Scoble Mush
Some things just make you blink. A Day in the Life is reporting that MSN is only blocking the words democracy and freedom in the ...
Cheating in Baseball
I have a romantic view of baseball, and it is always startling when confronted with the reality that baseball is a business first, and the ...
Google SiteRank Patent
Slashdot mentioned that the Google SiteRank patent application was available, so here it is for your perusal . ...
A deal made in Washington? Bargaining to Restore Freedom?
Congressman Rick Boucher is a rare animal indeed: a man looks at the bigger picture of intellectual property and tries to determine the appropriate balance ...
BSA disgusted with critiques of their inflammatory piracy loss methodology
Ars Technica points us at both an article from The Economist which questioned the accuracy and methology of the BSA in determining of piracy to ...
Gutenberg Gem: Occult Chemistry, by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
Okay, okay, it’s not really a gem, except in the sense that it’s interesting to read an early example of utter and complete mumbo jumbo. ...
Anti-Spam Experiment
Yesterday I did some thinking bout how to prevent more of the spam that floods (or at least leaks into) my sight, and decided to ...
Wikipedia
I like Wikipedia . I think it is a great resource, maintained by the efforts of many talented and knowledgeable individuals, even in the face ...
A Minute with Dan: Don’t Mention Democracy | Bayosphere
Dan Gilmor had a short .mp3 response to the news that Microsoft was cooperating with the Chinese government to censor weblogs on MSN. I ranted ...
EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers
Something no blogger should be without: the EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers . I’ve only skimmed it, but there seems to be a lot of ...
Brainwagon Radio: Why Blog? and Spam
This podcast is mostly a recap of my discussions with Amy on why I blog, and some meandering thoughts about spam filtering. ...
Comment Spams Per Day
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had 1300 or so comment spam messages enter my queue. I thought I’d make a graph to see ...
The dullest blog in the world
No, it’s not brainwagon , but it looked like this guy had to really work to take the crown away from me. Courtesy of Alan ...
Michael Jackson Acquitted
After months and months of trial, the King of Pop has been acquitted on all counts . Just prior to the verdict, I had this ...
Scoble on Human Rights…
In one of his recent posts , Robert Scoble reveals a certain pragmatism when it comes to human rights. When doing business in various countries ...
Moon, ala JVC GR-D270
Here is a picture of the crescent moon, captured at 25x zoom on my JVC GR-D270 camcorder. I punched it up just a tiny bit ...
Masked Bandits Attack!
Well, okay, so these bandits were really just stealing Scrappy’s cat food from the patio, but this time I had my new trusty JVC GR-D270 ...
Haunted papercraft toys of great magnificence
Courtesy Cory at BoingBoing (who got it via the Make blog) here is a cool set of haunted papercraft toys that you can make yourself. ...
Why Daily Blogging Is A Good Idea
or, at least not a bad idea. Amy Gahran over at Contentious wrote a nice article entitled Why Daily Blogging Usually Is a Bad Idea ...
Fedora Core 4 released…
Get your red hot torrent downloads here. ...
Water Bottle Jetpack
Damn! I hesitate to claim fraud, but is this really possible? Courtesy of the Make Blog . ...
Butterflies from Flutterby
Dan has put up a nice photo of a butterfly that he took while zipping around China Grove Camp. Now that my weekend chore is ...
Grand Theft Auto Otherside
Humorous inspiration that shows what can be done with a little imagination and a camcorder. ...
Today’s Installment of What Sucks Today…
I worked most of the day getting my garage door primed, and decided to accelerate the process of finishing the job tomorrow by spending more ...
The Food of the Gods, by Brandon Head
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a detailed account of one of my favorite things in life: The Food of the Gods, by Brandon Head When one ...
How to REALLY handle spam…
Tom sent me a pointer to Jef Poskanzer’s notes on how he handles a million spam messages every day . No, that’s note an exaggeration, ...
Internet Explorer Security Plans
Courtesy of Scoble’s blog, here is a post concerning “Low Rights Internet Explorerer”: IEBlog : Clarifying Low-Rights IE Low-rights IE will only be available in ...
Escher Photoshop Contest
Those guys on worth1000.com have truly amazing Photoshop contents, and this contest themed “Escher Blowout” has some incredibly cool stuff. Check it out. ...
Tutorial on Deconvolution
By way of (gasp!) a useful Slashdot comment , here is a tutorial on deconvolution produced by the NRAO. What can I say? I read ...
Senate panel votes to expand Patriot Act
Oh good gravy. Senate panel votes to expand Patriot Act . The revised act would grant the FBI the power to write its own secret ...
TiVoToGo, to go!
Reuters is reporting that TiVO To Go supports transfers to Windows Mobile devices . I’ll dig into this later tonight to see if I can ...
I didn’t think I’d have to say it…
Tiger Woods is not a nerd. ...
Movie Making Manual
Now that I have a little camcorder, I’m interested in free software that I can use to build cool bits of media. Wikibooks has a ...
I’m becoming less popular…
My popularity over the last thirty days appears to be falling. Perhaps I should bath more regularly. Or maybe I’m just more boring this month. ...
Sue’s Betta
As a brief test of the macro capabilities of my video camera, here’s a brief clip of Sue’s new Betta splendens (Windows Media Video, sorry ...
Stopped Clock Right Once in a Day…
But sadly isn’t right for the second time. Pundit Dvorak (just how does one get to be a pundit anyway) muses that the announcement that ...
Brainwagon Radio: The One Where Hell Freezes Over
Where your host muses about Apple’s announcement and tries to provide some sane reasoning about what it will mean for the stylish computer manufacturer. ...
Pentium M
I was trying to justify my inner hunch that the Apple announcement was all about laptops, and found the wikipedia page on the Pentium M ...
Let’s all drink the Intellectual Property Koolaid…
The Times Online reports that Britain is considering doubling the length of copyrights on pop classics , in an attempt to march in step with ...
Hollywood foots bill for LAPD spy cams
Xeni Jardin filed a story for Wired on the installation of spy cams funded by the MPAA . These cameras monitor a couple of alleys ...
WWDC Keynote
Off to go watch the Apple World Wide Developer’s conference keynote, mainly to see if Apple is going to switch from IBM PowerPC chips to ...
Butterfly Gardening
In the last couple of days, we’ve seen an explosion of butterflies (well, I mean a lot of butterflies, not actually exploding butterflies) around the ...
SLAX Linux Live, with some questions
Previously I’ve mentioned my appreciation for both Knoppix and Damn Small Linux , both fairly cute LiveCD versions of Linux. The problem is that Damn ...
Book Assembly Photo-Journal
I entertained the notion of self-publishing a book on telescope making a while back, and even dabbled in the idea of self-printing a few copies. ...
Two Musical Bits
Two musical links from the Make Magazine blog : A streaming radio station called rand()% which consists entirely of audio generated by programs in real ...
The Magic of Baseball
Check out the beautiful sunset forming the backdrop for the minor league team the North Shore Spirit. Damn! Makes me wish I could have a ...
Be Skeptable!
I found the rather curious non-word “skeptable” in a posting, and wondered just how often people used this particular bastardization of the word skeptical. The ...
Heart Rate Log For Today’s Exercise
Well, today I wore my Polar heart rate watch to the gym, and downloaded this nice log of my 45 minute workout. I did 30 ...
Aximsite – x50v Quicklinks
Just some cool links to information about the Dell Axim X50v, the PDA that I use to record all my recent podcasts. Some good stuff ...
Robby the Robot
Robby the Robot , originally uploaded by brainwagon . Just celebrity spotting in SF. Addendum: Check out the Robby the Robot Fan Site . ...
Five reasons social networking doesn’t work – CNET.com
Molly Wood has an article on CNET detailing Five reasons social networking doesn’t work . I think it’s worth reading. Her top reason: There’s nothing ...
Gnuplot usage
Lisa uses her weblog to remind her of things that are hard to remember like the instructions to her watch . I have done a ...
Education on the meaning of the word “public domain”
Dan put me onto Turtle’s 78 RPM Jukebox , a site which contains some very nice recordings of old 78 RPM records which are in ...
Historic Magazine About Aerial Photography
While surfing, I found this cool scan of Photo Miniature magazine which was published in 1903. It covered the field of aerial photography, and includes ...
The Weirdest Book I Ever Got
Check out this blogger’s report about theferrett: The Weirdest Book I Ever Got , his exposure to The Creationist’s View of the DINOSAURS and the ...
What I want to know is…
just how did this seem like a good idea ? I mean really, did someone pitch the idea like “I know, to emphasize how the ...
Ed Halley’s GIMP Tutorial on Using Multiple Exposures
I was searching for a program that I only vaguely recall (which I didn’t find) but I did find Ed Halley’s GIMP Tutorial on Using ...
Brainwagon Radio: Mystery Podcast
Yesterday I recorded a podcast on the way to work, but due to a computer glitch at work, I was unable to upload it immediately. ...
Ukulele Beatles Fun!
Previously I mentioned a $22 build it yourself ukulele kit and also found an inspiring rendition of Live and Let Die performed on the ukulele ...
My bookshelf
Just another test of my camera phone and automatic posting. I think my copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species is on the shelf above though. ...
Oakland Shows Signs of Life
Well, I bitched about Oakland a couple of days ago, and today I’m watching the possibility that they might string two wins in a row. ...
B-A-N-A-N-A
I have a lot of fun with digital cameras, just taking pictures of objects in isolation. A bit of work with Gimp , and you ...
VIA Technologies, Inc. announces the C7
This website runs on a VIA Nehemiah 1Ghz motherboard. I used to run it on a dual 400Mhz Celeron box I built on an Abit ...
Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
With only brief commentary on my part, I submit Human Events, The National Conservative Weekly’s list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th ...
WSJ.com – Blogging Becomes A Corporate Job; Digital ‘Handshake’?
We need a new word. The Wall Street Journal has an article about blogging as the new corporate job. I’m not happy with applying the ...
Optics Fun With Gelatin
Today’s bizarre science link of the day comes from the opticsforkids.com website, and is entitled Optics Fun With Gelatin . Edible optics? What optical phenomena ...
Me
Just a picture of me from my cell phone Addendum: This post was really just created as a test of Flickr ‘s ability to post ...
Boing Boing: HOWTO add Half Life 2 elements to your photos
Cool link today from Boing Boing which extracted elements from the game Halflife 2 and embedded them into real scenes using high dynamic range lighting. ...
Tough to be an A’s fan…
I suspected that the A’s may have a difficult time getting to the playoffs this year. All three of the other AL West teams had ...
Movie Review: Madagascar
Last night we had a screening of the new Dreamworks film Madagascar and I must say, it was one of the most enjoyable, light, fun, ...
Why the broadcast flag should go forward | Perspectives | CNET News.com
Dan Glickman, CEO of the MPAA has an editorial running on news.com entitled: [Why the broadcast flag should go forward.][1] I urge you to go ...
MAKE: Tonepad – DIY Music Projects
Courtesy of (you guessed it) the Make Blog , check out Tonepad , a website which offers all sorts of PCB patterns for DIY music ...
The Problem With Government in a Nutshell
Governor digs fixing potholes / San Jose crews destroy part of road for staged event Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger traveled to a quiet San Jose neighborhood ...
How the THX sound was made…
Andy Moorer’s story on how he created the THX sound. He did it the old fashioned way: he wrote 20,000 lines of C code! Music ...
Seamless Data Distribution System
Google Maps is pretty cool, but they watermark all their images which makes their satellite data a little less than entirely useful for goofing around ...
Recipe: Pulled Turkey
I haven’t posted any of my culinary explorations lately, so I thought that I would rectify this wrong by detailing something that I tried for ...
Map Projections: How Projections Work
I like maps. I thought I’d archive a couple of useful links for generating your own maps: First, a site to describe how to take ...
Project Dalek
All sorts of projects based upon the Star Wars universe are making the rounds of various blogs, so why not take a break and build ...
Brainwagon Radio: Potpourri Surrounding Make Magazine v2
Where your host meanders around topics inspired by the arrival of the new issue of Make Magazine . Topics too varied to enumerate, you’ll have ...
SnapStream Store: Medusa PVR
Crazy. The gents at SnapStream built PVR using their software and six capture cards. Then, they redid it with the new Hauppauge dual tuner cards. ...
Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption
Sigh. Things like this really depress me. Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption | CNET News.com A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the ...
Game Review: Katamari Damacy
I was in Fry’s last weekend, and was just browsing the cheap video game aisle’s with my wife, when I noticed that the quirky Japanese ...
Systm
Another fun link from the make blog: Systm , a video show produced by a couple of young geeks. In their first episode, they build ...
Remote Control of the Nikon 4500?
Hey folks, I’ve passed some of my helpful technical tidbits on to you, it is time that some of you work for me. 🙂 I ...
Fun with a digital camera, Gimp, and an action figure
I’ve got a lot of toys in my office. My friend Jeff and I used to play Starcraft online quite a bit, back when both ...
How to destroy the Earth
A veritable primer for the up and coming mad scientist. ...
New version of Neat Image
The incredibly useful dpreview.com has an announcement for a new release of the image noise reduction program Neat Image . If you’ve got photos which ...
Experimental IRC on brainwagon
For grins I’ve set up a simple IRC daemon on brainwagon.org. Go ahead and try it out if you like, my nickname is likely to ...
Ministry uses dinosaurs to dispute evolution
Quote of the day: Ministry uses dinosaurs to dispute evolution “I consider Ken Ham the most informed creationist in America.” Jerry Falwell The very definition ...
Philips DVP642 DVD Player Deal
Isn’t it always the way, two days after I buy a DVD player, the same model goes on sale on Amazon and $10 cheaper with ...
Video Encoding Experiments
I did some quick experiments to check the compatibility of video files that I converted and my new Philips DVP 642 DVD player. I wanted ...
Smile and Say “Olympus Mons”!
NASA does churn out some fairly interesting snapshots from their Mars missions, and this is no exception. The Mars Orbiter Camera onboard the Mars Global ...
Brainwagon Radio: Philips DVP642 and the Commercialization of Podcasting
Where your host describes his new DVD player which can play DivX video , rants about the commercialization of podcasting and finishes up with a ...
My New Toy: Philips DVP 642
On a whim, I decided I needed a new DVD player. It’s not like I don’t have DVD players, but the one I had in ...
Context Free
Courtesy of Mark Lentczer, have a gander at Context Free , an implementation of Chris Coyne’s design grammars . This puts me in mind of ...
More fun with reflecting balls
After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting ...
Revenge of the Sith
Well, once again, working for Pixar Animation has its perks: yesterday we had company screenings for the prerelease of George Lucas’ sixth installment in the ...
UTARC UX-1 Balloon Launch
Cool science link of the day: an amateur launch of an amateur balloon to a height fo 52,000 feet. Pretty nifty pictures UTARC UX-1 Balloon ...
Juicebox
The Make blog listed the Juicebox , a cute little embedded microcontroller board based upon the Atmel AVR chips. Pretty neat. ...
Cool video experiment
Video Thing has a cool experiment in shooting panoramic video using a Christmas tree ball mounted on a boom in front of a DV cam. ...
Bay To Breakers
Well, according to the Bay To Breakers website, I came in 21,753rd. Carmen came in 21,747th. Yesterday it seemed to be different: we saw 2174 ...
Perhaps it is just my aching knees…
But I feel a full on rant coming on, brought on by my favorite corporate shill, Robert Scoble. I know, I know, he’s an easy ...
Bay To Breakers
Well, I’m back from the Bay to Breakers. Carmen and I mostly walked the course at a fairly brisk pace, we completed in about 2h ...
Bizarre Camera Phone Picture
Well, after I crossed the finish line of the Bay To Breakers yesterday, I snapped the picture on the right. It seems that exercise can ...
Heart Rate Monitor Output
Well, my new Polar S410 heart rate monitor seems to work: I wore it for the first time at the gym last night when I ...
Childish Rant of the Day
For some reason, Dave Winer’s Scripting News hasn’t fallen off my blogslines blogroll. It must be for the “reality TV” factor, where people who should ...
Worst Product Intro Ever!
Sweet Zombie Jesus, does Microsoft need some lessons on introducing products? It’s a rhetorical question: the answer is yes, yes, they do. Yesterday was the ...
Aximsite – Dell to offer Windows Mobile 5 to X50 owners
Looks like I won’t be left out in the cold when Microsoft releases their Windows Mobile upgrade later this year: Aximsite – Dell to offer ...
Brainwagon Radio: World Wind, and Pick My Next Car
Where your host records a brief blurb about World Wind, and then asks his thoughtful, knowledgeable audience which car he should purchase to replace his ...
NASA World Wind
I ran across a cool Windows program the other day: NASA World Wind . It’s an application that allows you to view landsat and shuttle ...
Make Graph Paper and Grid Paper
Courtesy of the Make Blog, here’s a link to a site which contains site with PDF files you can print to make all different kinds ...
Brainwagon Radio: Happy Birthday!
Where your host wishes himself a happy birthday , queries about the percieved quality of his commute-time podcasts, and reviews a number of cool papers ...
Thought Thieves
Microsoft is sponsoring a short film competition in the UK entitled Thought Thieves on the subject of intellectual property theft. Thought Thieves is about people ...
So Long and Thanks for the Fish…
Upon returning from my SIGGRAPH sketch jury duty, I decided that Carmen deserved a lunch out and a movie. We chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide To ...
Grump!
Know how to get grumpy? Spend consecutive weekends in Reno and San Franscisco in the company of lots of people and food, and then go ...
OCaml Ray Tracer
I’m always interested in raytracing and programming languages, so the OCaml Ray Tracer seems pretty cool to me. What’s nice about it as an example ...
Facepunch Studios – Just Goldbergs
Thanks to long time raytracer Eric Haines for recommending this link to general craziness: Facepunch Studios – Just Goldbergs People with too much time on ...
PhotoPermit.Org
I had dinner tonight with fellow SIGGRAPH sketch jury member Kevin Bjorke, whom I found out is the brains behind PhotoPermit.Org , a website that ...
Victory in Broadcast Flag Case! FCC Has No Authority Says Court: Corante > The Importance of… >
In a two-fer that illustrates that all is right with the world, the A’s managed to beat the Yankees 6-3 in the 10th by mashing ...
Strangest form of vandalism ever!
Not content with using gauche spray paint, some people have learned how to create mossgraffiti , living moss that is stenciled onto suitably damp stone ...
Brainwagon Radio: Bay Fung Tong Restaurant
Where your host waxes philosophical about crab as he visits the Bay Fung Tong Restaurant on the occasion of Sam’s birthday. Also, my upcoming weekend ...
Bum Lee > Deanimator
Half shadow puppet theater, half first person shooter: Deanimator . Link courtesy of Dan. ...
Chuckle o’ the Day
Andy Rooney Quotes – The Quotations Page Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it ...
Grossly Excessive Penalties in the Battle Against Illegal File-Sharing: The Troubling Effects of Aggregating Minimum Statutory Damages for Copyright Infringement by J. Cam Barker
I’ve long thought that there should be some legal challenge to the excessive penalties levied against file sharers. After all, if I go and steal ...
Brainwagon Radio: Oroboros
A bonus podcast , relating mostly why I’m neither excited nor dismayed by commercial podcasting ventures. Just a short one piggybacking on my previous one. ...
Remarkable Fan Film
Last night I finally got around to watching Revelations , a Star Wars fan film which I found to be truly remarkable. It is not ...
Brainwagon Radio: A Brief Jaunt To Reno
Where your host finally gets around to recording another podcast detailing his brief weekend trip to Reno. Find out what sports book kind of blows, ...
Dell Axim X50(v) A03 ROM update
It appears that Dell has released a new ROM update (A03) for the Dell Axim x50v. Haven’t tried this out yet, but I will this ...
Maultasch’s Musings: Why I Hate Blogging Dinners
I’ve begun to wonder if many so-called A-list bloggers do nothing more than wander around the country having dinner with one another. One blogger expressed ...
Oroboros
The more things change, the more things stay the same, and the snake continues to eat its tail. Dave Slusher expressed a certain disgruntlement with ...
No Intelligence in Intelligent Design
Periodically Slashdot runs a story to punch the creation versus evolution button. I must admit, it’s one of my hot button topics. I’d could rant ...
Consider updates to be irregular for the next couple weeks
I’m freshly back from a whirlwind trip to Reno to scout locations for my father-in-law’s 80th birthday party, and I’m going to be tied up ...
Weekend Pic
Carmen and I spent a short weekend at Reno/Tahoe, and I snapped this picture of her at the shore of Lake Tahoe. A nice trip, ...
SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers
Here is the usual page of links to SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers . Not many have been filled in, but as usual, I suspect that as ...
Pinhole photography
The article on the Dirkon Paper Camera reminded me of the couple of pinhole photographs I made using a simple cylinder of cardboard and some ...
Nintendo controllers as musical instruments
One for the Make blog for Tom: Nintendo controllers as musical instruments ...
I hate cars.
My son’s Chevy was in the shop this week for difficulty starting. Today, I got it back, after paying $700 and replacing three seemingly unrelated ...
Dirkon – The Paper Camera
Courtesy of the the Make magazine blog , here is the instructions for Dirkon – The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz] , a pinhole camera design first ...
I like large LCD monitors.
On the other hand, my new Dell 20.1″ LCD monitor is the bee’s knees. Beautiful 1600×1200 resolution, with no bad pixels. Yum. ...
Mobile version of brainwagon
The Make blog this morning also mentioned WINKsite , a service which allows the simple creation of mobile websites. It’s pretty nifty, check out brainwagon ...
More on RAW formats and encryption
There is a nice interview on dpreview.com with David Coffin , author of dcraw.c , a nice little Linux program that decodes most RAW formats ...
Mars Rover Suspension Patent
I ran across a reference to the patent on the wheel system used by NASA in their Mars Rovers, and thought that Patent 4,840,394 – ...
Thoughts on ClearPlay
This morning as I was driving in (and running late since traffic was bad, and the UPS outlet where I was supposed to be able ...
KYOURADIO to be first podcasting radio station
Carmen told me about this: Infinity Broadcasting on Wednesday said one of its San Francisco radio stations will carry programming created exclusively by listeners using ...
You and Your Research
Courtesy of Lambda the Ultimate, here is your inspiration for the day, a transcript of Hamming’s lecture: You and Your Research . Addendum: John W. ...
Free Mag 7 Star Charts
A cool freebie: Free Mag 7 Star Charts distributed under a Creative Commons license. Can’t beat the cost! ...
An Insect’s View – Portraits of a Hidden World
Awesome bug pictures! ...
Weekend Experiment
Eric’s exploration of digital infrared photography over on flutterby has urged me to try to take some more infrared photographs. Toward that end, I’ve created ...
Gutenberg Gem: How TO Make a Star Finder
A hacker’s project of old, perhaps as would have populated Make magazine had it existed in July of 1887: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Scientific ...
Two Heads are Better than One…
If you need a spare, check out How to Build a Computerized Android Robot Head for $600.00. . ...
I don’t want to join any club that would have me as a member…
I’ve supported the notion that I think that the world is a much better place when people can communicate with one another. It’s one of ...
Science Fiction on the Big and Little Screen
It’s no surprise: I’m a bit of a scifi geek. But just a bit. I’m not hugely well read in the genre, although I have ...
Tracker Trail – Fire – Can of Coke and a chocolate bar
Cool. You can start a campfire using only a coke can and a bar of chocolate. Memorize it before you sign up for Survivor. ...
Steve Ballmer’s email about anti-discrimination bill
Cowardice. It saddens Scoble . Is it really surprising that a company as large, predatory, and self-centered as Microsoft might not be a good guardian ...
Stadiums ala Google Maps…
Tom Duff generated a nice list of MLB ballparks via Google Maps , and I found that Julian made a similar list of hockey stadiums ...
Nikon respond to RAW WB concerns: Digital Photography Review
There is a bit of a tizzy going around some of the blogs I frequent about the Nikon D2X. You see, Nikon has decided to ...
Recipes and Encouragement
While I was on Julian’s website , I noticed that he still hadn’t mastered the fine art of meat loaf. I thought that he should ...
GCC 4.0 Released
GCC 4.0 is now released, try checking out the release notes on gnu.org . ...
Robot Dreams
Lem Fugitt has a nice robotics blog, and found my pictures of Robogames 2005. He nicely linked from his blog, so I thought I’d return ...
Experimental Balloon Building
Another cool but relatively useless link from the Make Blog, a site entirely dedicated to Experimental Balloon Building . Become a modern day Montgolfier! ...
A self-referential puzzle
I’m bored, so I decided to amuse myself with a self-referential puzzle. This post on brainwagon.org (including the title “a self-referential puzzle” but not any ...
Flutterby! : Infrared Photography
Dan Lyke Eric over at flutterby scored an Olympus 2020 and is using it to do Infrared Photography . Cool stuff, I did a bit ...
Wil Out…
This just off the pokerwire.com WPT ticker … Annie Duke eliminates Wil Wheaton; John Kabbaj out Ten minutes after being crippled when an opponent hit ...
EVDO StompBox Project
Okay, I got it from slashdot , but the EVDO StompBox Project is pretty darned cool. The guy uses a Soekris single board computer running ...
The C.L.I.V.E. Project
As a link from the previous story, I also ran accross The C.L.I.V.E. Project , a custom gadget that tracks Iridium flares. Very cool. ...
Being Fat No Longer #2
The CDC guidelines say that obesity is the #2 cause of death in America, right after smoking. But a new paper in JAMA suggests that ...
White Smoke
Minutes ago, Yahoo! News reported that Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany has been elected the new Pope , and will be known as Pope Benedict XVI. ...
Individual-i
I concur. ...
Brainwagon Radio: Blackjack, Hold’em and Gambling
Where your host expounds about his largely academic interest in games of chance. Links: ::amazon(“0394703103”, “ Beat the Dealer , by Ed Thorp”):: : The ...
Relating FFTW and Split-Radix | Lambda the Ultimate
Two subjects I’m fairly interested in, metaprogramming and the Fast Fourier Transform, are combined in this paper from lambda the ultimate . Basically once they ...
Motion Induced Blindness
As Tom says, very spooky. Motion Induced Blindness ...
Still more Google Maps…
Your tax dollars at work . Gleaned from Google Site Seeing , which I just added to my bloglines blogroll… ...
MAKE: DIYcast
I’m a big fan of Make magazine , and what’s super cool is they are going to have a twice weekly podcast show . Awesome. ...
Positively Short Stacked…
Wil Wheaton is apparently off to play Texas Hold’em in Vegas in the World Poker Tour Championship. He has no real hope that he’ll last ...
My Wife is Quite the Shopper…
I thought I got a good deal on my wireless notebook, but I just found out that she managed to get a wireless notebook for ...
Brainwagon Radio: Opening Day for the Athletics
It’s been a couple of days since opening night for the Athletics, and it’s taken me a couple of days to stitch together the bits ...
Hacking to save lives…
From the MakeZine Blog, a report of an attempt to aid American troops in Iraq. Roadside bombs are jury rigged from FRS radios, and set ...
Wiper Motor Page
I’ve made no progress on my robot project, but the makeblog linked to Wiper Motor Page , which had a LOT of useful information about ...
‘Cool it, Linus’ – Bruce Perens
Over on the Register, there is an article on the ongoing row between Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tridgell, author of the Samba software you’ll find as ...
blueprintphotography
I’ve been interested in alternative photographic techniques for quite some time, so it was cool to see blueprintphotography mentioned on the Make blog. Very cool ...
Participatory Culture Foundation
One of the things that draws me to blogging and podcast (and which I mention from time to time) is that it allows individuals to ...
Scalia: Worst Justice Ever?
I’m not a big scholar of the history of the Supreme Court, but could it just be possible that Justice Scalia is the worst justice ...
High Dynamic Range Imaging
I’m tinkering a bit with high dynamic range imaging lately, and decided to code up a simple tone-mapping program so that I could begin to ...
Comcast Internet clients having problems
I hadn’t noticed especially , but apparently Comcast has been having difficulty with its name servers. ...
IRC Poker Database
While reading ::amazon(“1880685000”, “Skylanski’s Theory of Poker “)::, my brain was tickled into remembering vaguely hearing about a database of millions of poker hands. A ...
Google Maps – SR71s
Two of the coolest airplanes ever to fly , made visible via Google Maps. More mundane: airplane on approach to Oakland , a flight I’ve ...
Doctor Who, Back on the Air
Jeff reminds me that Doctor Who is back on the air . Jeff was the guy who got me hooked on Doctor Who while were ...
The CSI Home Game
Steve Lodefink returned to a parking garage and found his car mashed by some hit and run jerk. What did he do? He got all ...
Coin Sampler
Thiago has created a Coin Sampler , basically a loop based synthesizer that is programmed by moving coins on a rotating turntable. As each coin ...
Using Terraserver…
Dan bookmarked this site on how to use the Terraserver so he could remember it later, so I’m doing the same. Other things of interest ...
More Fun with Google Maps
Just some random links: The Statue of Liberty Former site of the Twin Towers , which are still visible in Terraserver data Bombers at Travis ...
VIA Technologies, Inc. releases Linux video driver source
VIA Technologies, Inc. has made code for their ProSavage, ProSavage DDR and Unichrome drivers available over at viaarena.com . Of particular interest to the growing ...
Opening Day 2005
Well, the game was not the epic stuff that dreams are made of. The Blue Jays roughed up the A’s pretty good, they lead 10-0 ...
Use Your iPod shuffle without Using iTunes – The Unofficial Apple Weblog – apple.weblogsinc.com _
As a public service, I thought that this might be of interest: a Python program to load your iPod Shuffle. ...
What have you got to fear?
Maybe you have been sitting on the sideline with respect to some of the intellectual property issues that I raise here from time to time. ...
Sarge vs. The Hoary Hedgehog?
Internetnews.com ran an interesting article about the synergy and tension beween Ubuntu Linux and classic . Ian Murdoch had this to say… Sarge vs. The ...
Scanner Cameras
Courtesy of the Make Blog, here is Mike Golembewski’s page on Scanner Cameras . You can get more details on building a similar camera from ...
Spammers wear an IE hat…
I must admit, I’ve been a teeny bit perplexed by one of my website statistics: the majority of my traffic appears to still be using ...
Poison Your Kids with Fast Food and Stupidity!
Apparently a fast food chain in Tennessee has decided to use material from Kent Hovind (aka Doctor Dino ) to adorn the placemats they hand ...
Learn Chinese Characters
Thanks to Susan for telling me about zhongwen.com , really cool site for learning chinese characters . I’m not sure how long this particular brain ...
A’s v. Blue Jays
With any luck, I’ll be podcasting, blogging, and posting photos from the A’s home opener later tonight. Update: It’s looking good. I have three separate ...
On the pope’s funeral…
Estimates are varied, but it seems clear that over a million people saw the pope’s body before he was finally buried over the weekend. Keeping ...
Texas Hold’em Trivia…
While watching the World Poker Tour today, I saw Mike Madusow survive going all in against a pair of aces, and surviving by hitting three ...
Where has my country gone?
Witness this article from the Washinton Post: And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty (washingtonpost.com) Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion ...
A rose by any other name…
In the prehistory of Pixar, before Toy Story , we did lots of things to make ends meet. One of the things I worked on ...
Gutenberg Gem: Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is just something that interested me vaguely: Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders . To be honest, I haven’t spent much time ...
New Release of Ubuntu Linux
The 5.04 version of Ubuntu Linux is freshly released, and is now running on my test machine. I must admit, I am really, really impressed ...
Two Jokes
A crook decided to break into the counterfeiting business. To ensure success, he decided that he would only try to pass his phony currency in ...
Another neat Chinese Calligraphy Book..
During our (alas, last) class today, they were passing around Martha Dahlen’s book, Brush with Life . A very nice, spiral bound book. I’ll have ...
United States Patent: 5,533,051
Apparently you really can patent nonsense. In United States Patent 5,533,051 , we get the following intriguing claim: A second aspect of the present invention ...
EFF on Blogging Anonymously
The EFF has an interesting article on Howto Blog Anonymously . What’s a more interesting question is why would you want to? It’s not that ...
Hitachi Reports on Storage Technology
Hitachi has a technical briefing the breakthrough Storage Technology which is used in their latest drives, destined for an mp3 player or cell phone near ...
Flashback…
I just had the urge to see what my website looked like a couple of years ago, and used the Internet Wayback machine to find ...
Big Thoughts for a Friday
On a mailing list I subscribe to, Tom Duff pointed me at Conway’s Proof of the Free Will Theorem . From the background: In mid-2004, ...
More fun with Google Maps…
Soren Ragsdale added some interesting Google satellite images to the wikipedia, including an overall view of the Kennedy Space Center. Here is a much tighter ...
Transcript of MGM vs. Grokster oral arguments – The Peer-to-Peer Weblog – p2p.weblogsinc.com
You can read the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case MGM v. Grokster on p2p.weblogsinc.com . A couple of brief comments from my skim ...
Gift for Baseball Fans
I wanted to get a file with the schedule for all the major league baseball games this season, but remarkably, it seemed difficult. Sure, you ...
Another Rider of the Apocalypse
Paris Hilton is podcasting. ...
Brad Bird on NPR
While driving home today, I flipped on KQED, our local NPR affiliate and heard a voice I’m rather accustomed to hearing: the director of The ...
Preserving Player Piano Rolls
Courtesy of the MAKE blog , here’s a link to Terry Smith’s Player Piano Rebirth page. Terry takes old player piano rolls, scans them and ...
Why Blog?
Over at Contentious , Amy is trying to answer the age old introspective question facing most bloggers: “Why do you blog?” I meet quite a ...
Brainwagon Radio: World Poker Tour Game, Sin City, and Acronis True Image
Where your host reviews a cool $20 video game, World Poker Tour by Toymax, gives his mixed (even muddled) opinion on ::google(“sin city”,”Sin City”)::, and ...
More good philosophy from Lisa
Lisa has really got a lot on the ball . Enough so that I’m nominating this for the quote of the day: Art and thinking ...
The Voidspace Techie Blog reviews Panda3D
The Voidspace Techie Blog has a brief review of Panda3D , an interactive graphics environment based on Python created by Disney and CMU’s Entertainment Technology ...
Google Maps, Now with Satellite Imagery!
Google just added satellite imagery to their map services. Check out their view of Pixar . Too cool. ...
Epia Information
EpiaWiki.org is trying to become the primary source of information on using the EPIA motherboards produced by VIA. This website currently runs on just such ...
Drive cloning software…
I recently began to have difficulties with my Windows XP box. For reasons which were not clear (and given XP’s “weld the hood shut” architecture, ...
I’m noticed!
Andrew noticed my name in the credits for The Incredibles . Woohoo! I’m famous! Note: I actually have two listings in the credits. ...
Opening Day!
Ah, baseball season begins today . Okay, I guess it really started yesterday with the Yankees/Sox game, but today is the first Oakland game. Unfortunately, ...
Sorry for the lack of updates…
I’ve been busy all weekend, caught Sin City , the Courbet exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum, spent some quality time with my wife ...
Slusher on MGM Vs Grokster
Dave Slusher has an excellent article detailing just what is at stake in the case of MGM v. Grokster . He says: I am the ...
Flutterby! : flippin’ the bird
Dan took some nice pictures while walking around San Francisco today. He snapped this picture: which I liked, but I thought could use a bit ...
Brainwagon Radio: April Fool’s Day and Sweet and Sour Bitter Melon
Where your host talks about his experience with Chinese calligraphy , relates a timely story about MIT hackers Gosper and Greenblatt and their attempts to ...
The Long Slow Ride To Cancellation
Lisa has some comments for the writers on CSI , so I thought I’d pile on with a couple of my own: The original CSI ...
Inspiration on Chinese, Through the Tummy
Mei Wah is a page to help you learn Chinese. Well, at least some of the Chinese you need to read a menu in a ...
More Chinese Calligraphy
Well, today was Chinese Calligraphy class again. This is one of the better attempts at writing the character for “Dragon” é¾ or long2 as writin ...
AXS and WordPress Integration Plugin (2.1)
AXS is a pretty nice little program that can gather many of the web usage statistics that are provided by statcounter.com , but without any ...
Slashdot | 95% of IT Projects Not Delivered On Time
I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked. How much of anything you do gets completed on time and to everyone’s satisfaction? ...
Tale of our times…
New instant messaging phone for your son <td> Free </td> Ability to have him ignore your calls when you call him <td> Free </td> Ability ...
Cigar Box Guitars
Courtesy of Make magazine blog , here is a whacky DIY site on building your own Cigar Box Guitars . It seems like the kind ...
SiteLight highlights yours truly!
Steve Ivy over at redmonk.net sent me a few questions by email, and nicely presented my my answers as a Sitelight : his own way ...
Gutenberg Gem: Micrographia, by Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia is one of the earliest books about the use of a microscope to view the world of the minescule. Published in 1664, ...
Brainwagon Radio: SCOTUS on Grokster, Copyrights and itsyBSD
Where your host records another podcast on his way to work, and encounters a particularly gruesome bit of road kill along the way. Still, I ...
What has John Carmack been up to?
Apparently, goofing around with programming his cell phone . It’s cool that someone with such impressive skills chooses to waste his time doing things like ...
Want to catch a fish? Use the right bait…
Damn! That is one big catfish! Courtesy of Boing Boing . ...
U.S. Copyright Office – Orphan Works Initial Comments
Over 700 comments were received during the inquiry period for comments by the Copyright Office on the topic of “orphaned works”: works whose copyright holders ...
Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Okay, We Give Up
I’ll admit it: I love to argue about evolution and creationism. Actually, it’s not so much an argument, as no real rational argument in favor ...
Boing Boing: Media lawyer’s blog from Grokster hearings
Another major intellectual property issue which is unfolding is the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Grokster case. With exchanges like the one below, I’m hopeful ...
First Bootable (Barely) itsyBSD .ISO file
I’ve got a very simple LiveCD of FreeBSD booting off of CDROM. If you are brave, you can surf over to itsyBSD.org and download the ...
Brainwagon Radio: Robogames 2005 and the ATI X700 Pro
I haven’t gotten a lot done this afternoon, but I did record a podcast which described some of the fun we had at Robogames 2005 ...
Robogames 2005
Well, just got back from a day of watching robot combat at the Robogames competition in at San Francisco State. It continues tomorrow. You can ...
M-Tran self-reconfigurable modular robot
Keeping with today’s theme of robotics, here is a cool reconfigurable robot that I found courtesy of Engadget . It’s a cool bot, constructed from ...
Boing Boing: Running vampire bat
Run, Bat, Run! The natural world still has many surprises left for us. ...
How to tune your BS-o-meter
My BS-o-meter was tripped today while I was reading this article on Media Matters . One of the doctors appointed by the Florida court to ...
Gutenberg Gem: A Course In Wood Turning, by Archie S. Milton.
I’m interested in a wide variety of rustic crafts, so I found A Course In Wood Turning, by Archie S. Milton. to be a cool ...
RoboGames (formerly ROBOlympics)
RoboGames (formerly ROBOlympics) is going to be held this weekend in San Francisco! How did I let this sneak up on me? II’ll have to ...
Moon-Watching Mars Rover Catches Deimos Crossing the Sun
Space.com reports that the Spirit rover caught these photos of Mars’ moon Deimos crossing the solar disk : in other words, a Martian solar eclipse. ...
Brainwagon Radio: Scrappy Update, The Schiavo Case, and Barry Bonds…
Using my Dell PDA to record podcasts while on the way to work is strangely addicting. Here’s another one that features an update on my ...
FIRST Competition, Silicon Valley Regional this weekend
For those of you interested in robotics, this weekend is a veritable feast. In addition to the previously mentioned Robogames, this weekend is the Silicon ...
The Next Big Thing in Online Type
Microsoft will be releasing six new fonts in 2006, and this preview shows some type specimens . I’m actually a big fan of Georgia and ...
Brainwagon Radio: Scrappy, Live CDs and Misc…
Well, today’s mobile podcast is dominated by a report on the health of my kitty. I know, I know, podcasting about your pets, how cliché ...
itsyBSD
Well, I’ve decided on a name for my tiny FreeBSD LiveCD project: itsyBSD , pronouced “itsybitsy”. 🙂 I haven’t got any files to download yet, ...
Is Software Engineering an Oxymoron?
SD Times – Is Software Engineering an Oxymoron? The problem, then, is that programming has changed from the study and implementation of algorithms to the ...
Sources of Intelligent Audio for Commute?
Slashdot has an interesting thread on the sources for interesting stuff to fill your iPod with. Some are podcasts, and some of them are more ...
FeedHacks.com
Russell Beattie mentioned Mike Rowehl’s new feedhacks.com blog. His major hack is a WordPress plugin that allows you to include RSS feeds in posts. For ...
Poor Scrappy
Our cat Scrappy seems no better. He just lies on our couch, completely zonked out. I got him to eat and drink a little, but ...
Minor Project Success
Well, I figured out why my attempt to create a LiveCD for FreeBSD was dying: init was compiled with shared libraries, and something was apparently ...
Brainwagon Radio: Live CD, The Incredibles DVD and the Ring, Two
A short short 12 minute podcast recorded in my home “studio”, which includes updates on building a LiveCD, the release of The Incredibles DVD, and ...
Programs Designed For USB Drives
Courtesy of the MAKE: Blog , check out Jeremy Wagstaff’s list of programs that can be run from USB thumb drives . Good stuff, including ...
New Cholesterol Numbers
Congratulations and huzzahs for me. By dropping 67 lbs and exercising over the last year, I managed to cut my total cholesterol from 262 to ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Cyder-Maker’s Instructor
I’m fascinated by old cookbooks and the like, which is why I found The Cyder-Maker’s Instructor, Sweet-Maker’s Assistant, and Victualler’s and Housekeeper’s Director to be ...
Duct Tape is like The Force
It has a light side, and a dark side, and it binds the universe together. You can also turn it into wallets. ...
Scrappy in a Scrap
Our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy has been fiesty lately. The previous two nights I’ve heard him picking a fight with random cats which stray into our ...
Any comments on my mobile podcasts?
Has anyone got any comments, positive or negative, regarding the quality and/or content of my last two podcasts which I recorded in my car using ...
Towards my own LiveCD…
Well, I’ve bit the bullet. I’ve decided that I have a couple of projects that could benefit from my own ability to produce a customized ...
The LiveCD List
A giant list of LiveCD projects. Hopefully I’ll have one joining the list soon. ...
Have a piece of Pi
a[52514],b,c=52514,d,e,f=1e4,g,h;main(){for(;b=c-=14;h=printf("%04d", e+d/f))for(e=d%=f;g=--b*2;d/=g)d=d*b+f*(h?a[b]:f/5),a[b]=d%--g;} Try reading this interesting paper to learn more . Source code , since WordPress insists on doing something to the quotes in the ...
Spore… and a New Way to Think About Games
Gamespy talks about Will Wright’s newest game Spore . It sounds fascinating on many levels. ...
Howto Podcast!
If you’d like to put out a good sounding podcast, or at least spend some money in an attempt to do so, check out this ...
Feral Robotic Dogs
If you’ve got your copy of Make , you know what this is all about. Feral Robotic Dogs ...
Online computer science archives
Those gents over at Lambda the Ultimate have a nice list of online computer science archives . I read stuff like this for fun, so ...
Choice alone is not enough
My blog is mostly a lark. Someone once said that sports were invented just so men would have something to talk about besides themselves and ...
Compressed Filesystems
While investigating the creation of my own Knoppix distribution, I encountered a reference to the FreeSBIE project, which is a LiveCD version of my personal ...
Fedora Core n+1
OSNews reports that Fedora Core 4 Test 1 has been released . New goodies: gcc 4.0 Gnome 2.10 Eclipse IDE lots of Java goodness If ...
Brainwagon Radio: Live Linux CDs!
Another mobile podcast , recorded with my Dell Axim x50v PDA and Resco Audio Recorder. This morning I chat a bit about various LiveCDs on ...
Brewster Kahle – Universal Access to All Knowledge
I met Brewster Kahle a couple of years ago at Hackers, when he brought the Internet Bookmobile and printed attendees copies of Alice in Wonderland ...
A special circle of hell…
A special circle of hell is reserved just for this guy , where rabbits will gnaw on this guys privates for eternity while munching on ...
3D Raytracing Chip Shown at CeBIT
One of the first scenes I ever raytraced, back in 1986 or so… Slashdot is running a story on a German group who is showing ...
CeBIT 2005 video coverage
This guy walked around CeBIT with a headmounted video camera and a portable MPEG4 video recorder, and then made the CeBIT 2005 video coverage available ...
Brainwagon Radio: Robots, robots, and rigid body simulation
This week I was too busy over the weekend, so I recorded this podcast using my Dell Axim x50v PDA while driving to work. It ...
Apologies for late podcast…
I didn’t get my podcast recorded last night, but one will be coming shortly… tonight. I’ve got it all recorded on my PDA, but unfortunately ...
Contraption Video
Remember the Honda advert? Perhaps with less flair but still pretty damned cool, here is another Rube Goldberg contraption. Yeah, I know, it was on ...
Tiny Dual Processor Boards…
Oooh. Via has released a dual-processor mini-ITX board . It’s got two 1ghz Eden-N processors, serial ATA, and gigabit ethernet. And it draws a mere ...
Podcasting with a Dell Axim x50v
Josh Bancroft recorded his TinyPodcast at a McDonald’s using his Dell Axim x50v and a $20 audio recording application. It sounds pretty darned good, much ...
Movie Review of Robots
I’ll be out to see Robots this weekend (hey, have to keep the demand for CG up somehow), but in my browsing with Google News, ...
It’s not whether you win or lose..
It’s whether you end up in Cooperstown. I was reading yesterday’s entry on my Major League Baseball calendar, and was greeted with this Dubious Achievement: ...
Bad Browser? You’re soaking in it!
According to statcounter.com , around 60% of you are still using Internet Explorer to read this blog. For shame! If you are using IE, get ...
Pixar Research – Physically Based Modeling
While digging around for more notes on game physics, I ended up back at the Pixar website and Baraff and Witkin’s notes on Physically Based ...
Google Maps
I like maps. Maps are cool. Google Maps are therefore really cool. What’s also cool is all the hacking that people are doing, such as ...
Sorry for the downtime…
General system badness today. I hope all will be better now. ...
Today’s useless legislation brought to you by…
Connecticut state senator Andrea Stillman thinks that you should pay a $250 fine for using your cell phone at a gas station because she heard ...
If I was from South Park
Inspired by GeekBlog.org , here is myself rendered as a Southpark character. You can create one of your own by clicking here . ...
“Who cares what others think?” redux
A couple of days ago I commented on the whole podcastalley hullaballo and the role that popularity plays in the actions of blogger/podcasters. You can ...
Robosapien Dance Machine
The Robosapien Dance Machine promises to be an open source program that allows you to program your Robosapien to boogie-down. Check out the screenshots here ...
Car Physics
Marco Monster has a nice tutorial article on Car Physics (mirrored here ) that’s worth reading if you are thinking about writing your own version ...
Brainwagon Radio: Sans Wife, Robots, Junk and Books
Well, my wife is in San Antonio for her niece’s wedding, so I’m back to my normal nerd talk . I spent yesterday in Sunnyvale/San ...
Screw You, America West
Well, it’s one o’clock in the morning on Monday. If everything was right with the world, I probably would be at the Oakland Airport awaiting ...
Coroutines in C
I remember blinking a few times the first time someone showed me Duff’s device. It made me ask “is that really legal C”. Simon Tatham’s ...
Robot Motor Test
Well, yesterday’s voyage to various Silicon Valley surplus locations didn’t yield many very many good buys, so my robot project is still proceeding rather slowly. ...
Constantine
Well, the wife is off to San Antonio this weekend (miss ya honey!) so I decided to go catch a movie. After mulling the choices ...
Chinese Calligraphy
You know, the thing I really like about Chinese calligraphy isn’t that I have an abiding interest in China, or in learning the Chinese language, ...
Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding
One of my (admittedly many) pet peeves is when law enforcement overreacts to a situation. Today’s example comes fro Clark County Kentucky, where an 18 ...
Bradbury Gives Advice to Podcasters Writers
Ray Bradbury Quotes – The Quotations Page You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. ...
Sick of Rain
Damnit, when I was living in Oregon, I could put up with this crappy weather, but I live in California now. Can’t we just call ...
Evil Genius Chronicles – Quantity vs. Quality 03 03 2005
Dave has begun to come to his senses: …it all comes back to what I keep saying – do your best work, put it out ...
Damn Small Linux Update
I installed Damn Small Linux onto one of those 64 megabyte USB dongle thingies, and walked it around to various machines to see if I ...
WB on DVD
While I may have struck Slashdot from my sidebar, I do still read it on occasion. And occasionally reference to a pearl drops from its ...
Damn Small Linux: Two Thumbs Up
I’ve been playing with various Linux distributions. I usually keep a Knoppix CD in my laptop bag so that I can use computers in a ...
I’ve Got The Worst Podcast of All
I’d like everyone who has downloaded one of my podcasts to run to your nearest podcasting rating service and vote my podcast down. Give it ...
FeedBurner Experiment
On a suggestion from a reader, I’ve decided to try to get better statistics on my RSS subscribers by managing my RSS feed via feedburner.com ...
Brainwagon Radio: Oscar Review Show
Where your host teams with his charming wife to give the fashion rundown of the Oscars , and to review all the movies we didn’t ...
Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer: Live Flight Tracking
The Burt Rutan Designed Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer is on its way. You can get live updates via their flight tracking webpage . At this ...
Robot motors have arrived!
The motors that I ordered from American Science and Surplus arrived this morning. I got a pair of Trico windshield wiper motors, originally destined for ...
Brainwagon Radio: Oscar Review Preview
Well, this is a very short episode tonight . It was my intention to release a review of the Academy Awards tonight, and to shake ...
DigiBarn Friends: Jef Raskin, A Life of Design
Check out this A nice and growing tribute to a remarkable individual . Includes some very recent photos and mp3s. ...
Brainwagon Has No Daily Readers
I’ve noticed something which I sort of find surprising: this website has no daily readers. I’ve been scanning the logs of all the people who ...
Must Have Magazine: Make
I just got my first issue of Make , and all I can say is Wow! Terrific magazine. Fifteen minutes after cracking it, I went ...
More stencil stuff…
I liked this tutorial on making stencils from freezer paper . Apparently the shiny wax that is on freezer paper allows you to iron it ...
Win for The Incredibles
Well, the Oscars have more or less just begun, but the news is good for us Pixarians: The Incredibles won an Oscar for Best Animated ...
PubSub: The Game’s Afoot!
I went to check the PubSub LinkRanks for brainwagon today, only to find that my ranking, which had been floating in the mid 50,000 range, ...
Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer: Greenlighted
You’d think the brains behind Spaceship One would take some time off, maybe consider going to Disneyland, but Burt Rutan’s off on another spectacular venture: ...
Music download prices to rise
The Register reports that major music labels are trying to get music retailers to increase prices . What a good idea! Let’s make it even ...
Grand Tourismo Goody
I bought Grand Tourismo 4 the other day for my son (hey, it’s cheaper than buying him a real car) and I must admit, it’s ...
Jef Raskin
It is with considerable surprise and sadness that I heard of the passing of Jef Raskin this weekend. I wasn’t a friend: merely an admirer ...
Quest for MythTV…
Well, I am now closing in on a working MythTV installation (I hope), although a few problems remain. The quality of video coming from this ...
Hardware Mysteries Resolving…
Underneath my relentless attention, I believe I’ve figured out one of the problems with my SV24 computer that I complained about earlier. I complained that ...
Followup to the Gorman piece…
Michael Gorman explains his previous article as “satirical”. I think that his piece could be described as many things, but satire is not one of ...
Millenium Post!
This post marks the 1000th entry in my weblog. Quite a milestone for me. I hope you all have found something useful or thought provoking ...
Slashdot? Slash not…
Dan Lyke is right: Slashdot has become a joke. It isn’t just the commentary. I expect that when you get 100 people to comment on ...
Argh, Debugging…
What do you do when you have the flu? Well, I sit down and try to debug a computer system which has become unreliable. In ...
Goodbye Speedy
It’s kind of a bummer day. Speedy, one of a pair of Betta Splendens that my wife and son bought for me over a year ...
Gutenberg Gems: In Time of Emergency
Need to know what to do in the event of a nuclear attack? Well, given that it would most likely be a low yield dirty ...
Another Librarian Who Doesn’t “Get It”
Oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with Dave on this matter : Gorman doesn’t have much respect for blogs or Google. In my career, I’ve ...
Word of the Day: Influenza!
Yes, it’s not just for the Pope, yours truly is experiencing the high fever, bodyaches, headache and general crappiness that marks the arrival of the ...
Apple to buy TiVo?
Intriguing rumor that hit Wall Street today. It would be great if my favorite consumer appliance got acquired by someone who could prevent its long, ...
Why would Apple even want TiVo? | PVRblog
Those smart gents over at PVRblog have a great article which spells out why it might make sense for Apple to acquire Tivo . ...
A possible brain for the brainwagon robot?
Glancing around the surplus market yielded the following computer which seems like it would be entirely capable of driving my as yet unstarted robotics project. ...
Robot Motors Ordered
Well, in an effort to push my as-yet unstarted robotics project forward, I decided to begin as I always do: by spending money! I ordered ...
BowGo
Those crazy guys at CMU have invented a cool gadget: the BowGo . It’s basically a regular pogostick gone high tech: instead of using a ...
ajax: a new approach to web applications
I must admit to a certain fascination with Google Maps , and was trying to figure out how it works. AdaptivePath has a nice essay ...
Double Take
I’m not sure who would buy this thing, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to know them. ...
Gutenberg Gem: Beeton’s Book of Needlework
Today’s book which crossed the Distributed Proofreader’s RSS feed and caught my eye is Beeton’s Book of Needlework by Isabella Beeton . It includes all ...
Minimo on Pocket PC
I had heard about the open source browser Minimo, but they just recently released their first trial build . You can download a sneak peak ...
Back!
Sorry about the lack of updates yesterday, I took the wife off to a whirlwind 1-day Reno vacation. Got a spa suite at the Silver ...
Does everything in the world require debugging?
This morning I’m try to cross off six or seven niggly tasks that require concentration but relatively little time. I didn’t bring my iPod, so ...
Enclosures in the new WordPress 1.5
Well, there is some support for enclosures right out of the box in the new release of WordPress, but it could still handle a bit ...
A cool set of tutorials on creating stencils
Check out Stencil Revolution for some cool tutorials on how you can create your own stencils and use them to make art, either in the ...
Brainwagon Radio: Upgrading to WordPress 1.5
Where your host describes his mostly good experience in upgrading from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5 . Links from the show: You can get WordPress ...
On Blogging and Marketing…
Ah, another rant about Scoble. He’s got a fresh “rant” (rant is in parenthesis because it’s pretty mild by my standards) about a group in ...
Scientists find tsunami produced 90-foot wave
I was reading this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which says that last December’s tsunami create a wave 90 feet high . They said ...
gapingvoid: blogs are my life
Hey, I resemble that remark! Well, not really. I’d do this for free. How do I know? Because I do it for free. ...
Watch as America becomes covered with bedsores!
Apparently now Everquest (lovingly referred to by those in the know as “crack on a CD”) will allow you to order Pizza Hut with just ...
Upgrade Completed!
Well, I’m running WordPress 1.5 ! A few minor glitches, and undoubtably I still work on the “theme” a bit, but the RSS and permalinks ...
WPVI.com: If It Ain’t Broke….
Not all things which are new should be construed as progress. WPVI.com: If It Ain’t Broke…. The “reimagined” Bugs Bunny is going to be renamed ...
Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot
Today’s book recommendation is Brad Graham and Kathy McGowan’s Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot . Brad and Kathy are the authors of a book which ...
An Oldie, but A Goody
For some reason, this old Dr. Fun comic popped into my head. I found out that ibiblio.org keeps these all archived, complete with a search ...
First Try at WordPress 1.5
Well, I cloned this weblog and tried out the newest release of WordPress on the clone . Basically I used mysqldump to save everything out ...
Porter Garden Telescope
Want to own a tiny bit of telescope making history? Check out the Porter Garden Telescope , which according to an email from the owner ...
Wow. I want one.
It’s just too cool. ...
Wil Wheaton chimes in on ASCAP Podcast Licensing
Wil Wheaton has some distinctly harsh words for the notion that ASCAP now will sell you a license to play music on your podcasts . ...
Time for an upgrade…
The release of WordPress 1.5 happened sometime, and I missed it. I’ll be doing an upgrade (and a bit of tidying of my generally messy ...
Elementary Crypto Lesson
I’ve been interested in codes and cryptography for quite some time. I find them at the fascinating intersection of history, mathematics and computer science: all ...
More Long Hair Hippy Talk
Back on February 9th, I wrote a post about how I was feeling like a podcasting hippy, because I asserted that I wasn’t going to ...
Scoble is laying down fertilizer
Mark Hughes reacts in much the same way (but far more entertainingly) than I have to the cheerleading that Scoble is doing for his corporate ...
That Whiff of Decay…
Michael Malone has an article which has been going around the blog circuit, hypothesizing that there may be a whiff of decay about Microsoft , ...
Valentine’s Day Blogging Sonnet
Lisa Williams waxes poetic with a Valentine’s Day sonnet on blogging . She apparently also knows of Jef’s Candy Heartmaker. ...
Happy Valentine’s Day!
In an article which was nominally about Robert Scoble, Hugh Macleod of gapingvoid had one of his brilliant cartoons on the back of a business ...
Brainwagon Radio: Photography in Public, Blogging in the Workplace, and More
Where your host chats about photography in public, blogging in the workplace, and his usual assortment of podcasting and gadget related experiences. Links from the ...
The Aviator
Carmen and I haven’t been to nearly enough movies lately, but today we got up early enough to go out and catch the nearly three ...
Sliding down the slippery slope
I’m not paranoid. Damn, I just realized that by saying it, I probably am, but holy-land-o-mercy. Have people gone completely insane? A high school in ...
Untapped Gmail Generosity
Well, I was kind of depressed that only one person stepped forward to request a gmail account. Does everyone already have a gmail account? Well, ...
No more referers logged on the homepage
I removed the list of referers from my homepage. While it is interesting to see who is coming from other sites, it’s also clear from ...
Motorola MPx220 – software update
As I have mentioned previously, I’m the owner of the Motorola MPX220 SmartPhone. Overall I’ve had generally mixed feelings about it, but two things which ...
Another Open Robot Project – Open Automaton Project
After my posting the other day about Hollerbot, I ran accross the Open Automaton Project , a similar robotics project which actually is quite a ...
Win a signed Ray Harryhausen DVD set
Those lads at BoingBoing pointed their readers to a contest to win a signed Ray Harryhausen DVD set . Cool! Don’t surf on over there, ...
More musing on the nature of communication…
Today I was scanning my list of blogline feeds, and noticed an update to The QuotationsPage , which included this quote by Hansell B. Duckett: ...
HollerBot: Open Internet Robot
Want a simple (but not too simple) robot project, using easily available, off the shelf components? Try checking out Overview – HollerBot: Open Internet Robot ...
Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM | CNET News.com
Color me surprised… [Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM | CNET News.com][1] “Despite the vast disparity between SCO’s public accusations and its actual ...
Photos: Apollo computer’s ready for liftoff | CNET News.com
A while ago I mentioned John Pultorak’s efforts to build a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer . CNET is running a [picture fo the ...
Got Gmail?
Todd over at Geek News Central was handing out Gmail accounts to all his loyal listeners. What a good idea! I’ve got 49 invites I ...
American Idol blocking fast forwards
I must admit that I’m vaguely scared of the much-rumored impending doom of TiVo . Ironically the issue which causes it to be unprofitable (lack ...
News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials
Courtesy of I Love Radio.org, read this remarkable study: News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials . How surprising, that people resent being pummelled by twenty or ...
It’s supposed to be about the podcasts, man…
I’ve come to suspect, as my brother has often asserted, that I’m a hippy. You won’t find me squatting in a geodesic dome, smoking plants ...
Why Try To Improve on Perfection?
Slashdot is running an article which suggests that the FreeBSD core team is running a contest to design a new logo to supplant the ubiquitous ...
One more step toward world domination
I bet that somewhere, someone deep inside Google labs is trying to find a way to put Google into your DNA. In any case though, ...
TivoToGo -> PDA, mission accomplished!
Yesterday morning while I was stuck at home sick, I decided to try to accomplish something novel. Well, perhaps not novel, but cool. Well, maybe ...
Slashdotted! Okay, maybe not quite…
While after about five yesterday I was trying to sleep off my miserable cold+headache, I noticed that I got an increase of traffic from this ...
The Circle of Life goes Round and Round
A fellow blogger has a turn of good luck , even though his cat has been sick. Go read his story, and revel in the ...
Podcasting gives Weblogs a voice
Well, thanks to Ruth Meers at podcast.net , yours truly was interviewed briefly by Matthew Fordahl, an AP Tech reporter. The article is a fairly ...
Help Stamp Out Boredom
Today I’m home sick. I’m going to prepare some notes for a meeting I should have tomorrow if I’m not still coughing up phlegm, but ...
Brainwagon Radio: Dell Axim x50v, iPod shuffle, and the Soweto Gospel Choir
Where your host wakes up early and knocks out another podcast, even while suffering through an at-times painful head cold. Hope the sound of nasal ...
Four Minutes About Podcasting
Lisa Williams has done it again. She’s created a nice little four (closer to five, actually) minute video that will tell you all you need ...
Super Bowl or Sleeper Bowl?
One thing I didn’t mention on today’s podcast was the Super Bowl. I understand it’s supposed to happen sometime today. While listening to some of ...
Good Tips from Russell Beattie
Russell posted a plea to Jeeves, who has just acquired bloglines.com , my preferred method of RSS aggregator, asking them to please, oh please, don’t ...
Pyramids, In Stereo
I must admit to a certain fascination with ancient Egypt, so it was kind of cool to note that the Library of Congress has a ...
Christian Sir Mix-A-Lot spoof: Baby’s Got Book
Chuckle-worthy video courtesy of Boing Boing: Christian Sir Mix-A-Lot spoof: Baby’s Got Book Let’s face it, any spoof of Baby Got Back has to be ...
The Xbox 360?
According to Engadget, the rumor mill has ground out the name Xbox 360 for the successor to Microsoft’s Xbox . To give you a head ...
IPOD-Photo Stereoscope
Oh good lord! IPOD-Photo Stereoscope Addendum: Kind of timely, after looking at all these old stereograms on the Library of Congress Website. Paul Bourke has ...
Sushi Prepared on a Printer
I’m about as much of a technology geek as you can imagine, but when I read the Slashdot headline Sushi Prepared on a Printer I ...
Copyright the Eiffel Tower?
{.alignright}Over at BoingBoing, David Pescowitz noted that taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower at night is now illegal, as the gents who installed the new ...
InformationWeek Weblog
“If you’re getting into open source because you see it as a career path, you’re doing something wrong.” It’s not that Linux creator Linus Torvalds ...
InformationWeek on The Weblog Question > January 31, 2005
Information Week is running an article on weblogging and the workplace . It seems mostly common sense to me. For instance: Forrester Research advises companies ...
Greetings World Travelers!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve begun to use statcounter.com to help figure out various statistics about people who visit my blog. It’s ...
We offer free next day shipping!
I just completed ordering a product from a website which claimed “free next day delivery!”. “Golly”, I think to myself. “It will be nice to ...
The Mac Mini as a Server: Good idea?
Over at Flutterby!, Dan Lyke was baiting comment by suggesting that you could do better than a Mac Mini for a small server . I’ll ...
The Campfire Blog > Restored photo of Ulysses S. Grant
The Campfire Blog has a nice example of what you can do with Photoshop and some historic photos from the Library of Congress website. Neat! ...
MSN Search: brain wagon
[MSN Search: brain wagon][1] Other names for a railroad caboose are crumb box, brain wagon, bazoo wagon, strawberry patch, and loose cage. [1]: http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=brain wagon&FORM=SSRE ...
Decoding Why Few Girls Choose Science, Math (washingtonpost.com)
Stories like this one have been making the rounds, probably in response to the unfortunate remarks which Harvard University President Lawrence Summers made last month ...
How?
How in the world does this book get to be ranked #15 on amazon.com? Truly, the end times must be upon us. Or, they would ...
Holy Crap!
While testing MSN Search using my name, I found Topics in Animation: The Pinscreen in the Era of the Digital Image which includes a reference ...
Gumstix
Allright, allright, I’m getting too fascinated by these tiny computer things, but I was reminded of these guys gumstix.com – all things small . Cute ...
Scripting iTunes on Windows with Python
The Lonely Lion has a small snippet of Python that adds files to iTunes using the COM interface. Could be useful. ...
TiVo’s Home Media Engine launched | PVRblog
Those guys over at PVRblog are on top of everything TiVo, and today that includes news that they’ve released TiVo’s Home Media Engine . You ...
SHOUT OUT – A Kid’s Guide to Recording Stories
This link is a guide for kids, but us adult podcasters can certainly learn a thing or two from this article. Transom Tools: SHOUT OUT ...
Kids don’t understand the First Amendment
CNN is running a story about students’ lack of knowledge about the First Amendment that is getting quite a bit of blog space. Short excerpts: ...
Carmen eating Dim Sum
This is mostly just a test designed to try out Flickr ‘s Post-To-Blog functionality. Still, it’s a nice picture of my lovely wife munching Dim ...
Hey Garmin, Learn from Apple
Garmen just released a new product: the GPS 10 , a simple Bluetooth GPS that you can use with your PDA or laptop. A great ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Moon Pool
Science fiction entries in Project Gutenberg are fairly hard to find, but here is one I haven’t read in a very long time: The Moon ...
Brainwagon Radio: New, but Still Noisy Recording and the NSLU2
Wherein your host tries out his new Behringer UB802 mixer (with mixed results) and goes on about his new project: hacking on “the Slug”, a ...
The Sound of iPod
Awesome hack, courtesy of ipodlinux.org . Ran on the front page of slashdot, but they don’t need my link. ...
FM 34-40-2 Basic Cryptanalysis
Interesting link of the day, courtesy of Boing Boing: FM 34-40-2 Basic Cryptanalysis . The truth is this kind of cryptography is pretty much of ...
Hormel can ukelele
Those clever BoingBoing-ers found another cool item for you “music” loves: a Hormel can ukelele . It doubles as a lunchbox. It’s a pity that ...
Tasty Musings on Blogs
Thanks to Doc Searls for pointing me at Jack Shafer’s article Blog Overkill at Slate. I think Shafer makes some excellent points. I do feel ...
Music Thing: The ToneCrafter Universal DIY Stompbox – Engadget – www.engadget.com
Keeping with a musical theme, Engadget had a nice nice entry with lots of cool links . Try checking them out, including this wacky instrument ...
Wikipes
Wikipes is a cool site which creates a global cookbook using Wiki technology. There aren’t a whole lot of recipes yet, and they seem to ...
Fun with SLUGs
Well, I couldn’t resist. I went ahead and bought one of the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2 boxes (colloquially referred to as a slug) and began tinkering. ...
HomeSeries Net-Box
In a previous post I talked about my desire for a digital homestead , an appliance which you could use to create your own persistant ...
Wisdom from Learning The Lessons of Nixon
Another gem from Lisa over at Learning The Lessons of Nixon This is what the internet is for, these wonderfully over-the top abundances of obsessive ...
Warner Bros. Cartoons Filmography
Courtesy of a link on BoingBoing , here is a nicely done Warner Bros. Cartoons Filmography with frame grabs of lots of title cards. I’ve ...
All-In-One Podcasting Device For About $25 That My Mom Could Use
Over at The Social Customer Manifesto, they have a cute hack . Basically, he buys a simple $25 mp3 player that also looks like a ...
How to See All of Europe Without Really Trying
All you have to do is rely on directions from MSN and you’ll be well on your way. This would be slightly amusing, but is ...
On Crime Dramas…
I watch a fair number of crime drama shows. Early on, I really liked CSI . It had some fairly interesting characters, and tried to ...
Blog vs. Audioblog
Try comparing this blog entry with the audioblog that I mentioned yesterday . Same event, different media, different impressions. Thanks Wil! Addendum: Perhaps I should ...
Oscar Nominations for The Incredibles
Well, the Academy has released their Oscar Nominees, and I’m pleased to see that The Incredibles was nominated in four categories: Best Animated Feature Best ...
A real look into someone’s day…
My audioblog gives very dim hints as to what goes on in my personal life. This is largely by design: there are parts of my ...
flickr.py
While playing around with Flickr, I did a quick grovel through their services API. It appears that James Clarke has already written a Python binding. ...
Mini Surgery
I remember hearing the following question: Q: An alien comes down in a spaceship and hands you a small oblong gizmo. He tells you that ...
Brainwagon Radio: Small Webservers and Telescope Making
Where your noble host apologizes for his infrequent podcasts, and goes on to describe why he thinks small devices are interesting as webservers, with some ...
Ah, Baseball…
Well, it’s just past the middle of January, but already this fan’s mind is turning toward opening day at the ballpark. I was following my ...
Cheap Hardware Projects
If anyone has been following this blog for any period of time, you know I’m a bit of a gizmo freak. It’s not that I ...
Gutenberg Gems: U.S. Copyright Renewals 1950 – 1977 by U.S. Copyright Office – Project Gutenberg
A nice resource for those of us who are interested in the public domain: U.S. Copyright Renewals 1950 – 1977 by U.S. Copyright Office courtesy ...
The Problem with Podcasting
It’s been about a week since I last put out a podcast. I wanted to do one today. After all, I’d hate to think that ...
Vonage Doo-Hickey Arrived…
I finally had it with the phone company. I end up spending close to $100 most months with minimal long distance charges, and that seemed ...
Today’s Geek Adventure
God, it’s 7:25AM and I’m awake on a Saturday. What am I thinking ? Well, I’m thinking that the Apple Store opens in 90 minutes, ...
If you thought $0.10 a message was expensive…
If you thought $0.10 was expensive for an SMS message (and it is), for pity’s sake, how bad is $3.95 per message ? Holy crap, ...
Giant squid ‘taking over world’
NEWS.com.au | Giant squid ‘taking over world’ According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass. That means they take up more ...
Gathering Statistics for Your Weblog
I have to thank Russell Beattie for writing about StatCounter.com , the service that he uses to monitor his website. In the days immediately after ...
Steve Jackson Games’ electronic publishing venture is brilliant
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’ve been a geek for a long time. Twenty five years ago, my geekdom took the form ...
Jumping on the Bed Stories…
Apparently over in Lisa’s world , her little one took a header off the bed and bumped his noggin. All seems to be well (phew!) ...
Brainwagon Radio Comment Line
Well, everyone in the universe seems to be having fun with Skype, so I thought I would join the fun and open my very own: ...
Apollo Guidance Computer Replica
While chatting with Tom over lunch, I was reminded of a guy who built his own Apollo Guidance Computer Replica . Tom was the guy ...
Iron/Nickel Meteorite Found
In itself, meteorites are not uncommon, but what’s pretty cool is that the Mars rover Opportunity managed to land close to a basketball sized one ...
Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.
Dan Gillmor has a new blog on the future of journalism , where he tries to ask and answer questions about where journalism is going ...
Gutenberg Gems: Treatise on Light, by Christiaan Huygens
It’s great to see a book related to one of my pet interests made available on Project Gutenberg. Today’s Gem is the classic treatise on ...
Google Blog on Preventing Blog Spam
Google Blog If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings ...
California State Senator introduces Stupid Legislation
I know, I know, this should come as no real surprise. California legislators craft stupid, unconstitutional legislation every day. But Kevin Murray has introduced a ...
Would you buy a house here?
Doc Searles snapped a picture of the town of La Conchita on a flight to Santa Barbara. Surf on over there and check out the ...
GTA San Andreas
One industrious hacker created this master list of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas cheat codes by wiring a PS/2 controller to his PC’s parallel port ...
AI Bots Pick The Hits of Tomorrow
Slashdot links to a story about the music industry using AI to choose hit songs . I can’t help but shake my head in shame. ...
Gizmodo : NFL on iPod
In the first of what will likely be many attempts at commercializing podcasting, Gizmodo is reporting that the [NFL has inked a deal with audible.com ...
Podcasting Police Fail to Stem Tide of Satire…
With the combination of my iPod suffering a meltdown and the Christmas holiday, I must admit that I am way behind on my podcast listening. ...
Russell reacts to Referer Spam…
Russell Beattie Notebook – Home What I really want to do though is to be able to mark a URL as referrer spam, then the ...
One metachlorian short of a Jedi…
One last, long campout for ‘the Star Wars guy’ Jeff Tweiten lives on a periwinkle blue, fold-out futon on the sidewalk in front of the ...
iPod returned!
My wife called and informed me that a Fedex Box had shown up from Apple with my newly repaired iPod tucked inside. Neat! Now I ...
Comcast to raise broadband speed
[CNET News.com reports:][1] With Baby Bell local phone providers making inroads with cheaper but slower DSL service, Comcast and other cable companies hope to fight ...
Ghost Busted!
From Italy, we get this story: A real-life Scooby-Doo villain has been jailed in Italy for four months for pretending to be a ghost. And ...
Quiz for the Day
I score 38.5. I’m not sure if I wanted it to be higher or lower. (Found via mobitopia). ...
Elektra
I had intended to go catch Elektra , the latest of the many Marvel epics, last night after Wil Wheaton’s booksigning, but by the time ...
Brainwagon Radio: Wil Wheaton’s Booksigning
Where your host forgoes his usual activities at Chabot Observatory and instead accompanies his wife to Wil Wheaton’s booksigning at the Border’s in Union Square. ...
Webcam Images From Titan
The ESA/JPL has released the tiny image you see to the right and provided us with some background , but this image is as big ...
Cassini snaps pictures of Iapetus
The Cassini probe has taken some awfully nice pictures, including this one of the moon Iapetus. The equatorial ridge is really very odd. The most ...
jabber quickie
Over at random thoughts, they’ve got a nice quickie: Python code to talk to a jabber server . ...
Huygens Down Safe, Pictures To Come Here
The ESA is reporting that the Huygens lander survived it’s descent to Titan, and is transmitting data. According to JPL, the first images should be ...
MSNBC – Judge nixes evolution textbook stickers
MSNBC – Judge nixes evolution textbook stickers A federal judge Thursday ordered a suburban Atlanta school system to remove stickers from its high school biology ...
My Name is Mark, and I’m a Geek…
I was just going to post a link to the Battlestar Galactica Blog , where Ron Moore answers some behind the scene questions, when I ...
Brainwagon Radio: New Years Goals, Women in Podcasting and a Mellow Track
Where your host talks a bit about his goals for the New Year, chats about the newly announced Apple Mini and iPod Shuffle, rambles (probably ...
Lisa William’s on Blogging Policies
Lisa Williams has a terrific article on the policies and ethics which surround blogging . I’m actually most concerned with the actions of employers: the ...
Python Gadget of the Day – Pydot
pydot is an interface to the GraphViz suite of programs for drawing abstract graphs and networks. Nifty. I’ve had need of such a thing quite ...
Just how do you get to become a pundit, anyway?
It’s obviously not by having anything insightful to say. Robert Scoble has quite possibly the most “I just don’t get it” response to Jobs’ MacWorld ...
Rx For XP
Microsoft has released a Malicious Software Removal Tool . I thought that’s what Linux install disks did. Bad-dump-pump. ...
Call for topics!
I must admit it, I’m pretty empty today. I have a couple of topics that I could talk about in today’s podcast, but they seem ...
Gutenberg Gem: Thinks to Make
Today’s Gem is Things to Make , by Archibald Williams . Yes, it’s dated, but c’mon! Where else are you going to find plans for ...
Getting started with “Getting Things Done”
After reading some of the material on 43folders.com, I decided to order, read and apply some of the lessons in the book. It’s good! I’ll ...
APOD: 2005 January 11 – Machholz Meets the Pleiades
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day has a very nice picture of Comet Machholz crossing the Pleides, or Seven Sisters . Subaru owners might find ...
Free beer that’s free as in speech
Not content with OpenCola? How ’bout Our Beer instead? It does have one drawback: It is based on classic ale brewing traditions but with added ...
Apple Keynote in 1 hour
I’ll try to blog shortly after to let you all what’s what. ...
MacWorld Keynote Underway
What can I say, Steve is a master. Short list of stuff so far: Tiger improvements include: Spotlight Desktop Search Dashboard Quicktime 7, with H.264 ...
Tiny DLP Projectors with LED Bulbs
Gizmodo reports about Tiny DLP Projectors with LED Bulbs . Interesting! Using LEDs as light sources may limit the ultimate size, but should result in ...
OpenCola
While researching Cory Doctorow, I found he founded a company called Opencola. Now defunct, the primary result of their company seems to have been the ...
Reporting from CES: Going Deeper into TiVo’s announcements | PVRblog
PVRblog goes even deeper into Tivo’s announcements at CES . I can hardly wait. ...
The Hipster PDA
I’m 40 years old now, and I’ve realized two things: I’m much wiser than I was when I was 25, or even 35. My raw ...
White Noise
I haven’t done a movie review in quite some time, but I did manage to get out with my better half to see White Noise ...
Personal Achievement
I ran a mile today. A real mile, at a real run. I probably last did that at age 25. It probably doesn’t mean much ...
Creative Commies T-Shirts
Bill Gates apparently think that those who seek to reform copyright terms are communists. The silliness of that claim has spawned a number of cool ...
Deluo Bluetooth GPS Lite
While digging around, I found a Bluetooth GPS near the $100 price point: the Deluo Bluetooth GPS Lite . About $40 cheaper than the Delormé ...
TiVo announces new developer tools | PVRblog
The gents at PVRblog are reporting that Tivo is beginning a new developer program. I’ll have to keep an eye on this, as it appears ...
What is your alternative?
Over at evilgeniuschronicles, Dave Slusher has dug out yet another Internet pundit who proclaims that the idea of allowing every individual to have their own ...
Software makers lobby for copyright changes – Jan 7, 2005
CNN is reporting that BSA is lobbying for copyright changes . They wish to require that ISPs be required to reveal the identities of individuals ...
pypod
My ipod is on the fritz, so this isn’t immediately useful to me, but check out pypod : a Python library and script for manipulating ...
Don’t get IP law advice from a security guard…
Those clever people at BoingBoing give a link to a story about a little girl who was asked to stop sketching famous paintings hanging in ...
Brainwagon Radio: Miscellaneous Rambling
Where your host blinks the sleep from his eyes, relates his experience with swapping operating systems on his laptop, and tells the story of how ...
A Day in Marin, In Pictures
I just created a new gallery of Carmen and my Day in Marin in my brainwagon photo gallery . We marched around Muir Beach for ...
Vacation Day!
I could spend the day stewing over my laptop, my broken ipod, the mixer, or going to the store to buy a new microphone or ...
Fickle Operating System of the Day
After a bit of frustration with the sound quality on Linux, I decided to go back to ground I’m more familiar with me: I installed ...
Curious Laptop Behavior
The mystery deepens. I had a couple of mysterious crashes while using Fedora Core 3, and when I installed FreeBSD 5.3, tried a kernel recompile ...
Podcasts stalled by crappy sound
I’m mostly satisfied with running Fedora Core 3, but I’m having some difficulty getting rid of the crackly, popping sound that you heard in my ...
Tallest bridge photographed from orbit
Boing Boing showed the photo to the right of the Millau viaduct in France: the highest bridge ever constructed. Yet the more interesting fact to ...
VTech’s ip8100-2 Broadband Telephone has Vonage built-in
Engadget reports that the VTech’s ip8100-2 Broadband Telephone has Vonage built-in . I’ve been wondering how long it would be before such things would be ...
Brainwagon Radio: A Minor Revolt, Linux on the Laptop
Wherein your host describes his pique with Windows XP and describes his installation of Fedora Core 3 onto his laptop, followed by his recording of ...
TiVo to Go Released
Slashdot reports that TiVo to Go has been released . I’ll download it later, and let you know how it works! (For those of you ...
Whew! Back!
After an 11 hour drive from Portland back home, I’ve got the laptop in front of me, the Tivo playing all the shows I missed, ...
I’ve had it!
I have finally decided to take the plunge: my laptop is now running Linux instead of Windows XP. I got tired of trying to debug ...
Hercules
Ah, another “classic” movie has been released by archive.org : Hercules , starring Steve Reeves. Like so many of the feature films on archive.org, this ...
Happy New Years!
Welcome to 2005! Hope everyone has had a pleasant holiday and is ready to get back to the serious work that we all have: namely ...
Bridging San Francisco Bay
Another small video of some interest: Bridging San Francisco Bay , an industrial film created by U.S. Steel Co. to crow about the construction of ...
Sidekick II
My wife got the new Sidekick II as her present to herself this year. I must admit: it’s nice. It’s got a nicer keyboard, nicer ...
Opening Al Capones Safe…
I was out geocaching with Jeff and Marla yesterday, and we searched for one of their caches. In the second stage, we were required to ...
Sad tale of device woe…
Tis a sad, sad day. My trusty Garmin GPS III was being carried by my wife down the stairs when she missed a step and ...
EPIC 2014
A Flash Presentation on the Future of Media Thought provoking look at a possible future where collaborative media replaces traditional news media. ...
Snell’s Law Song
Need a ballad dedicated to Willebrord van Roijen Snell? Look no further than the Snell’s Law Song . Found via the MASSIVE search engine. ...
Asian Tsunamis Kill at Least 13,340 People
Not a happy holiday for some. Bleh. Tsunamis are brutal. ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Chemical History of the Candle
Michael Faraday instituted a tradition (which continues to this day) of giving special Christmas lectures especially for young people at the Royal Institution. The most ...
Brainwagon Radio: Boxing Day, with some Gift Reviews
On this 44th edition of Brainwagon Radio, your host apologizes for his lack of podcasting over the holiday, but gives brief reviews of some of ...
Nice article on the Cassini/Huygens mission
On Christmas Eve the Huygens lander successfully disconnected from the Cassini orbiter and is set for a landing on Titan on January 14th. There is ...
Christmas Music, ala PDP-1
In case you weren’t impressed by the 8-bit Christmas music, how ’bout these Christmas Carols generated on a PDP-1 . Ah, square waves. ...
New Infrared Camera Gets Amazing Orion Images
Slashdot reports about the new wide field camera at the UK Infrared Telescope . As part of their initial testing, they took some nice looking ...
How not to describe a wine you wish to sell…
Today I stopped by Cost Plus again, as they had 40% off their Christmas stuff. While wandering the aisles looking for last minute stocking stuffers, ...
Merry Christmas!
No links, just heart felt best wishes for the holiday season! I’ll probably get breakfast going for the family soon, which will probably include toasted ...
Christmas Audio
Need something to test out your new MP3 players? Well, you could surf over to Lisa and Rowan reading Twas the Night Before Christmas . ...
Christmas at the Oakland Zoo
Well, today marked another nice trip to the Oakland Zoo. As always, I brought my digital camera so I could snap some pictures of the ...
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
What can I say? It’s a cough cough classic , brought to you by archive.org. ...
Thanks to all my listeners and readers…
When I woke up this morning (well, after loafing in bed for a while) I did my usual scan of email and weblog posts, and ...
Boing Boing: The 8 bits of Christmas
Holiday-themed chiptunes from 8bitpeoples , link courtesy of BoingBoing. Kind of makes you want to dust off your Gameboy (not the DS, or the Advance, ...
Nice Words From Lisa Williams, with a correction
It’s great to get a linkback from Lisa , but I’m afraid I must disappoint her: that wasn’t me playing Live and Let Die on ...
Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system
This EFF-funded project sounds very interesting. It attempts to provide anonymity by making traffic analysis difficult by using something called an onion router . I’ll ...
Sandbag shelter wins architecture prize
I must admit to a certain fascination with low-tech housing solutions, so it was interesting to read this article on Boing Boing and the associated ...
Brainwagon Radio: Christmas Prep, My Wife, Referer Spam and BitTorrent
Where your host complains about his perfect storm of auto repair, switches back to his laptop for improved sound quality, is interrupted by the missus, ...
The Border Brass do Christmas Carols
Imagine Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass playing Christmas Carols. They might sound like this . Try especially <a href=http://nexus.colum.edu/user/morris/tijuana%20christmas/02.mp3"> God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen ...
Christmas Pasta
For Christmas Eve dinner, I like a dish which combines simple rustic flavors with little prep and cleanup. The big meal after all will be ...
Ugly python made better
Here you can find a tidier p2p program inspired by tinyp2p . It seems to use the Set datatype, so is probably specific to python ...
Slashdot | Following up on Torrent Shutdowns
Slashdot has some followup on the weekend’s BitTorrent shutdowns . Apparently there were some arrests over the weekend, and many threats of arrest. Haven’t had ...
Fighting Referer Spam
In the last couple of days, I’ve been targetted by referer spam bots. These dorks access pages on a weblog repeatedly in an attempt to ...
How bad is referer spam?
While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple query: mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog ...
Black Sunday For BitTorrent
Slashdot is reporting that TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org have gone dark . There seems to be little really solid news as to the reason, but widespread ...
Yet another P2P script…
This time, in Ruby and only six lines. ...
Building Carma Karma
Well, as the holiday approaches, I’ve got all three cars in the shop virtually simultaneously: My Expedition, for shocks, two tires and alignment The Jeep, ...
Stuck inside for the holidays?
Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics | Publications | 2004 | Abstract of preprint 2004.3 This paper explains how one can crochet the Lorenz manifold, ...
Early Random Number Generator Paper
Here is an interesting early paper on the justification, implementation, analysis and use of random number generators, written in 1959. The resulting machine generated about ...
Gutenberg Gems: State of the Union Addresses
Project Gutenberg has released transcripts of every President’s State of the Union addresses, starting with a more important George W. ...
Astronaut: ‘Single-Planet Species Don’t Last’
I call bullsh* . Shuttle astronaut John Young made the following claim : The statistical risk of humans getting wiped out in the next 100 ...
GCHQ Challenge
The GCHQ has a bit of a Christmas challenge: break the code they have on their website, and be entered in a drawing for winning ...
Brainwagon Radio: Dead KVM Switch, Rants, Dickens and Mediocre Audio
In trying to fix his previous noise problems, your host appears to have squelched that a bit, but ends up with clippy audio. Sigh . ...
Digital Libraries Considered Bad
Sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the stupidity of people. Today’s installment comes from the editorial pages of the New York Times, ...
Apologies for the Cinnamon Bear Outage
I upgraded my Python distribution to 2.4, and that broke a couple of packages that my script which generated the pages used. Rest assured, you ...
A Whitewashed Earthsea – How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books. By Ursula K. Le Guin
Slate is running a scathing article by science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin . Apparently a movie with a title similar to some of ...
MoleSter – a tiny file-sharing application
Not to be outdone, Matthew Skala one-upped Ed by creating MoleSter – a tiny file-sharing application . I wonder if it works… 🙂 Addendum: As ...
Bunny Cinema for Christmas
The classic It’s a Wonderful Life , directed by Frank Capra, but starring bunnies, and taking only 30 seconds . Caution: Didn’t work for me ...
TinyP2P
Ed Felton of freedom-to-tinker has released a tiny 15 line Python program called TinyP2P which allows you to create a simple (if not secure or ...
How can I continue to get my head through the door?
People keep saying nice things about my blog . Golly, thanks! ...
Book Scanning Robot
Ever wonder how they hope to digitize millions of books? Try looking at this film showing a book scanning robot working for archive.org. You can ...
The Future of Scanners?
Gizmodo had a link to a flexible book scanner , basically a sheet of plastic filled with organic photodiodes and phototransistors that act as a ...
Lego Logic Gates
The Goldfish Online has an extended treatise on building NOT, OR, NOR, And and NAND gates using everyone’s favorite building toy. ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Claiming my Feedster Feed…
No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Boing Boing: Piracy vs. Stealing: Teacher Fails
Boing Boing reports that sixteen year old student Steve Geluso was given an F on his exit exam for trying to draw a distinction between ...
Christmas Colors!
Well, I scribbled up a new logo image on some scratch paper, scanned it, colored and touched it up with The Gimp , and did ...
Complete ukulele kit for $22
For some of my do-it-yourself musicians, Boing Boing ran a link to this $22 kit to build a ukulele . I’m developing an intellectual if ...
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 ...
podcat likes brainwagon…
The fine gents at podcat.com saw fit to include me in their best of podcasting show for November 27th . Thanks for the plug! ...
War of the Worlds ala Spielberg
Apple has just posted the teaser for Stephen Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds . Not much to see, but try comparing voice over ...
Why is podcasting important?
Yesterday, I experienced something new as I recorded a podcast. It began innocently enough. I thought I would do ten minutes or so on basic ...
Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter
To quote Al Franken, “What is up with Ann Coulter?” Need another reason to blog? Try listening to Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson . Is ...
That Lisa Williams is Smart!
Lisa Williams has a nice weblog post on the need for uBlogger: a universal way of creating any weblog content from anywhere . Great idea! ...
Happy Birthday!
Didn’t find out about it until late in the day, but I’d like to wish Tom a happy birthday! Best wishes to you and yours, ...
Casting SPELs in Lisp
Lambda the Ultimate has a link to a cute (if somewhat basic) tutorial on LISP programming . It shows how you can construct a rudimentary ...
Charlie Chaplin Festival
The feature film section of archive.org has just released The Charlie Chaplin Festival , including the short films The Adventurer , The Cure , Easy ...
The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art
Like the pixel art on eboy ? Here is The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art , a nifty guide to spelling out how it’s ...
Scripting News, Trade Secrets and Ego
My rant begins with Dave Winer’s post on Scripting News , from which I quote: Here’s the Trade Secrets podcast I promised yesterday where we ...
Dell turns on too pricey Red Hat | The Register
The Register is reporting on Dell business director’s comments that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is too expensive for a variety of Dell customers. Actually, ...
Brainwagon Radio: Too Long Since the Last One
Damn, it’s been nearly a week since I put out my last one, and this was painful to put out. Hopefully it isn’t too painful ...
Chicken and Dumplings, ala Brainwagon
It’s cold (or what passes for cold in California) and rainy today, so it’s time to cook up something healthy and delicious. Here’s my recipe ...
Referer of the Day: RasterWeb!
Occasionally I scan the referer list on the right and see who is linking to me. Today’s cross linker is from Pete at Rasterweb. This ...
Gutenberg Gem: The Complete Book of Cheese
Today’s gem from Project Gutenberg is Bob Brown’s The Complete Book of Cheese , which includes one of the most enthusiastic endorsements of the fine ...
Minor website improvements…
I downloaded the most recent release of ChaitGear Powerpack , a set of WordPress Plugins that you include support for the referer list and an ...
One of those days…
Yesterday was one of those days. You know the kind I mean. Nothing earth-shatteringly dramatic happened. Nobody had a stroke, or was poisoned or shot. ...
Images in MP3 files for iTunes
The other day I noticed that several of the podcasts to which I normally subscribe started having cover art visible when I played them in ...
Another good vocoder paper…
Tom Duff pointed me at Traditional (?) Implementations of a Phase-Vocoder: The Tricks of the Trade by Götzen, Bernardini and Arfib. Useful Matlab code included. ...
More DSP tinkering…
Well, today I wasn’t feeling especially well, but I did manage to get a tiny bit of tinkering done. My idea was to implement the ...
Burger King Corporation Threatens Those Who Return Sponge Bob
It seems that large inflatable SpongeBob Squarepants figures have been hot items in the world of petty theft. People are apparently stealing them from rooftops ...
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
Doc Searle had a link to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse , an excellent site dealing with many issues related to the chilling effects that laws ...
Spreadsheet, a cute Python hack…
The Python Cookbook has a new entry which I thought was especially clever, and perhaps the only really good use of eval that I’ve ever ...
Roll Your Own RSS
The PhotoblogsWiki has a nice tutorial on rolling your own RSS feed for a photo weblog . Good stuff, and the kind of bootstrapping that ...
Tenet calls for Internet Censor… err.. Security, That’s it!
The Washington Times files this report on a speech by former CIA Director George Tenet . Quoting: Access to networks like the World Wide Web ...
Liquid lenses for camera phones | The Register
This story has been making the circuit, but this Register article is the first that I’ve seen which has any real detail. As part of ...
Brainwagon Radio: Digital Signal Processing, with apologies to the BBC
Where your host shows his geekiness by generating a new intro for his podcast while demonstrating a simple digital signal processing trick he coded up ...
Where does Brainwagon belong?
A direct question from Ruth Meers at Bloggercon served to percolate a question that has been kicking around subliminally for quite some time. What is ...
Evesdropping on CRTs
Boing Boing mentioned a paper by Markus Kuhn on reconstructing the contents of a screen by measuring the reflected light in a room with a ...
Gingerbread House Patterns
I’m as obsessive compulsive as the next guy (actually, I’m twice as obsessive), but even I am amazed at the dedication that resulted in this ...
Fast Generation of Sine Waves
Every once in a while, I want to generate some pure sine waves for audio purposes, and I have to go digging around to find ...
Anti-Lamenessing Engine (ALE)
My perusal of freshmeat today turned up a link to the ill-named Anti-Lamenessing Engine (ALE) , an image processing program that contains (among other things) ...
Tidying up images…
While testing the low light performance of my new cellular phone, I noticed that even in medium indoor lighting , the camera had significant amounts ...
iPodder out, Doppler is in…
Sorry the team working on iPodder , but I’ve become too frustrated with it to continue using it. I have been having problems with iTunes ...
A Singular Christmas
Anyone who can mix eigenvalues and eggnog gets a thumbs up from me. Bonus brainwagon tip: wget -r -A.mp3 -l1 -H -np -nd http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/christmas_2004.html ...
Brainwagon Radio: MPx220 and MythTV
Where your host describes the fun he’s been having with his new cell phone and his travails in trying to get MythTV installed. Links for ...
Useless debugger
I was trying to figure out why my Cinnamon Bear Podcast was not showing up on audio.weblogs.com after pinging. I checked it with the feed ...
Python 2.4
Two things are occupying my mind this morning: the first: an internal reminder to pay my mortgage today, and the second is that Python 2.4 ...
Expect New Bumper Music Shortly!
Brilliant! Link courtesy of Dan Lyke at Flutterby! . ...
Phantom of the Opera
Time for another Gutenberg Gem! While listening to the notes on my DVD of the Phantom of the Opera, I was reminded that the tale ...
Cinnamon Bear Podcast
Well, it’s November 29, which means that my podcast of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear has officially begun. There are 26 episodes, each ...
Rock On, Rock ON
Need an inexpensive hobby? Try Rock Balancing . Bill Dan appears to be rather good at it. ...
Another Pixar Blogger
Wow, Metafilter kindly pointed me to another Pixarian who blogs: Ronnie del Carmen , and damn . Lots of really nice artwork. Sometimes working at ...
New Cell Phone
Well, I couldn’t resist a sale this morning: Best Buy had the new Motorola MPX220 cell phones on sale for $49 after a $300 rebate ...
Brainwagon Radio: Tinkering with Gizmos
In episode 37, your intrepid host reports on his new cell phone, talks about his as yet unsuccessful efforts to get MythTV to work, plays ...
Tryptophan Dose Near Fatal Limits!
My friend Tom and his son Tim showed up for Thanksgiving, and my son and his friend showed up just as we sat down for ...
Happy Thanksgiving!
To all the readers of these humble pages and all the listeners of my podcast, here are my best wishes to all and their families ...
Ipodder Idea
I mentioned in yesterday’s audio podcast that it would be nice if ipodder clients did more to manage your collection of online audio from podcasts. ...
Apple Audio Interface Speculation?
This morning the gadget sites (as well as some podcasters ) were all a twitter over the possibility of Apple producing a new audio interface ...
Brainwagon Radio: Cinnamon Bear, Core Media Player, and Konfabulator
Where your host describes his upcoming special holiday treat, yammers about a couple of interesting bits of software, and plays some holiday music to prime ...
Interview with Robosapien creator Mark Tilden
Gadgetmadness has a cool interview with Robosapien creator Mark Tilden. Apparently Robosapien 2 will be demonstrated in February of 2005. I can’t wait. ...
Anime Popeye
Favorite quote: Woah! They are some kind of crazy midge-gets. Link courtesy of Metafilter ...
On getting laid…and the Legion of Honor Museum…
Joshua Talley has written a nice little piece on how he achieved artistic insight (and may have gotten laid) by going to the Legion of ...
Oh Good Lord…
We’ve seen plenty of games, chock-a-block full with violence, sex, sex and violence, but I must admit that it never dawned on me that someone ...
Fun with street boxes
I can’t help but marvel at some people’s cleverness in inventing random acts of beautification. ...
Ed Felten’s lecture
Cory Doctorow posted a link to Ed Felten’s Princeton President’s lecture: “Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue” , which helps explain some of the ideas behind the ...
Whew! Found it!
To my great relief (and no doubt, the great pleasure of my wife) I found her missing wedding ring. Apparently it slipped off while she ...
Hacking WordPress…
I’ve been thinking for sometime that I should really try out the new development version of WordPress . I hacked some crude support for enclosures ...
Brainwagon Radio: Lost and Found, Gadgets, Software and Recipes!
Where your host rambles and meanders through the topics that seem appropriate on a Saturday. Links from the show: I use lots of command-line tools ...
Example Video From the Aiptek DV4500
{.alignright}Well, I promised to make a better review of the Aiptek DV4500 and to post some trial video and image files, and here they are. ...
Burroughs’ Encyclopedia
I haven’t posted any Gutenberg Gems lately, so to right this serious wrong, consider Burrough’s Encyclopedia of Amazing Facts and Useful Information . Besides having ...
Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Washington, D.C.: U.S. vows 30M newspaper pages to go on Net
The National Endowment for the Humanities is teaming with the Library of Congress to make 30 million newpaper pages from 1836 to 1922 available for ...
What’s the last place you would look?
Imagine the following. You are home all day, sick from work. You don’t go anywhere special, or do anything outside your home. Yet, at the ...
Boing Boing: Theory of Fun PDF – UPDATED
Cory Doctorow mentioned Ralph Koster’s Theory of Fun , an as yet unreleased (?) book on the design of games. Ralph has prepared 50 page ...
Brainwagon Radio: Aiptek DV4500, Halo2 and other gadgets
Where your host describes a number of interesting gadgets and gizmos, and then plays some Halloween sounding music: Links from the show: The Aiptek DV4500 ...
Analysis of H.R. 2391 from Public Knowledge
Over the weekend I heard a talk by Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge about the state of intellectual property law. The lame duck Senate is ...
Screw the X Prize, Work on the L Prize!
Over the weekend, Julian Gomez informed me of a project that he thought (correctly) that I might be interested in: The L Prize . What ...
Cool Optical Illusion
A classic illusion is the hollow face illusion, where a concave casting of the face appears convex. This is demonstrated neatly here , with a ...
Cory Doctorow on Copyrights
Cory Doctorow gives a nice talk to a bunch of librarians, and somebody was kind enough to record. transcribe and post the Quicktime . ...
NPR : Political Speeches and the Public Domain
This morning Neda Ulaby of NPR reported on Political Speeches and the Public Domain , which covers a dilemma. Public speeches by politicians are normally ...
Random Act of Political Expression
Damn, wish I was this creative . (Courtesy of BoingBoing). ...
Brainwagon Radio: Alternator Trouble, plus a Pot Pourri
Where your host laments the problem with his SUV (bad alternator) and comment spammers, chats about the NPR program regarding political speech and the public ...
Oops…
Herbert Baerten reported that my feeds weren’t valid RSS and that his client Doppler was having difficulties with it as a result. It should be ...
Upset over the election?
Some people seem to take offense with the idea that Red States represent the New America . Warning: Strong Language. ...
Dark Side of Oz
Ever wonder what happens if you play Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz ? Wonder no ...
Brainwagon Radio: Digital Audio 101
Where your host tries to give a meaningful introduction into digital audio by explaining the basics of digital audio. Topics covered include: What is sound? ...
TaxProf Blog: Red States Feed at Federal Trough, Blue States Supply the Feed
The Big Picture has an interesting list of post-election maps which seek to demonstrate the oddities of how people voted in the Presidential election. I ...
Caught on Tape, er, Flash!
I happened to be seated a couple of rows in front of Russell Beattie during the Mobile Weblogging session at Bloggercon, and he caught me ...
Courtly Art of the Maya
Well, I wanted nothing more than to spend the day relaxing around the home, but my wife conned me into going over to the Legion ...
Back from Bloggercon!
Well, I’m back after my full day at Bloggercon . Apologies for not trying to stick around and catch dinner with some of you folks: ...
Bloggercon Post-Mortem
Where your host, refreshed by two ibuprofen and eight hours of sleep, replays his experience and impressions of Bloggercon . Closing music from garageband.com : ...
Bloggercon!
Well, it’s finally arrived: Bloggercon . I’m just arming myself with my digital camera and my tiny voice recorder, I suspect that if I brought ...
The Incredibles Opens!
Today is the opening day for the latest Pixar Animation Studios film, The Incredibles directed by Brad Bird . In the interest of full disclosure, ...
Electing to Leave (Harpers.org)
Disgruntled? Harpers published a practical guide to what you can do about it . ...
Silicon Valley – Dan Gillmor’s eJournal – Declaring Victory
We will not recognize America in four more years. That will make half of America giddy. It will terrify the other half. Dan Gillmor ...
Brainwagon Radio: Post Election Blues
Where your host records half of the program with his mike muted, then re-records an apology to his brother, spins two rockin’ blues tunes from ...
Where did my country go?
While as of this hour Bush has not declared victory, nor Kerry conceded victory, both seem to be inevitable. I’m depressed, and I can’t help ...
The Treo Podcast
Russell Holliman’s Treo Podcast is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. Try looking at his mobilepodcast.org: Pre-Election Podcasts NOT About Election episode. Particularly amusing: his ...
Books in the Queue…
Inspired by Dave Slusher’s mention of Robert Rodriguez and his Ten Minute Film School, I decided to get a bunch of books on the subject ...
Brainwagon Radio: Election Eve Politics
Breaking with the tradition of geeky news, your host explains why he’s voting for the Kerry/Edwards ticket this year, and encourages everyone to go out ...
A Scheme to C compiler in 90 minutes
In a previous lifetime, I actually knew something about the compilation of functional programming languages. Hence, I found this presentation about writing a Scheme to ...
DVD Review: Phantom of the Opera : The Ultimate Edition
For Halloween, I decided to pick up The Phantom of the Opera: The Ultimate Edition , which I got for $15 or so from my ...
Giant squid ‘taking over world’
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn “In his house in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming” ...
Jon Stewart on C-SPAN
C-SPAN recently ran an interview with Jon Stewart and just like his appearance on Crossfire , he continues to roast the conventional television media for ...
Mysteries of Package Tracking
First thing this morning I decided to try to track my latest amazon order to see when it was going to arrive. I got the ...
Bad Film? You are soaking in it!
Interested in fan films? Then try giving Attack of the Flesh-Eating Subterranean Bog-Monster from the Center of the Earth and Beyond the Moon: Apocalyptic Revenge! ...
Am I part of the popular crowd?
In some ways, I’m blown away by the popularity of my podcasts, and yet in listening to people like Adam Curry, Dave Slusher, or even ...
Halloween Podcast!
Well, it’s still a couple of days till Halloween, but I thought I would to this special halloween themed podcast so that you could still ...
Dvorak is not just irrelevent, he’s a jerk…
It could be possible that someone might disagree with what many others view as the promise of podcasting, or might not possess the foresight to ...
The Internet Turns 35
In the 1960s, computer scientists at American universities and in the U.S. Department of Defence devised a plan for a network of computers that could ...
The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
The New Yorker endorses Kerry in an essay that in most respects echoes my own thoughts on the upcoming election. We shall see who prevails ...
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – The Adventure Game
The BBC has the 1984 Infocom adventure based upon Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy running as a Flash applet . Cool stuff. Don’t ...
Dead Walk, Hell Freezes Over, and Red Sox win the World Series
Tonight the Red Sox completed a 4 game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals, which was the first World Series game played during a total ...
There’s Something About W and Stolen Honor
Today documentary filmmakers Robin Chin and John Grimes dropped by Pixar to show their film and to answer questions about their documentary film There’s Something ...
Interview with a Lawyer for Tivo
Wired is running this interview with a lawyer for Tivo regarding their new changes to respect broadcast flags for pay-per-view content. While it’s bad news ...
Podcast #27: Magnatune, DMCA and the Treo Podcast
Where your host plugs the worthy record label Magnatune and their gracious use of Creative Commons licensing, plays a bit of American Baroque’s rendition of ...
Free George Bush and John Kerry Jack o Lantern Patterns
Enjoy carving those large wintertime vegetables! ...
Happy Halloween!
In an effort to get in the mood for Halloween, I thought that I would change the default color scheme on my weblog until after ...
Free Good Music for Podcasts
Doug Kaye reports that Magnatune proprietor John Buckman considers podcasts to be noncommercial uses under the Creative Commons, and as such you can use their ...
Wow! Thomas P.M. Barnett at Pop! Tech
On the way home I stopped to pick up a few things, and decided to catch up on my Podcasts while pushing the cart around. ...
Happy Anniversary Honey!
Ten years ago I had a job interview with SGI, and afterwards went on a first date with Carmen. I didn’t get the job, but ...
Bring Dead Art Back to Life!
Awesome! Undeadart.org (a division of FreeCulture ) is having a contest to remix clips from classic zombie flicks! What an awesome idea! Since the public ...
Boing Boing: Knitting patterns under Creative Commons license
Materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses are becoming more and more popular, and more and more mainstream. As reported on BoingBoing, Knitty is a web-published ...
Podcast #25: Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting, Two Reviews and Picking a Linux Distribution
Where your host introduces you to his brother’s venture Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting , reviews the Iogear MiniView 2-port KVM switch , gives his brief thoughts ...
Essence of Brainwa…err.. Emeril
Today is kind of a rainy, wet day, and I am stuck at home. My son is off doing something, and my wife is in ...
World Series Preview
Well, it’s time for the Series, and it’s Red Sox versus the Red Birds. Here are some pre-series thoughts, along with my prediction. Defense: the ...
NASA Crash Tests
You can view all sorts of aircraft crash videos from NASA including the rather famous one of the fuel that was supposed to resist ignition ...
Silly Patent of the Week
In the realm of patents being issued for the obvious, Phillip Torrone of the Edgadget website mentioned in his podcast that photomosaics had been patented ...
Boston vs. St. Louis in the Series…
Okay, I’ve been boring people with baseball talk in the podcast, so I’ll just briefly mention it here: St. Louis defeats the Houston Astros 5-2 ...
System Downtime
Something occurred this morning that I have never seen on a FreeBSD-stable box: something glitched and my webserver was hung (I suspect for a very ...
Joke of the Day…
Contributed by Tom Duff: Q: What’s the difference between Iraq and Viet Nam? A: GWB had a plan to get out of Viet Nam. ...
Podcast #24: The Sox Win! The Sox Win!
Where your host apologizes for his haste in deserting the Red Sox and congratulate them on a terrific ALCS victory in game 7 over the ...
Podcast #23, Go Sox!
Wherein your host is once again proven wrong and the Sox go on to fight another day. Other items of interest: Curt Schilling — hero ...
Stellarium
{.alignright} {.alignright}Today’s cool bit of software is Stellarium : a realistic sky simulator available for both Windows and Linux and Mac OS X (thanks mneptok!). ...
Podcast #22: Baseball, Nostalgia and Photography
Where your host rants about the Red Sox’s second come-from-behind win in a row, discusses the nostalgia of the The Old Terminal Room which Rob ...
The Prokudin Gorskii Collection
{.alignright}The autochrome images of World War I subjects reminded me of the excellent Prokudin-Gorskii collection that you can see at the Library of Congress website. ...
Podcast #21
Where your disgruntled host lauds Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire, including a short clip and further rants about the commercialization of the “podcast platform”. ...
Red Sox 6, Yankees 4, 12 innings
This teaches me not to turn off games in the 7th inning. Looks like I missed some real theatrics. But sorry Sox, your defeat is ...
Lego, the Type Designer’s Friend
Mark Simonson has a really nifty website on typography. I originally found it because he built a mechanism for holding filmstrips of fonts out of ...
Autochrome Images of World War I
World’s Armed Forces Forum points to some magnificent color autochrome images from WWI. These images were among the first color images produced, and show remarkable ...
Don’t Try This at Home
A Cunning Stunt ...
The Smartest Man in America
Damn, I just got the opportunity to watch Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire and boy, did he totally, brutally dominate Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. ...
Podcast #20, A Short One
Wherein your movie going host gives a brief update on his experiments with Asterisk, and reviews the mediocre new movie release Team America . Sorry ...
What R.A.D.I.O. Can Teach Podcasting
There has been an explosion of podcasting stories around, and one of the absolute best that I’ve found so far can be found here . ...
Quote of the Day
“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which ...
Fun with Cellular Automata
{.alignright}As part of my dose of IT Conversations recently, I listened to this interview with Stephen Wolfram , author of the book A New Kind ...
Volcano Movie
A while ago, I wrote a simple script to fetch pictures from one of the Mount St. Helens volcano cams . I only ran it ...
Podcast #19
Where your host tries to get in touch with his inner geek, ponders the world of functional programming, and then rambles about VOIP and Asterisk. ...
Smarter Playlists for iTunes
Here is a little tip that I just figured out. I was trying to use a smart playlist to create a special playlist which contained ...
How to Make Lava Lamps – Oozing Goo
If you would like to wander back to the days of the Keith Partridge and Greg Brady and make a really groovy pad, you can ...
More ideas for ipodding clients
Well, my experiments with podcasting are revealing a couple of problems with the current podcasting solutions, and I thought I’d write a couple of them ...
mod_bt: making things better for seeders
While digging around, I found out about mod_torrent , a project which appears to be moribund, but also mod_bt: making things better for seeders , ...
Memory Walk 2004, Incredibles Wrap Party and General Network Chaos
Wherein your host has an exhausting Saturday filled with a charity walk, general networking problems of great mystery, and ends the day in a tuxedo ...
Apologies…
My website was offline yesterday, I’m trying to debug a network problem. It may experience some additional problems today. I’ll try to settle it down ...
More success…
I am the King! I am the King! Well, my little podcasting video was an enormous success, so enormous in fact that I am left ...
Podcasting, Debates and My Weekend
Wherein your host talks once again about the nascent field of podcasting, gives his impressions of tonight’s debate, and describes a busy weekend. I also ...
The first rule of podcasting…
I just finished listening to the latest of Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles (love the show Dave!) and thought I’d merely give my comments about ...
Mirrors, anyone?
I’m getting hammered pretty hard by requests for my “podcast.wmv” file. Anyone want to create a mirror for it? Send me an email . ...
Bandwidth Monitoring…
I’m getting hammered enough that I thought it might be prudent to install some software to figure out just how hard I am getting hammered. ...
Fight Club, Stark Effect, VP Debates and Stair Dismount
Wherein your host describes his future plans for drawing up some useful information for other podcasters, configures BitTorrent, plays far too much with Stair Dismount, ...
Podcasting Video
During my last audio podcast, I promised that I was going to make a short video showing how I record my audiopodcast sessions, and here ...
Video Capture from VP Debate…
Excellent! ...
The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo
The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo has been released under a Creative Commons license. Awesome! If you like, you can still by ...
Victim of your own podcasting success?
I passed another minor milestone: according to my script which peruses my http logfiles for downloads of my podcasts, over 100 unique IP addresses have ...
Stair Dismount
While watching the amateur video program The Packet Sniffers , I was introduced to Stair Dismount . It is a wacky little “game”, where you ...
Peeved Squirrel
My brother snapped this picture of this cute little squirrel while he (my brother, not the squirrel) was stacking up wood for the upcoming winter. ...
Memory Walk 2004
On short notice, my wife and I have decided to participate in this years Memory Walk 2004, a fundraiser for the Alzheimer’s Association, which takes ...
Balmer Blather, and other brief topics…
Where your ascerbic host tears tears Steve Ballmer a new one over DRM, reports on his attempt to make AB’s Beefy Broth , and also ...
Engadget on Podcasting
Engadget has a nice article on getting and making podcasts . It’s mostly Mac-centric, but still could be of use to others. ...
SpaceShipOne captures X Prize
Well, today SpaceShipOne launched again, and if its final altitude of 368,000 feet is verified, will become the winner of the coveted X Prize. Congratulations ...
Doom3, Halo, and Sound Effects CDs
Wherein your host bores potential listeners with late night reviews of Doom3 and Halo, points out the silliness of copyrights on sound effects CDs , ...
Thanks Adam, I feel better.
Last night, I did what I consider to have been one of the poorer podcasts. Frankly, I was tired and empty of ideas, and just ...
Unemployment, Baseball and Strangerhood
Where IT downsizing claims another victim, the Angels victimize the A’s, and your host anticipates the creation of a new machinima series called The Strangerhood ...
It could be worse…
I could be a Cubs fan. To the Anaheim Angels: give the Yankees and Red Sox hell, boys. ...
About last night’s “debate”…
Wherein your skeptical Democratic host rambles for 25+ minutes on the outcome of last night’s (for lack of a better word) “debate”. Warning: fans of ...
Math Puzzle of the Day…
Consider all the powers of 2: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and so on… The unit digits follow the ...
Mt. Saint Helens Erupting
My brother in Portland just reported to me that Mt. Saint Helens is beginning to spew ash up into sky. Apparently a modest eruption in ...
Patent of the Day – Slinky!
Some patents are just too much fun, and the pat2pdf script allows you to look them up and get a look at them. Today’s fun ...
EFF: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law
Fred von Lohmann has published an interesting article on the intricacies of law surrounding the development of P2P software entitled: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to ...
Sigh, A’s fall to second place…
Well, the A’s fall a game behind the Anaheim Angels with 4 games left to play. I like Jim Mecir, but it seems to me ...
Earthquake! Baseball! Copyright!
Wherein your host is stirred (but barely shaken) by an earthquake and then goes on to ponder baseball, copyrights and other miscellaneous topics o’ the ...
Private Rocket Ship Lands After Space Flight
Woohoo! The first half of the X-Prize challenge was achieved today in Mojave, after a wild corkscrew ascent. Congratulations to all! Yahoo! News – Private ...
Woohoo! Validation!
I was surfing this morning and noticed that Dave Slusher, the Evil Genius , had provided a link to this site in the announcement of ...
50th Anniversary of “The Catch”
On this day in baseball history, Willie Mays made this spectacular over the shoulder catch at the wall to rob Vic Wertz in Game 1 ...
Shake, rattle and roll.
Just a few minutes ago, I felt a couple of gentle rolls that usually indicate an earthquake. I mentioned it to my wife via IM, ...
Remote broadcast, and a review of Shaun of the Dead
Wherein your host experiments with a remote on-the-street feed, thanks his patient and benevolent listeners for their comments, and reviews the British zombie comedy Shaun ...
What goes wrong in recording audioblogs…
Yesterday I reached a minor milestone: the tenth of my audioblog entries, and I have a strong suspicion I may have had more than ten ...
Blogger fooled, news at 11.
Your beloved editor (that’s me, in case you didn’t realize) was apparently taken in by an Internet hoax . The image of the “computer of ...
Unrest in the world…
Volcanic unrest, that is. It appears that Mount St. Helens is rumbling a bit, enough so that scientists have posted a warning of volcanic unrest ...
I’m going to have trouble getting my head through the door
Wow, on the same day I get a mention on the Evil Genius Chronicles, Dan Lyke endorses my little attempt at audio monoblogging . I ...
Keyboard Kraziness…
Somebody had an idea that I had a long time ago: to use evolutionary techniques to evolve a better keyboard layout that QWERTY or even ...
I feel just like Jonathan Frakes on Futurama
While driving into work this morning and trying to catch up on my audioblogs for the weekend, I noticed that Dave Slusher had mentioned the ...
HOWTO: Produce Your Own AudioBlog
Andrew Grumet asked in one of my comments what hardware and software I used to produce my audioblogs. Since I thought this might be of ...
Hand Shadows
Cory Doctorow over at boingboing drew my attention to the classic Hand Shadows by Henry Bursill . Does your kid want a new Playstation 2 ...
My bad speech habits…
Wherein your host apologizes for his inept speech habits, reviews the Star Wars trilogy DVD collection, yaps a bit about graphics hardware and Moore’s law, ...
Not only bike locks which are vulnerable…
[Quad-City Times Newspaper Online reports][1] that a local man who wished to remain anonymous found that the recently uncovered [bicycle lock vulnerablities][2] apply just as ...
The Amazing Breast Enhancing Ring Tone
Oh, good, Lord. Gizmodo : The Amazing Breast Enhancing Ring Tone Is there even one person this stupid? ...
Smalltalk Book Now Free
The book Smalltalk-80: BIts of History, Words of Advice is now available for free download as a PDF file. Cool! ...
Intellectual Property, Zipf’s Law, and Opera
Wherein your noble guide to all things brainwagon rants about taxes to support the music industry, on copyrights and patents, elucidates Tom Duff’s musings about ...
Free Reads by Jim Kelly
Free Reads has a collection of short fiction read by their author Jim Kelly. More food for the insatiable ipod! ...
Blogging statistics?
Dave Slusher was musing about a peculiar statistic of his audio blogging experiments: all the commentors appear to be male. That set me to wondering ...
99: Boots of Escaping can’t compare to Boots of Striding and Leaping, imho…
Got this off the Blogdigger WMV feeds: 99: Boots of Escaping can’t compare to Boots of Striding and Leaping, imho… I’ve got the boots of ...
Audio regarding Fish, Doom3 and Thunder
Wherein your noble host explains about ipodder , ponders the demographics of weblogging, gives his brief thumbs up for Doom3, hints about betta fish, and ...
Blogging, baseball and creative writing
My latest audioblog which consists of musings about the role of weblogs and audioblogs, my best baseball story, my experience with my new creative writing ...
2004 Republican National Convention in NYC
Try reading this chilling report of one reporters experience during the RNC: 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC . Maybe we should start spelling Amerika ...
PONGMECHANIK
*\ * PONGMECHANIK ** is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. Don’t miss the explanatory video either. ...
Knots, Splices and Rope Work, by A. Hyatt Verrill
For reasons which escape me, I have a half-dozen books on knots and splices. It is one of the odd curiousities of life that you ...
Another milestone.
My email server has been up for just four days, and is mentioned only in a single post on my weblog. Today I received the ...
Happy Birthday Adam!
Happy Birthday To You… Happy Birthday To You! Happy Birthday Dear Adam! Happy Birthday To You! It’s Adam’s 21st birthday. He’s officially an adult now, ...
Of System Changes and Other Randomness
Hear the dulcet tones of my voice describe my day spent with my wife trying to find the perfect dress for our upcoming Incredibles wrap ...
About me…
As part of my continuing education, I decided to take a creative writing course that is being given through Pixar University, Pixar Animation Studio’s ongoing ...
Unofficial Robosapien hacks and mods site
While reading today’s slashdot article on hacking the RoboSapien , I turned up a link to the Unofficial Robosapien hacks and mods site . Some ...
Sorry for the light news…
Sorry readers, I didn’t have much time for the Internet last night. I was co-opted into helping my wife search for the perfect dress for ...
The Computer of Today, From Yesterday!
{.alignright}The caption reads: Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. ...
Sigh…
For the moment, comments to my weblog are disabled. This is because I have an IP spoofing spammer who has been hammering my website, posting ...
Cockroach-like robot leads new research effort
Those kind lads at Boing Boing sent me to this cool walking robots site by some gents at Berkeley. Their robot, RHEX, uses compliant legs ...
Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency
Project Gutenberg just released Tesla’s Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency , with illustrations and everything. If you are interested in ...
Eric Idle on the FCC (and more)
Eric Idle, you’re my hero. SLITFOASNSFW (Strong Language In The Form Of A Song, Not Safe For Work). Thanks to Dan Lyke of Flutterby! for ...
Die Spammer Die!
Ode to a downright bastard. The mp3 itself doesn’t have the right tags. It’s too late to fix. I apologize. ...
Ivan the Terrible
Hurricane Ivan is about to go ashore. It’s a category 4 hurricane, with sustained wins of 135 miles per hour. Two people in the U.S. ...
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
It’s sometimes important for me to remember that working for Pixar Animation Studios does have its perks: today we were blessed with a preview screening ...
Another audio blog…
Well, here’s my latest installment of audioblogging. Hear my praise for the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow , some ranting about my ...
Gill – Six Months in Ascension
Those clever lads and lasses at Metafilter had a very cool link to Isabel Gill’s Six Months in Ascension , written in 1877. Sir David ...
String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major Opus 127 by Ludwig van Beethoven
Project Gutenberg has also begun to publish music in many formats. Try Project Gutenberg – String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major Opus 127 ...
Microsoft Sings a New Tune With Windows Media Player 10
Apprently Microsoft can occasionally dimly see the light ahead: witness Yahoo! News – Microsoft Sings a New Tune With Windows Media Player 10 . After ...
Underground Cinema
I must admit, I’m intrigued by the stories being reported about a secret group setting up movie theaters in the catacombs beneath Paris . Damn, ...
OS-tan
Oh good God . I think I’m glad I can’t understand Japanese . The idea that I might “get” what this is all about just ...
My Second Audio Blog…
Today’s audio blog recapitulates the days major events, at least as viewed by me. My rememberences of Sept 11, the North Korean “nuclear test”, and ...
Yahoo! News – Blast, Mushroom Cloud Reported in N. Korea
The news is reporting that a large blast and mushroom cloud has been sighted over North Korea. Apparently the explosion was large enough to have ...
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Well, today’s weekend movie extravaganza was the long awaited (at least in the VandeWettering house) Resident Evil: Apocalypse . For those of you who have ...
Pictures of the Hopper…
As I mentioned in my audio blog today, I was diverted from my mornings appointments by this little guy who appeared on my windshield as ...
Remembering 9/11
I must admit, it snuck up on me a bit. Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the terrible events in New York, at the Pentagon ...
How to Make Fried Oreo Cookies!
What more of an intro do you need to this link? Fairy’s Strange Junkfood Tribute: How to Make Fried Oreo Cookies! In trying to find ...
First Audio Weblog Post
Well, this is my first attempt to enter the glamorous world of audioblogging. I’ve brutally hacked the wp-rss2.php script to output enclosures whenever you add ...
The Original Brain Wagon
{.alignright}I have to give credit where credit is due: the name “brainwagon” was first suggested by Tom Lokovic , based upon the theory of jamming ...
Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley
Slashdot had a link to Intellectual Property, and Free Riding by Mark Lemley . The abstract reads: Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual ...
UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance
UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. ...
NASA Genesis Probe Goes Up High, Comes Down Hard…
NASA’s Genesis probe was to have parachuted into our atmosphere and snagged by special helicopters ala the old Corona project, but apparently the chutes didn’t ...
Boing Boing: Jimmy Carter’s Letter to Zell Miller
It’s great to see a truly great man tear Zell Miller a new one. ...
My Memories of the Game…
The drubbing of the Oakland A’s at the hands of the Boston Red Sox did two positive things: it reminded me that a great duel ...
Relativity : the Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Albert Einstein’s Relativity : the Special and General Theory . The author himself describes it thusly in the Preface: The present ...
Another Zoo Pic
{.alignright}Here is another picture from my weekend zoo excursion. Surprisingly, these little guys have proven to be very hard to photograph, largely because they blend ...
What I Cooked For Dinner…
I can’t really believe that I’ve been blogging for over two years, and I haven’t gotten around to posting about one of my passions in ...
Zoo Excursion
Spent the other day at the Oakland Zoo. I finally got some decent pictures of one of the female lions using my Nikon 4300 and ...
DVD Experiments, with a recipe…
Well, I’ve burned a few DVD blanks today just to see what I can do. For source material, I decided to go to the feature ...
The War Prayer
Stuff by Samuel Clemens , a good antidote to watching the RNC. ...
Why I’m Not Proud To Be a Democrat…
I’m sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning, and the urge to yap about something political has just become too strong to ignore. ...
New Gadget — A DVD Burner
Well, I finally caved in. DVD burners and blanks are now cheap enough that burning CD-Rs seemed like a waste of time, so I went ...
Musings re: iPod and Audioblogging
Well, my week long vacation is slowly slipping away, and it appears that I’ll do relatively little programming during the 11 consecutive days that I ...
Scientific American Supplement, May 23, 1891
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is The Project Gutenberg eBook of Scientific American Supplement, May 23, 1891 . It includes some nice illustrations of an unusual equatorial ...
Disneyland now air launches fireworks…
Disneyland is now using compressed air to launch pyrotechnics . I read about this before my trip, but it slipped my mind while I was ...
How popular am I?
I’ve begun to wonder who (and how many) read this blog. I’m now averaging 65 megabytes of downloads per day, with 1581 unique hosts served ...
Hero
Hero is the U.S. release of the movie Ying xiong , starring Jet Li as Nameless, a man who has defeated the three top assassins ...
Hacking Perl in Nightclubs
Alex Maclean thinks of Perl programming as a type of performance art . He improvises new programs that generate music while standing on stage. He ...
An Audioblogging Manifesto
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing out An Audio Blogging Manifesto , both in text format and as an mp3 file with inspiring background music ...
Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia
Today’s gem is Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia , which is not only interesting because of the subject matter, but also because ...
Apple – iMac G5
Apple has just released a new iMac G5 , and damn, it does look awfully cute. I like the trend of shrinking the footprint of ...
Ickk!
Warning: not for the especially squeamish: eMJA: Myxoedema and a lost wedding ring ...
Limits to Growth in Energy Consumption?
Sometimes a single sentence is enough to kick your brain into thinking about things in a different way than you have before. This rant was ...
XM Radio pulls PC hardware amid piracy concerns | CNET News.com
Sigh. [XM Radio pulls PC hardware amid piracy concerns | CNET News.com][1] Guess they aren’t interested in taking my money. [1]: http://news.com.com/XM Radio pulls PC ...
My Weekend
Well, it’s Monday, and I’m back from my weekend trip to Disneyland. With the wife, son, and two of his friends in tow, we conquered ...
RNC protests: Bikes Against Bush organizer arrested
BoingBoing reports that Joshua Kingberg was arrested at the RNC in New York for operating his bicycle mounted dot matrix printer. It’s an enormously cool ...
Kenneth Snelson
Thanks to the gents on Metafilter for calling my attention to Kenneth Snelson’s exposition on Tensegrity . He has a nice presentation that shows the ...
XM Radio and Time Trax
During one of my many explorations of the net, I found mention of a program called TimeTrax , a program which converts songs broadcast over ...
Hamster-Powered Night Light
Hamster-Powered Night Light is a really nice school project that the people at otherpower.com helped an eight grader realize. They modified a hamster wheel to ...
A’s over Baltimore, 3-0
Just a quick note after a memorable game. Rich Harden and Bruce Chen battled and each gave up no runs. Chen had a no-hitter into ...
Audio and Video Blogging
Growl. I’m irritated today because I realize that there are magic djin inside my computer, and I don’t know how to harness them to do ...
Twilight Zone meets Planet of the Apes
One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while is this remake of The Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone Episode . ...
How-To Tuesday: Make 3-D photos
Those lads at engadget.com have a nice tutorial as part of their How To Tuesday series on producing 3-D anaglyphs using free software. It’s not ...
Cat, or Gargoyle?
You decide. Our own kitty, whom we’ve named Scrappy, ranks a respectable 7.8 on ratemykitten.com . This cat, well, not as much. ...
Change This
Today’s link of the day routes you to ChangeThis , a website with an interesting idea: if you distribute good ideas, people will adopt, adapt ...
Garden State
This weekend’s movie extravaganza was Garden State , starring, written and directed by Zach Braff. Braff is perhaps best known for his role on the ...
Making Sh*t Up
My brother and I had a conversation recently about police merely making up laws to roust you about. Apparently some cops think they can make ...
Holy Niche Market, Batman! — The Wave Pillow
Engadget reports on The Wave Pillow , an Internet enabled pillow that connects to a server and checks the waves at a beach that you ...
It’s a good thing the lady wanted $450 for these pups…
Otherwise we would have ended up with a brand new puppy and I’d be laying down papers in the kitchen and trying to scold them ...
John Cura: Snapshots of History by Mark Lewisohn
Kudos to Metafilter for digging up this one. Try reading the story John Cura: Snapshots of History by Mark Lewisohn and then pine about the ...
The Vision of Hell
Project Gutenberg just released The Vision of Hell, by Dante Alighieri , translated by Rev. Carey and illustrated by Gustave Doré. If Doré’s Bible I ...
Computer Chronicles Flashback
I was amazed to watch this old episode of Computer Chronicles which chronicles the swansong of the Apple II series of computers. What the people ...
BatBox installed on Linux Router
Just an update on the Linksys WRT54GS router that I bought. I’m as yet too chicken to reflash it, but I did install BatBox on ...
Useless Security Measures
SFGate.com reports that Senator Ted Kennedy was delayed in boarding because his name appeared on a terror watchlist as an alias . Oh, dear, God. ...
Phil Zimmerman on Moore’s Law
I think the biggest threat to privacy is Moore’s law. The human population does not double every eighteen months but the ability to keep track ...
The Night Before Christmas, and other Stories
Project Gutenberg just released The Night Before Christmas and Other Popular Stories For Children which includes nice stories (mostly of a Christmas theme) and some ...
Dick Van Dyke – Animator?
Apparently the legendary Dick Van Dyke put in an appearance at SIGGRAPH 2004 and demonstrated some of his animations. It’s really very cool that a ...
Linux on Your Router
Ever wanting to keep up with the other hackers on the street, I recently decided to upgrade my 802.11b network to run 802.11g. Toward that ...
Decision in MGM v. Grokster
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, and found that Grokster is not liable for copyright infringement of its users. You can read the ...
Dore Bible Gallery
Project Gutenberg recently completed scanning the Bible Illustrations of Gustav Dore . While I prefer illustrations of crazy scientists and proto-hominid skeletons, you might find ...
Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks
For some reason, I found a reference to an early patent on Ouija boards , and with a bit of digging, came up with this ...
Collateral
I had a rare “middle of the week” movie attack last night (there was nothing on television) so the wife and I trundled off to ...
Bloggercon
Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for over two years, I have as yet really developed a sense of the impact of weblogs on ...
Clip Art O’ The Day
Another bit of clip art from the lads at Project Gutenberg. This one comes from the same issue of Punch that I mentioned earlier . ...
On Audio Blogging
I’ve begun to become interested in the idea of audio blogging, or more generally, multimedia blogging. Ideally, I want to have a way to compose ...
Political Cartoons of the Past
{.alignright}Project Gutenberg has been digitizing various periodicals from the 19th century, and some of them have included some very nice line art which I thought ...
AMD K8 has reprogrammable microcode
Real World Technologies lists an interesting article about the AMD K8 processor and its previously unnoticed ability to patch its own microcode. Apparently AMD has ...
Alien vs. Predator
Warning: This may contain something you will view as a spoiler. You’ve been warned. It was with some mixed feelings that I decided to go ...
Weekend of Fun
Well, I’ve been busy this weekend helping my son repaint his room. It’s now a lovely sky blue, with faux-finished images of clouds painted all ...
Headline of the Day
Bush TV ad targets Kerry on intelligence issues Boy, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black. ...
Experiments in video capture
I recently reinstalled my Hauppauge Win-TV card in my server box, and have been working a bit at getting my webcam software up and running. ...
DRM is doubleplus good for business, Congress advised | The Register
The Register reports that the CBO is advising Congressmen that Digital Rights Management is good for America . Well, for American business anyway. It is ...
Radio Tidbits
A couple of quick items regarding radio, that incredibly passé form of media that nonetheless seems to occupy a great deal of my time. Nerosoft ...
Things CPU Architects (and others) Need To Think About
Bob Colwell gave an interesting talk at Stanford about his experiences as Chief Architect of Intel’s IA32 processors from 1992-2000. I spent an hour and ...
How to make a Smoker from a Trash Can
GeekDIY has a nice little project: How to make a Smoker from a Trash Can . It’s very similar to Alton Brown’s cardboard box smoker, ...
Au Revoir, Julia
The great legend of cuisine, Julia Child, passed away today in her sleep. She was three days short of her 91st birthday. In the last ...
Yahoo! News – Powerful Charley Pounds Florida’s West Coast
Ouch! It looks like hurricane Charley is coming ashore south of its earlier predicted course, and wth winds that are topping out at 145 mph. ...
void && NULL
While driving in this morning, the airwaves were abuzz with the news that the California Supreme Court had ruled to annul 4000 same sex marriages ...
International: Isn’t 50 years of copyright enough?
The Index of Free Expression asks Isn’t 50 years of copyright enough? The recording industry is lobbying the EU to extend their current term of ...
Armadillo Crash Video
Finally got back to looking at the video from the crash of Armadillo Aerospace’s 48inch test vehicle . In the words of Bugs Bunny, what ...
Stairway to Heaven, Orchestral Variations
For publicity, the University of New South Wales commissioned orchestral variations on the classic Led Zepplin tune, Stairway to Heaven . Each segment is done ...
Snitch, the Copyright Ferret
News.com is running a story about the [BSA’s new mascot][1], a ferret who lectures children about the perils of the copyright infringement. Children will play ...
Human-powered helicopter returns to the drawing board
Today, those crazy Canucks of the Human Powered Helicopter group at the University of British Columbia tried unsuccessfully to be the first to fly a ...
How to ameliorate the outcome of Eldred v. Ashcroft
I’m nearing the end of Lessig’s Free Culture , and am at the point in the book where Lessig describes his loss in Eldred v. ...
Tough Weekend for Would-be X Prizers
There were two failures of launch vehicles this weekend. The 48 inch launch vehicle of Armadillo Aerospace crashed, leaving what was described on their website ...
danny bot: the film
Gave me a chuckle. Thanks to td and tdl for pointing me at it. danny bot: the film ...
Long Exposure Tools
Freshmeat listed an interesting new project called Long Exposure Tools . Like many cool ideas, it’s actually very simple. It takes multiple exposures, and combines ...
Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system | Lambda the Ultimate
Ivan Sutherland’s thesis on Sketchpad may be one of the most famous and innovative papers in the history of computer graphics. LtU reports that there ...
Rick Boucher, Guest Blogger on lessig.org
Congressman Rich Boucher is guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig’s blog this week. Congressman Boucher is fairly rare amongst politicians in that he actually seems to ...
Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle
Friday nights are terrible for television. Usually I’m out teaching people how to make telescopes, but last night I was just not in the mood. ...
Some Punks Need An Ass Whooping
Sometimes, you just have to wonder if some kids’ parents beat them too much or not enough . ...
On Politics
Except for my occasional bleats about intellectual property rights, I try not to write very much about politics in my blog. It’s not that I ...
Video of INDUCE hearings via P2P
Lawrence Lessig has a link to a Bittorrent feed for the INDUCE hearings , starring the venerable Orin Hatch. I’ve ranted about INDUCE before a ...
Unmanned Flight with Microsoft Flight Simulator
Slashdot is running an article about a Cornell group who built an unmanned model aircraft using rather conventional hardware and Microsoft Windows XP embedded. What ...
Creeping Featurism
The Python Daily URL! feed has had quite a few articles lately on the so-called “decorator” syntax. I must admit, I’m not really up on ...
Free Culture
I must admit, I’ve been a slacker. I haven’t read Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture , and since you can actually get free copies of ...
Casio develops ceramic lenses for digital cameras
Casio has developed lenses made out of transparent ceramics for use in their digital cameras. Apparently using this material can reduce the overall size of ...
Valenti Redux, by Tim Wu
Tim Wu has a long list of idiotic quotes by Jack Valenti on Lawrence Lessig’s blog . I particularly like On the VCR, 1983 “We ...
Flash O’ The Day
Low Morale is some of the best Flash animation I’ve seen in some time. Be sure to check out their music video, set to Radiohead’s ...
Yahoo! News – TiVo Wins Nod for Users to Share Digital Shows
Reuters is reporting that the FCC has granted approval to Tivo for their scheme to allow people to share Tivo’d shows with their friends . ...
The Making of Arguments By, J.H. Gardiner.
The Making of Arguments By, J.H. Gardiner is a fresh release from Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreading Project which explains how to write arguments. ...
Great Minds Think Alike
Metafilter ran an article about the winners of the Canadian Awards for Excellence in Book Design . Louigi mentioned that he really liked The Gryphons ...
Baseball Poetry
While the best baseball stories and poetry occurs on the field, some of it also appears in the form of prose (courtesy of kobayashi @ ...
You’re a bastard, Sven Jaschan
The Sasser and Netsky viruses accounts for 70% of the virus reports in 2004 , yet were written by one person: German hacker Sven Jaschan. ...
Fun With Music, via abc2midi
Since discovering that the classic baseball tune Take Me Out To The Ballgame was in the public domain, I decided that I might like to ...
The Brainwagon Photo Gallery
I decided finally to install gallery so that I could create The Brainwagon Photo Gallery to display my amateurish attempts at photography. For now, the ...
Thunderbirds are Go!
Today’s DVD acquisition is The Best of the Thunderbirds . This year both the Thunderbirds and myself are celebrating our 40th birthdays. I’m not your ...
How about Legal Guerrilla Drive-Ins?
Slashdot is running a story about a N.Y. Times article (registration required, yada yada) that details Guerrilla Drive-Ins , mobile parties that use a DVD ...
Please set your clock back fifty years!
The Arizona Daily Star reports that: A rally organizer for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign asked Teri Hayt, the Star’s managing editor, to disclose the journalist’s ...
Interesting Papers Galore
Slashdot mentioned work by Nayar and Nishino on generating images of what people see by processing images of reflections in the cornea. I thought the ...
Take me out to the ballgame…
While at the ballgame earlier this week, I found myself wondering whether the classic 7th inning stretch song, Take Me Out To the Ballgame was ...
Scientists Create Synthetic Rogue Protein
California scientists have created a synthetic prion , a rogue protein that was used to infect mice with a brain destroying infection. Prions are the ...
Francis Crick
Francis Crick, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his work with James Watson, is dead . You can get JPEGS of their ...
On This Day in Baseball
My baseball calendar informs me that on this day in 1988, the Red Sox traded two of their minor leaguers for pitcher Mike Boddicker. Boddicker ...
Great Hackers
Paul Graham posted Great Hackers , an adaptation of his keynote OSCON 2004 speech. He’s also the author of Hackers and Painters , which I ...
Exploratorium: Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
Dan Lyke noted that the Exploratorium has new exhibit of hand-cranked automata called the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre . I love this stuff. Perhaps a trip ...
Athletics Defeat Seattle 5-3
Last night my loving wife took me to watch the A’s take on the Mariners. While the Mariners’ star has seemed to have faded, I ...
That’s No Moon!
Oh, wait, I guess it is . Sorry Chewie. ...
Eliza Turns Dirty, Changes Name to Jenny18
Normally I steer this website away from overtly sexual topics, but I’ll make an exception here. Jenny18 is a version of the classic Eliza program ...
Aaron Brady, Porno for Pythons – Pixie Weblog Software – Hello & Goodbye
I’m currently using WordPress for this weblog, but I can’t help but feeling that the more that people work on it, the less I’m going ...
Getting back into the groove
The BBC is reporting that scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley Labs are using non-contact means to reconstruct sound from old records ...
Praying Mantis!
As I was wandering into the house this evening, I opened my front door, looked down and saw the fellow on your right on my ...
Double Header Movie Review
Since I was frustrated by server problems this weekend, this weekend was a double movie weekend: I went out to see both The Bourne Supremacy ...
Baseball pictures…
After penning the article below, I was looking for a picture of the elusive Walter Carlisle (didn’t succeed), but I did find a nice page ...
The End of an Incredibles Journey
Well, yesterday was a momentous day for me. I had rendered the very last shot in The Incredibles , and it was approved in a ...
Server Difficulties…
Well, my server has locked up a couple of more times in the last 24 hours. I’m perusing the FreeBSD-current mailing list to see what ...
Haskell Functional Programming Bookstore | Lambda the Ultimate
The gents at Lambda the Ultimate note that John Meacham has set up a Cafe Press Bookstore for Haskell books , including Simon Peyton-Jones and ...
Baseball Trivia
I was tearing off sheets for my daily calendar which lists achivements in baseball, when I encountered the following: July 19, 1911 Walter Carlisle makes ...
Apologies for System Downtime…
I had some unscheduled system downtime today. A couple of times in the last couple days, my system (which was heretofore incredibly reliable) has mysteriously ...
Yahoo! News – Senator Induces Support for Piracy Bill
The Internet has been abuzz with comments about Senator Orrin Hatch’s INDUCE Act , which would criminalize any activity that “induces” copyright infringement as if ...
Electr-O-Sketch
Some clever lads at Cornell University have adapted a classic Etch-a-Sketch so you can draw with a serial mouse . Like many projects I link ...
Happy Birthday!
Today is brainwagon’s 2nd anniversary. Over the last two years I’ve made 403 posts, which I hope that some people have found entertaining. Wherever you ...
Awesome!
Just click here for one of the cleverest uses of animated gifs I’ve seen in a while. ...
Bottle Cap Tripod
Slashdot ran a story about a gadget to turn your water bottle into a tripod that can be found in Japan. Adam at fiendishthingy.org has ...
Neil Fraser: Hardware: 3D Mouse
Slashdot provided a link to Neil Fraser’s 3D mouse hack . He takes the parts from a couple of mice and makes a gadget that ...
Fixing Old Motion Picture Film
I’ve been reading papers lately about using image processing techniques to remove artifacts and damage from old motion picture film. Some old films are remarkably ...
Programming in Lua
Before I discovered Python, I enjoyed a brief period of experimentation with Lua . I even went so far as to use Lua to add ...
Viruses Get Smaller
In the decade to come, it’s clear that the Internet will face two related challenges: Increasing volume of spam, and Increasing sophistication of viruses. These ...
Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld)
Metafilter had a link to Bob Metcalfe’s 1995 article Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld) . It’s always incredible ...
Kevin Kelly — Making My Own Music
Kevin Kelly had a very nice New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled Making My Own Music , which clearly elucidates the way that I’ve come ...
Man Lived With Dinosaurs!
John Stewart’s Daily Show did a startling exposé on the work of Dr. Carl Baugh which shows undeniable evidence that men and dinosaurs lived simultaneously. ...
Trinity Test, July 16, 1945
Read these declassified accounts of the Trinity Test on the 59th anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear device. I’d also recommend reading the ...
I, Robot
I must admit, I had low expectations from I, Robot . Perhaps it’s just that I see a lot of decent science fiction which is ...
More Math and Baseball
Bukiet and Harold wrote a paper entitled A Markov Chain Approach To Baseball , which details their use of Markov models to study hitting order ...
The Mathematics of Gambling
Thorp’s book, The Mathematics of Gambling , is apparently available online with permission of the author. Thorp is of course the author of the classic ...
NASA – Apollo 11’s 35th Anniversary
Today is the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It seems like a lifetime ago, but I remember as a young five year ...
Software That Lasts 200 Years
Dan Bricklin, one of the co-inventors of Visicalc, has posted a nice article entitled Software That Lasts 200 Years . He points out that software ...
Phonecam Art Show
SENT is a Motorola Sponsored phonecam art show. If you click the link, you’ll see new photos every five seconds, many of which are pretty ...
Pot Pourri and a Cheap Microscope
Well, tonight I’m just too tired to string any coherent thoughts or good links together, so I thought I’d merely list some of the days ...
The Yolo Reflector, a booklet by Arthur Leonard
On an unrelated search, I discovered that Arthur Leonard’s treatise The Yolo Reflector had been scanned and made available, including translating all the mathematical formulas ...
Dragonfly BSD 1.0 released
As of July 12, 2004, the 1.0 milestone has been reached by the DragonFly Team. DragonFly BSD is a derivative of the FreeBSD 4.x tree, ...
Fuller’s Geodesic Dome Patent Turns 50
As of the 29th of June, Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome patent is 50 years old. I was surprised how interesting and informative it was, but ...
King Arthur
There was nothing on television worth watching last night, so I took the missus out to see King Arthur , the latest in a sequence ...
Idiotic things…
Ever on the lookout for odd science/craft experiments, I was pleased to find instructions on how to make soap out of bacon , and poking ...
A Mathematician at the Ballpark
I’m a bit of a baseball fan, and I’m also fascinated by gambling and probability. It’s rare that I find a book which talks about ...
Internet Archive: Feature Films
I guess I wasn’t paying attention: the Internet Archive has added a Feature Films section. The selection is fairly unremarkable for now, but contains a ...
Wireless Ipod Hack
In case you are running out of geeky things to do with gadgets you could try wire a PocketPC to an Ipod to allow wireless ...
War of the Worlds
Look at this nifty collection of cover art for various publications of War of the Worlds that span over a century. You can, of course, ...
Low Cost Cruise Missile Designer Seeks Job
Bruce Simpson, designer and builder of a low cost, homebrew cruise missile, has posted a rather interesting plea to sell his services . He claims ...
ThePhotographersRight.pdf
In the discussion on metafilter regarding the Brown Equals Terrorist , someone posted a nice link to a summary of the rights of photographers . ...
Eldred Threatened With Arrest for Distributing Thoreau
It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of the public domain: the bits of our culture that are actually free for individuals to use as ...
Xaphoon – The Maui Xaphoon (Bamboo Sax or Bamboo Flute)
Metafilter pointed me at Xaphoon – The Maui Xaphoon (Bamboo Sax or Bamboo Flute) , another website with an unusual music instrument. This is cute ...
Do you feel more secure?
With many crack federal agents like this , don’t you feel safer at night? Isn’t harassment of people necessary in our post 9/11 world, especially ...
Gutenberg Gems: Edward Lasker
Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Edward Lasker, a rather colorful individual in the history of chess. He won the championship of Paris in 1912, in London ...
Gutenberg Gems: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Project Gutenberg now has some awfully interesting stuff, and to help promote it, I think that from time to time I’ll post links to particular ...
Big Telescope Threatened — Mobilize the Nation!
Wildfires near the Mount Graham International Observatory in Arizona are threatening the as yet uncompleted Large Binocular Telescope. The area immediately surrounding the complex has ...
An Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System
While doing an unrelated search, I browsed into Publications by Wolfgang Heidrich and started reading his paper entitled The Design of an Inexpensive Very High ...
Japanese Name Generator
I ran across a website that claimed to be a Japanese name generator . When I tried mine out, I got 渡辺 Watanabe (near a ...
Exterminate Excessive Copyright Terms!
The BBC is reporting that there will be no Daleks in the latest incarnation of the Dr. Who franchise. It appears that talks between the ...
Big Songs For Little Attention Spans
World of Stuart has a nifty download: Big Songs For Little Attention Spans . It’s a 95 megabyte download of 99 (he says 100, but ...
Solar cells powered by plant proteins?
Nature ran an online article entitled: Could laptops run on spinach?: Solar cells turn over a new leaf. Curiously enough, I have been going over ...
Radio Controlled Clocks
The NIST has a very nice history of radio controlled clocks which was written by Michael A. Lombardi. The National Institute of Standards and Technology ...
Mining Project Gutenberg
While perusing a random copy of Scientific American from June 18, 1887, I ran across an interesting little nugget of mathematical niftiness: Lewis Carroll’s technique ...
Spiderman 2
The other part of my weekend was spent donating my dollars to the latest summer movie extravaganza: Spiderman 2 . All the principles are back: ...
Making the Squarpent, a serpent-like instrument
At least one of my occasional readers is interested in homebrew musical instruments. Having listened to the example mp3’s, I’m not sure that these instruments ...
Fireworks!
If you have Quicktime, you might be able to click below and see some of the fireworks we observed from Jack London Square in Oakland, ...
Space Ship One, continued
Scaled Composites released some nice video on their website, including video M&Ms scattered in zero g’s . Nicely done (even if it is in Microsoft ...
Computing simple holograms
Neat paper: Holography without Photography, by Thad Walker . The author uses a simple C program to generate holograms which are then printed on overhead ...
Streaming Audio/Video patents…
Groklaw.net is reporting that Acacia Technologies has been filing litigation against websites for patent infringement on patents they received for a system for distributing video ...
Buy your very own Constitution!
Lessig had this link awhile ago on his weblog, but I thought it would be appropriate for Independence Day. You can purchase a copy of ...
Homebuilt Lasers Page
This seems to be just about the simplest homebuilt laser you can make: a TEA nitrogen laser . TEA stands for Transverse Electrical discharge at ...
Fahrenheit 9/11
I must admit, I’m a bit of a fluff movie-goer. I go to movies to be entertained, not to learn. When I wish to learn, ...
The KnotPlot Site
For some reason, I find knots fascinating. What’s even more fascinating is how often books about knots show up on the bargain shelves at Borders, ...
An Undergraduate Project in Imaging Radar
Ankit Agrawal, Bob Fougere, Mridula Oravakandy and Greg Siemens wrote up their B.S. report Design, Construction and Testing of a Microwave Radar System for Through-Wall ...
The Department of Homeland Security says…
If you use Internet Explorer, the terrorists have already won! The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this ...
Homegrown PVC flamethrower
I know that I’ll probably be stuck on some terrorist watchlist for posting this, but when you find the description on a DIY flamethrower , ...
Cassini arrives at Saturn
After a seven year, 2.2 billion year trip, the Cassini spacecraft completed its SOI burn and entered Saturn orbit. Check out the details on CNN.com ...
Apologies for downtime…
Sorry to my two or three readers, who undoubtably were devastated to find brainwagon off the air earlier today. I had a brief outage while ...
BBC R&D – Dirac
As part of my brother’s ongoing experiments with streaming video , I’ve become somewhat more interested in the world of streaming video. Interestingly enough, the ...
This Day in Baseball
On this date in 1990, the New York Yankees were playing against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park. The Yankees pitcher Andy Hawkins gave ...
Serious Putty
Everybody needs 5 lbs of Silly Putty , although I must admit I can’t imagine why. The official site is at sillyputty.com . Aaron’s Putty ...
Pencilmation
Pencilmation.com has some fun (if silly) flash animations, including the story of “The Monkey and the Coconut” , which perhaps people who appreciate monkeys might, ...
All you need to know about lasers…
I was trying to figure out some details about how laser time of flight sensors determine distance, and Sam’s Laser FAQ came to the rescue. ...
U.S. Supreme Court Rules on Rights of Detainees
The Supreme Court handed down its rulings on rights of detainees. You can listen to some commentary on NPR if you are streaming enabled. The ...
Barbie Dumps Ken, Dates Blaine, CNN Money covers!
While scanning the headlines of CNN Money this morning, I found out that Barbie is dating again, this time it’s a hunky Australian . This ...
Iraq war will cost each family $3145
But to free the world of Weapons of Mass Destruction , it’s worth every penny. I’m beginning to agree: a vote for Bush in November ...
Blog Me Out to the Ballgame 2004
Taking a cue from Tom Mangan, I decided to participate in his proposed Blog Me Out to the Ballgame 2004 extravaganza. Carmen and I got ...
One More Reason To Stop Using IE
CERT has suggested that users stop using IE because of a serious conjuction of two security flaws: one in IE, another in IIS . If ...
Pay for My Stupidity
Slashdot provided a link to KiteCam Disaster Fund Appeal , the website for an individual who lofted and subsequently landed a Casio EX-3 digital camera ...
Senate Has Too Much Time – Passes Useless Bill
Reuters is reporting that the Senate has just passed a bill that makes using a camcorder to record a movie a federal crime . punishable ...
Spoofing Biometric Scanners
Marie Sandström has a short thesis on spoofing biometric fingerprint scanners . It involves collecting latent prints, and then casting a replica finger in gelatin. ...
21 Rules of Thumb — How Microsoft develops its Software
Jim McCarthy writes about 21 Rules of Thumb that guide the development of software products inside Microsoft. There are very few surprises, but I’ve been ...
Python Weblog Software — Aether
Aether is a simple weblog/website authoring system written by Paul Harrison. He’s also got some other cool stuff that he’s written, including GIMP plugins for ...
Low Frequency Modulation of Lasers
K3PGP has a nice website which I’ve seen before since he and I share some common interests: astronomy and lasers, notably. He’s got an interesting ...
I need more Serenity
When it comes to television, I’m about as jaded as they come. Let’s face it, it’s mostly crap. That’s what makes it so difficult when ...
Useful program: pat2pdf – fetch patent images from the USPTO database
Picture this: you run across a reference to a patent that you want to read, but you are too cheap to spend the money that ...
More Papercraft — Jun Mitani
In keeping with the earlier paper model theme, I give you Jun Mitani , who has a paper in this year’s SIGGRAPH conference on turning ...
SpaceShipOne Still a Dangerous Ride
New Scientist is currently running an interview with Burt Rutan where he admits there was some potentially catastrophic failings in SpaceShipOne’s inaguaral space flight: a ...
Alan Shepard – Project Mercury Freedom 7
I was pondering yesterday’s flight of SpaceShipOne, and decided to lookup the information surrounding the first American sub-orbital flights. Alan Shepard – Project Mercury Freedom ...
More Paper Crafts
For reasons which escape me, Yamaha has a really nice webpage on paper crafts , which include patterns that you can download and build. These ...
Flame Fractals
While watching the Athletics lose another game (sigh), I dusted off this paper and coded up a quick implementation. It seems to work, although I’m ...
Universal Feed Parser
Mark Pilgrim has released a new version of his Universal Feed Parser . I have mixed feelings about the long term viability of this code, ...
Seven vs. Five Game Series
The conventional wisdom of baseball is that five game series are easier for bad teams to win than seven game series. But how much easier? ...
Soda Straw Tensegrity Structures
Another cool link from the Geometry Junkbox: George Hart’s instructions on building Soda Straw Tensegrity Structures . I can see myself wandering off to the ...
Paper Plates Never Looked So Cool
I like arts and crafts, particularly those with a mathematical bent. Wholemovement – The Work of Bradford Hansen-Smith shows what cool stuff you can do ...
Differential Evolution
The recent Wired article on the use of evolutionary computation to optimize Formula-1 cars has been getting a bit of press lately, and finally made ...
SpaceShipOne Lifts Off and Lands!
Well, I bailed on the six hour drive down to Mojave to see the launch of SpaceShipOne, but somehow they’ve managed to muddle along without ...
Blog Me Out to the Ballgame 2004
Tom Mangan proposed a blog-in at the Athletics-Giants game on June 27. I don’t have tickets yet, but I may have to give the idea ...
Dodgeball
Today’s weekend movie was Dodgeball, starring Ben Stiller, and featuring a large list of cameo appearances from some fun celebrities. Ben Stiller plays White Goodman, ...
World Series Baseball
I was mulling over the mathematics of the World Series in one of my more bored moments, and decided to write some simple Python code ...
Find Nemo Somewhere Unexpected
I enjoy an (admittedly waning) interest in the Photoshop contests on fark.com , and recently they ran a contest where the theme was Find Nemo ...
Templates
A nifty group of template for various cards and boxes can be found at Mirkwood Designs . Useful for craft projects, no doubt, and the ...
Python Neural Nets
Any tinkering I’ve done with neural nets is a decade or more in my past, but I’m still interested. Python News! provided this article on ...
Armadillo Scores Test Liftoff Success In Bid For X Prize
I woke up this morning with a bit of indigestion (when you are used to a rather spartan diet low in fats, the occasional indulgence ...
Perspectives on a Classic
Ed Willis has an article entitled The Mythical Man-Month Revisited [Jun. 17, 2004] on onlamp.com. As I read it I can only imagine that the ...
Happy Anniversary!
Today is Carmen and my fourth anniversary. I can’t even begin to describe how terrific she makes my life and how happy I am that ...
DIY for photography links
A nice collection of photography links can be found at DIY for photography links . I particularly liked the instructions for making your own Shroud ...
More silly USB devices…
Well, the plug in aquarium was completely useless, so this would have to score higher merely on the basis of utility. The iDuck USB Memory ...
Misleading Headline
Sometimes you read a headline, and it just strikes you as odd. For instance, today on Yahoo! News, I read that: Red Sox: Nixon To ...
The Brainf*ck CPU
Clifford Wolf wrote VHDL to implement a custom processor which executes the Brainf*ck programming language using a Spartan 2 FPGA chip. You can download the ...
Blog Additions – My Books and DVDs
I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but I added a couple of things on the sidebar to the right. A random selection from my ...
More Public Domain Images and a Correction
Just another example of an image that I scanned from the Dover book and colorized. I kind of like it! Now, the correction: in reviewing ...
Public Domain Images
I was looking for some clip art that I could use on my website, so last time I was at the bookstore I acquired a ...
Are really one nation under God?
Today the Supreme Court issued a ruling which reversed the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling that the phrase “under God” was unconstitutional. Instead of trying to ...
Why POV-Ray is bad…
Apparently after two years of noodling around, the POV-Ray team has finally seen fit to release a new version of their rendering software . I ...
Holy Crap! My scanner works!
I have a Canon LIDE 20 scanner, a super cheap LED flatbed scanner. I figured there was no way that it would possibly be supported ...
Weekly Weigh In
Today’s weigh in saw me give back last week’s loss. Not too surprising given the fact that I have been eating a bit more. A ...
The Chronicles of Riddick
Ah, this time, a Saturday evening saw my wife and I attending a late showing of The Chronicles of Riddick , a sequel to Pitch ...
CPU Evolution…
Over on linuxdevices.com , there’s interview with Glenn Henry , founder of Centaur Technology, the bright guys behind the C3 CPUs which are marketed by ...
Ancient Shellfish, or More Fun with Fossils
Okay, okay, I know I am choking the bandwidth on my page by putting out these images, but here is an ammonite fossil done the ...
A TCP/IP Stack and Webserver in PHP
Sweet Zombie Turing! Adam Dunkels has written phpstack – A TCP/IP Stack and Webserver in PHP . Some people really do have too much free ...
Trilobite Fun
I have this old trilobite fossil that I bought from the Discovery Store. I find it kind of neat to have a specimen from 530 ...
Silly Gadget – USB Mini Desktop Aquarium
Every once in a while, I run across a gadget so silly even I can’t bring myself to buy it. This has got to take ...
Baseball Yesterday
After the Athletics previous road trip, I felt I had plenty to be worried about. The A’s hitting (especially their ability to hit with men ...
Time keeps on slippin…
Tom Van Baak has a fascinating obsession with timekeeping. His website, www.leapsecond.com , has a great deal of information regarding timekeeping and his vast collection ...
Interesting FPGA Board…
Dan Lyke was musing about learning about FPGA technology on flutterby , which is a topic which has long been in the back of my ...
The Fun of Radio
I admit it, I have a ham radio license. I’m KF6KYI, a lowly Tech licensee. I went through a brief phase where I learned alot ...
Ars Technica: Small Form Factor Guide — June 2004
I’m tired of machines taking up several cubic feet of my under desk space, so the recent trend towards smaller machines suits me fine. I ...
Venus Transit Pictures
Well, this rare event has concluded, I’ll try to add links to sites with images throughout the day as my browsing uncovers them. Check back ...
Notre President…
I had mentioned this before, but managed to find this gif. You can refer to my previous post if you have difficulty decoding the French. ...
Ken Brown is a Big Fat Idiot…
Holy crap. It isn’t often that I get a chance to read something as high in drivel as Ken Brown’s rebuttal to Andy Tanenbaum’s critique ...
God’s Will
Let’s hope that it’s God’s will to put a Democrat in the White House come November. ...
On Watching Weight and Weight Watchers…
I have been attending Weight Watchers since early January, and have had good results (over 36 lbs lost as of my weigh in on June ...
For news about Tivo and PVRs…
I found this nicely done weblog of information on personal video recorders. Check out PVRblog (it even has an RSS feed ). ...
Venus Transit
A particularly rare astronomical event – the transit of Venus across the solar disk – will occur on June 8 or about sixteen hours from ...
Fedora Core, or can a FreeBSD fan find Linux Nirvana?
I’ve been a FreeBSD user since the days of FreeBSD 1.1.5.1. I cut my teeth old older BSD systems, and the desire to have a ...
Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The summer movie season is upon us, which means that Saturdays are the day for seeing the latest release of the week. Today’s movie was ...
Gadget o’ the Day: Hauppauge MediaMVP
Cringely mentioned the Hauppauge MediaMVP gadget in his column. It’s a semi-cute toy: a stand alone box which connects to 10 or 100 megabit ethernet, ...
D-Day
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day: the date when the Allies of World War II began their invasion of France to defeat the Axis ...
A Corkscrew for Champagne?
I suspect that the story surrounding this E-bay posting is a fake, but if not, it’s an excellent justification for the notion that some people ...
Free Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks
Project Gutenberg – Audio eBooks Read by People lists eight different books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all read by humans (much better than the ...
Keeping Score…
Okay, okay. I’m still on the baseball kick. Sorry for all of you who are bored with this topic, but I couldn’t help myself: metafilter ...
Learning about the Supreme Court
The inner workings of the Supreme Court have always held a certain fascination for me, and since my wife got me an iPod, I’ve found ...
Letters from Iraq
You can read all the blog posts of Jeremy Botter made as a soldier on duty in Iraq as a PDF file . Interesting stuff, ...
Biodiesel
The rising cost of gas makes one consider alternative sources of fuel. Lately I’ve been hearing a great deal about biodiesel fuels. I found a ...
Ouch! Chavez HBP, moved to DL
I was watching the Oakland A’s game against the Chicago White Sox in preparation for sneaking out of work for today’s day game ($2 tickets? ...
Stereo Video Project
Ever on the lookout for nifty projects, I stumbled across this stereo video display . It works by synchronizing cheap board level video cameras with ...
Alton Brown — My Kitchen Hero
I love Good Eats , and am a big fan of Alton Brown. His no-nonsense pragmatism has vastly improved my skills at preparing steaks, chicken ...
More Stereo Stuff…
Keeping with the stereo theme, Jim Gasperini wrote up an idea so simple that is surprising how effective it is. To display stereoscopic images, he ...
Who will Kerry choose to be VIP?
John Moe weighs the pros and cons of some possibles on mcsweeneys.net . I particularly like the idea of choosing Clinton, if only to see ...
Still more baseball statistics, and a story…
Amazing what you can find when you dig. On retrosheet.org you can find box scores for lots of games. Pretty cool. For instance, I dug ...
Weight Watchers Progress
The project that I’ve spent the most time on lately is actually myself. Last December I was having some health difficulties and visited my doctor, ...
The Day After Tomorrow
Well, this weekend’s movie extravaganza was The Day After Tomorrow , a classic global catastrophe film. Dennis Quaid stars as a paleoclimatologist who is the ...
More Baseball Statistics
Baseball-DataBank.org has statistics similar (identical?) to those from baseball1.com but has conveniently placed them in the form of a 33 megabyte file that you can ...
The Mathematics of Baseball
I just finished reading Moneyball , and as I woke up this morning I was wondering what good online information was available on the mathematics ...
Chernobyl Chopper Chick is a fraud…
Apparently the tale of Elena, the young lady who did a photolog of her trip through the quarantine zone which surrounds Chernobyl is a fraud ...
Beware the traitors that walk among us…
Somehow I missed out that the NSA had banned Furby from entering their Maryland facilities. Can anyone doubt that beneath their furry exterior they are ...
Fun with Python and Cryptography
I’m a bit of a classic cryptography nut, and I also have had a lot of fun writing bits of Python code. Python is awfully ...
Please Excuse Our President
Dug this brief blurb off of talk.origins this morning. From the pages of New Scientist : HERE’S one US company where “freedom fries” surely never ...
Mini-FAQ Macro Photography, Frugal, mostly Digital
Today’s useful link of the day is to Mini-FAQ Macro Photography, Frugal, mostly Digital . This page has lots of good ideas for getting images ...
Software Potpourri
Python 2.3.4 is out. Just a bugfix release. FreeBSD 4.10 was also released earlier this week. This is the first “Errata Branch”, which will include ...
Next-gen VIA mobo touts speed, security, MPEG-4
This website runs on a spiffy little VIA motherboard, so I was glad to see that VIA is about to release some new motherboards. You ...
Blondes Wrestle for Desirable Movie Role
In entertainment today , Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears are both battling to play that most challenging of thespian roles: Daisy Duke on the upcoming ...
Tinkering with Toys
I recall seeing the plans for a simple walking, balancing robot constructed out of TinkerToys, and while surfing around aimlessly I ran accross it again. ...
BXFlyer Four Rotor Helicopter
A couple of days ago I was talking about small robotic flyers, I should have known that somebody at the Seattle Robotics Society would already ...
How To Build Your Own Blog
The title is a bit of a fraud. This is not so much an article on how to build your own weblog as a short ...
What’s the lesson of The Swan?
Allright, I admit it. I watch lots of crap “reality” television shows. None do I find more disturbing than The Swan . The recipe of ...
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
I received an interesting phone call from my friend Phil last week. I hadn’t heard much from Phil, but he called me in the middle ...
A Paper on Small RC Vehicles
I’m always interested in bizarre remote control applications, so I was pleased to find this informative paper on the development of the Black Widow Micro ...
Lair of the Chrome Cow
For some reason I found myself looking for plans for cheap 3D scanners at 1:15AM this morning, and came up with the Lair of the ...
Spiral Fresnel Reflectors
A recent Slashdot article was a rather dull one about fun things you could do with a large Fresnel lenses. I had seen stuff like ...
On the strike zone…
This morning I was catching up on Baseball tonight to see what went on with baseball yesterday. I mostly wanted to see what happened yesterday ...
Shrek 2
It’s rare that a sequel film surpasses a good original film, but I must say: Shrek 2 must be judged as one of those rare ...
Software Update
I’ve upgraded this blog to use the latest release of WordPress . It’s unfortunate that the software mingles functionality and appearance in the way that ...
blog.noetech.com: Overhaulin’
Sweet Manatee of Santa Fe. Apparently if you post an article about a TV show on your blog, you become their official voice on the ...
Andy Tanenbaum on ‘Who Wrote Linux’
It’s fascinating the degree to which Microsoft/SCO backed front companies are trying to create FUD around the use and authorship of the Linux operating system. ...
Modal Web Server Example Part 1
I thought that this article, Modal Web Server Example Part 1 , had some interesting ideas. I think that many existing web applications are hampered ...
MSNBC – Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved?
Today someone on our local message board posted a link to MSNBC – Can Star Wars: Episode III be saved? , a story that suggested ...
On Blogging Software…
As I work to install WordPress on this site and tweak and twiddle the look and functionality, I can’t help but think that every blog, ...
Pardon our construction…
Pardon my construction. I’m busy revamping brainwagon’s look and feel to be more like it’s previous incarnation, and have unveiled a few warts in the ...
ARRLWeb: Rocket Carrying Ham Radio Payload Reaches Space!
An amateur constructed rocket reached an altitude of 100km and became the first such craft to reach space. This incredible achievement is described here by ...
Review: Troy
This weekend’s block buster is Troy , the classic tale of the Iliad . Brad Pitt stars as Achilles, the moody and reluctant (if somewhat ...
Brainwagon Under Construction
Motivated by the change in licensing in MovableType as well as a general feeling of dissatisfaction with certain elements of its design, I decided to ...
On Today’s Date, Hindenburg explodes over Lakehurst, NJ
On May 6th, 1937, the German airship _Hindenburg_ had just completed its 21st crossing of the Atlantic. While approaching it’s landing field in Lakehurst, New ...
IPOD update
Well, the IPOD is working, if not flawlessly. It seems to get it to work I need to plug the iPod into the USB card ...
New iPod, Same Old Trouble
As part of my weight loss plan, I decided I needed/deserved some form of MP3 player, and with my upcoming birthday, asked the wife that ...
Build your own Steadicam
Cute and useful project: build yourself a $14 Steadycam . Or you could look at this plan for a camera stabilizer from the Guide Book ...
Two Short Subjects
Just a short blurb to inform my readers about two interesting bits of code that I’ve looked at in the past week. The first is ...
Do it yourself Board Games
I ran across Games and Tools – The Deck of Boards while reading rec.games.board . The author designed a way to create boards for many ...
An aside into Fonts…
I have begun work on a program to play checkers, tentatively called _Milhouse_. I’m mostly doing it to keep my programming and research skills tuned ...
Playing with food…
On Tech Now! this morning, I found out about the [Octodog’s Frankfurter Converter][1]. When there are products this silly in the world, can the Apocalypse ...
Shaolin or Ow-lin?
This picture served as the basis for a [fark][1] Photoshop contest, but I think it stands on its own. It’s good to see that our ...
Riding a motorcycle through Chernobyl
One of the most bizarre and macabre websites I’ve seen recently is GHOST TOWN , the story of Elena, a young woman who rides her ...
Advertising Saturation
Today’s Quote of the Day comes from Steve Ballmer of Microsoft . According to this report , Microsoft spends 12% of its budget on online ...
Never do today…
… what you can put off ’til tomorrow. Sometimes procrastination can pay off, courtesy of Moore’s Law. ...
The Rapture and Armageddon
A couple of days ago I was driving around and caught an interview of Tim LaHaye on NPR’s Fresh Air program. LaHaye is the author ...
One liner…
Ever wish you had a simple webserver on a machine? You can do it in a single line with Python. python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer ; ...
Woo-Woo!
If you’d like to adopt a new quack persona on the Internet, you could always look at How to be an Internet Woo-Woo . Nobody ...
More on the DARPA Challenge…
Soren Ragsdale apparently got himself a press pass and recorded his impressions of the event on his weblog. ...
Embedded PC
While chasing down a fairly pedestrian story on Slashdot about building your own LCD picture frame (seems rather obvious, use a box, a VIA motherboard, ...
Grand Challenge, Modest Failure?
Today the DARPA Grand Challenge was run. The course was shortened to only 142 miles from its original design goal of 250 miles. Fifteen robotic ...
Remember, don’t stare at the mantis leaders…
Are you troubled by frequent alien abductions and their tricksy mind control? Well, it is good to see that amateur scientists are hard at work ...
Do it yourself laser scanner…
While doing one of my usual bored browses of the web looking for odd science projects, I ran across a page detailing a [homemade 3d ...
Cobb’s Comedy Club
Late on Saturday Night, my charming wife walked into my office and proclaimed “Robin Williams is doing a special set at Cobb’s on Monday Night. ...
My Wishlist…
Hey, if anyone has a spare 10 grand that they want to waste on me (your soon to be best friend), how about a VersaLaser ...
Pocket Enigma Machine
I recently joined orkut.com, and find it pretty interesting to participate in a community based soley upon invitations/trust. One of the first interesting things I ...
Visible Man, Visible Woman, Visible Barbie?
When I was in at Princeton in the late 80’s, I remember Pat Hanrahan talking about the Visible Human Project , a project to produce ...
Damn Yankees…
Today, Alex Rodriguez was traded to the Yankees for Alfonso Soriano. Apparently A-Rod will play third base for the Yankees. I bet the Red Sox ...
Happy Birthday Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was born February 12, 1809 in Shrewsbury England. In addition to being the world’s greatest barnacle expert of his time, he also took ...
Weekend thoughts of metalworking
This weekend I had the pleasure of driving out to visit “Steamboat Ed” Haas . Ed is a heck of an amazing guy who (among ...
You’ve gotta have balls…
Over the years I’ve been interested in complex and chaotic phenomena. Anyone looking at my desk would confirm this to be true. Sometimes I think ...
Remembering Columbia
One year ago today, the space shuttle _Columbia_ broke apart on reentry. All hands aboard perished. In honor of the sacrifice these men and women ...
Yuck!
Yahoo! News – Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street _ The decomposing remains of a 60-tonsperm whale exploded on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars ...
Betta Fish Saves Children From Burning Building
This comes from the betta group on Yahoo. Fire extinguished by exploding fish bowl in Eagan ...
End of an Era for Pixar?
Pixar has decided to end its negotiations with Disney for a new contract after the current five movie deal expires. What does this mean to ...
Remote Control Vandalism, and more…
Today Slashdot is running a story about hektor , a robotic graffitti artist. It is a computer controlled robot, driven by an Adobe Illustrator plugin ...
SCO offering $250K bounty for MyDoom author…
SCO is apparently the target of the MyDoom e-mail virus. Infected machines are supposed to take part in a denial of service attack against SCO ...
Dieting…
I’ve become my own latest project. During a recent checkup, my doctor noted my increasing weight (323 lbs) and my high cholesterol. He recommended that ...
Best use of Genetic Engineering to date…
How about a genetically modified flower that signals the presence of unexploded landmines by changing color based upon the presence of nitrogen dioxide? The plants ...
Balancing Bots…
I’m kind of fascinated by the whole “balancing robot” thing so I found Dan Piponi’s Equibot to be pretty interesting. It uses a single Sharp ...
Fishy Tails…
Over Christmas my wife and son presented me with a couple of new Siamese Fighting Fish, or bettas. Betta is actually a fish genus, with ...
Codes… Bar Codes…
I’ve got a lot of books. I have no idea really how many. For a long time I wish I actually had a master list ...
Not the first use for SUV mounted missiles, but…
Satire? Or not? Check out Tornado Fighters and try to decide. The demo is AWESOME! ...
Fun with the Terraserver
Okay, it’s nothing really innovative. Jef Poskanzer was the first guy I know who did it. Then my friend Jeff Eaton did it. Now I’ve ...
A great story
I ran across The case of the 500-mile email while reading Jef’s website. A great story. ...
I just greatly expanded my library…
Along with my usual rash of bills, today’s mail call included a DVD from Project Gutenberg . This CD contains 4 gigabytes of public domain ...
Melting, melting, what a world…
Craig Good gave a link to melting metals in your home microwave . Surprisingly nifty, although I might be tempted to wear a lead apron. ...
Public Domain Images
While exploring the NOAA’s website, I noticed that they have a list of photos of weather and ocean related images that (being funded by your ...
The Spirit of the New Year…
Well, Marvin didn’t get this one. Yesterday the Spirit rover successfully bounced to a stop on Mars, linked up with JPL and transmitted pictures back ...
Another reason to move to Canada..
Lawrence Lessig’s weblog contains a short message from Wallace McLean. He notes that in Canada every author who died before December 31, 1948 has passed ...
Stardust Succeeds…
Today NASA is reporting that their Stardust probe, designed for capturing a sample of matter from the tail of comet Wild 2 successfully photographed and ...
Brain related merchandise…
While perusing the web, I sometimes encounter odd brain-related products. Today some random link took me to [the Soda King][1], a purveyor of unusual soda ...
Do it yourself card games..
I’ve long known about Nomic, a game where the players make up the rules as the game is played. Dvorak – A Nomic Card Game ...
Graphics CPUs
Modern GPUs are interesting bits of silicon. They pack a huge number of relatively slow floating point processors in parallel to achieve large throughput. Because ...
Crypto Smorgasborg
In a bit of synchronicity, today’s llinks have a decidedly crypto theme. [Julian][1] sent me a link to the [Enigma-E][2], a modern electronic equivalent to ...
Astronomy Pic of the Day
If you haven’t seen NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website, you should check it out. The most startling picture I’ve seen in quite some ...
Blog Spammers
Well, it finally happened. My blog was spammed by a whole bunch of comments which linked to Lolita-style porn websites. Thanks for the interest, but ...
Attention Deficit Theater
There is a recent trend I’ve noticed in TV programs. It’s the practice of recapping the show that’s currently in progress after virtually every commercial ...
Which is scarier?
It’s quiz time: which of these do you find funnier: this cartoon or this one ? Scary fact: one author actually believes his cartoon. ...
Patent a Fish?
Slashdot had a link today to the glofish.com website: a company which will begin distributing a genetically engineered zebrafish in 2004. These fish have an ...
Unavailability
I apologize to any of my two or three readers that brainwagon.org (and telescopemaking.org) may have been unavailable for the last few days. I’ve had ...
Very old puzzle solved
Bill Cutler, a rather famous puzzle guy has finally found all unique solutions to The Loculus of Archimedes . I rather like puzzles of all ...
Weblogging software in Python
I wrote a weblog system in Python by stealing some ideas from blosxom . Today I found a great list of Python Software for Weblogs ...
Pot Pourri
I spent the weekend in the company of other individuals of like (and considerably different) mind, and thought I’d provide some links to some interesting ...
Don’t double down on hard 20…
This weeks whim book purchase was [Amazon.com: Books: Bringing Down the House : The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions][1]. ...
The Domain of the Public
This week has been dominated by pondering of the public domain. I ordered a book from nolo.com written by attorney Steven Fishman entitled The Public ...
Robots from VIA motherboards
Today’s Slashdot extravaganza sent me to deviceforge.com for a robot design using Via’s Mini-ITX motherboards. Thse motherboards are very capable and about 7″ square, they ...
Shake, Rattle and Roll
Well, it’s 8:40 or so in the morning on Sunday, and I’m surfing to the USGS realtime earthquake website to see if the jolt I ...
Playoffs, A’s Style
What can I say, Boston over Oakland, 4-3 in game 5. ...
The Recall
I hate politics. It’s mostly about the hypocrisy. I’ve been trying to ignore the recall news for the most part, but every once in awhile ...
Game of the Year — Oakland 5, Boston 4 in 12
I love baseball, and this is the time of year that baseball is the most fun (except of course for the impending end fo the ...
OldFlash: Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot
Okay, this isn’t really news. Rush Limbaugh is an idiot. If you don’t know that by now, you’re probably an even bigger idiot. I’ve lately ...
New Ebay Booty
Recently I’ve been trying to establish better wireless networking in my house, and toward that end I purchased a couple of books on wireless networking. ...
Parody or not?
There is a saying on USENET: any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from real stupidity. (You could try looking at Korpela’s Laws of USENET for ...
Earthquake!
While at work late, I felt a pretty good jolt, which marked the arrival of yet another of California’s exciting pastimes: the regular Hayward fault ...
A simple Icecast2 client…
While experimenting with Icecast2 , I tried out the ices client. It very nicely handles either live or precompressed streams, and can provide audio encoded ...
War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast
After finding an mp3 of the original War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater broadcast, I decided to try to experiment a ...
Watch the skies!
Today Mars is as close as its been in recorded history, the closest opposition in something like 80,000 years. If you try to go to ...
SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers
I didn’t attend this year’s SIGGRAPH, so I was pleased to find the following link to the SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers online. Perhaps the time for ...
CGI Map Generator…
While mucking around some more with maps, I encountered a somewhat useful website at the Census Bureau that can be used to draw maps from ...
Mapping for Free
While mucking around with my GPS, I immediately thought about providing my own map capability. The question immediately arose: where can I get street level ...
GPS programming in Python
I just recently bought a new laptop, and on a total spur of the moment bought a Delorme Earthmate GPS to go along with it. ...
Music on the PDP-1
A couple of years ago, Tom Duff approached me with the notion that he was going to write a simulator for the ancient PDP-1 so ...
RC-Cam Website
RC-CAM: Amazing R/C model video system seems to have some interesting information about using video cameras aboard radio controlled models. ...
Another try for a trans-Atlantic model airpline flight…
Last year a group tried to fly an 11 lb model airplane accross the Atlantic. In four attempt, they managed a maximum distance of 479 ...
Nifty Bootable CD
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered two projects which both boot from CD, don’t install anything on the PC, and provide interesting functionality. ...
Gigli — A Movie Review
I’m a huge fan of what reasonably called "bad cinema". I go to see the terrible comedies, the action films, horror movies, what most serious ...
It’s easier to destroy than to build…
Occasionally I’m struck by the apparent oddness of people’s behavior. High on my list of pet peeves are people who go out of their way ...
Holy Rat Brains, Batman!
Today, the BBC is running an article entitled [Rat-brained robot does distant art][1]. The idea is that a collection of 50,000 rat neurons in a ...
Happy Birthday to BrainWagon!
As is typical of males, I forgot a birthday! As of July 21, [BrainWagon][1] celebrated it’s one year anniversary. Huzzah! Let the kegs of ale ...
Quine in Python
I’ve been trying to hone my Python skills. Python has lots of nice commands for manipulating text, including standard libraries for doing base64 encoding. After ...
More cool IR stuff…
I’ve been experimenting with digital photography using my Nikon 4500, and have took some kind of cool pictures. The palm on the right was shot ...
Keeping an eye on Mars…
As Mars approaches its closest opposition in something like 80,000 years, [International MarsWatch][1] is a great website to track for the latest images and information ...
Shuttle Musings…
Today, [ Slashdot][1] is reporting that the [ BBC][2] has announced that recent investigation of the Columbia disaster has shown that the foam that blew ...
Useful Link for Nikon 4500 Manual Focussing…
Nikon 4500 Manual Focus Calibration Chart & Depth of Field is a link to a very nice chart to help with manual focussing on the ...
Je suis en vacance!
Je suis en vacance au Paris, mais je vais aller chez moi souvent. A toute a l’heure! P.S. You can get your slashdot fix for ...
Experiments with Webware
I’ve toyed with the idea of writing my own weblog, and toward that end have been playing a bit with Python and the Webware application ...
When in Crete, do as the other Cretins do…
It’s amazing how sometimes surfing leads you to interesting ideas that you’ve never had before. Like the mention of slashdot of pykrete , a combination ...
Fun with PyEphem…
I’ve been trying to tune up some of my telescopes for the upcoming Mars event. In late August, Mars will be closer to the earth ...
Finding Nemo released
Well, it’s that time again, I’ve got another production credit on another movie. Pixar is releasing _Finding Nemo_, starring a young clownfish named Nemo and ...
Narrowband Television
The problem with the web is that sometimes you hit a website that drags you off into a direction completely unrelated to anything you’ve really ...
Moon picture…
Well, I didn’t try to take any pictures of the lunar eclipse, but I did try to take a picture of the post-full moon using ...
Cool Photography Link
Digital Photography For What It’s Worth is a great webpage with many terrific hints for the digital photographer, including a rather interesting page on infrared ...
More fun with fingerprints
I have to admit that I’m a pretty big fan of CSI . Not the crappy new CSI: Miami , but the original one. It ...
Fun with Fingerprint Readers
Bruce Schneier is the author of Applied Cryptography , the incredibly useful encylopedia of modern cryptographic algorithms. He also publishes the Cryptogram, an electronic bulletin ...
phlog — a photo weblog
Since Carmen and I both just got new digital cameras, we are taking a lot more photos and Carmen wanted me to create a simple ...
More Panoramas…
I love the new Nikon, and have had some fun playing around with it. I used Panorama Factory to stitch together 11 images to construct ...
Improved Camera Manual
CK’s Digital Camera Page has a really nice set of manuals for certain Nikon cameras, including my new Nikon 4500. ...
New Digital Camera
I’m planning an anniversary trip to Paris with the missus, and decided that it was time to retire our aging Kodak 210+ camera and buy ...
What to wget…
SuperDeluxo4 wgets and curls is a nifty site which logs interesting things that you can do with the command line tools wget and curl . ...
Audio compression compared…
I’ve been interested in compression technology of all kinds for what seems like forever. Saturday I did some informal testing of the Ogg Vorbis codec, ...
It’s a Small, Stick Figure World…
When I was probably eight or ten years old, I remember going to the Book Vault, our local bookstore and seeing [Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: ...
Mpeg Mandelbrot Madness
Well, I was working on some software to do panoramic image stitching over the weekend. Several hours of work yielded some phase correlation code that ...
Panoramic Images
I’ve been interested in using digital cameras to capture panoramas, and yesterday I had my cheapy $50 digital camera with me, so I shot 19 ...
Reinventing the weblog wheel
I’m fairly happy with Movable Type , but I am constantly on the lookout for new weblogging software. During one of my surf sessions, I ...
What’s next, the Humongous squid?
The BBC is announcing the discovery of a squid thought to be larger than any discovered so far. The so-called giant squid or Architeuthis dux ...
Building a Panoramic Camera
A Panoramic Camera is a terrific webpage by Giorgio Carboni. The rest of his website is awsome too, and includes many nifty science projects. His ...
Master link list on cheap imaging for amateur astronomy
Low light CCD Camera Data is just an awesome collection of links. I modified a supercircuits camera to have manual gain control, but now some ...
Journalist fired for altering photo…
Los Angeles Times – Editor’s Note details the dismissal of Brian Walksi, former photographer for the LA Times. He produced an altered photograph of a ...
Still more DJVU
I’ve scanned and created another document, an article from the Gleanings for the ATM column that ran for years in the magazine Sky and Telescope. ...
More experiments with djvu
I did a bit more research on djvu, and have done some more experiments. Long ago, I rescued a huge number of old Scientific American ...
From the Hackers mailing list…
“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple ...
DaVinci and the Splendor of Poland
Carmen and I went to the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco today to get away from the war news coming out of Iraq ...
View of SF from the Marin Headlands
After our day of enjoying fine art, we decided to go out and get some delicious Thai food from Thai Spice which is located just ...
Postcards from Japan
Bill and Anne were nice enough to send me this spiffy postcard from Japan. Mmm. Sushi. ...
Scanning and Archival
I have a bunch of papers that are not valuable, but are rare and hard to find. Some I have only as faded Xeroxes, such ...
Seven Signs of Bogus Science
I recently spotted this article on the subject of spotting bogus science. It’s enormously easy to be hoodwinked by science, and these seven rules can ...
Shockwave
Just for kicks, I tried creating a simple shockwave animation. <tr> <td> <embed src="https://brainwagon.org/files/bw.swf" width="234" height="30"> </td> </tr> </table> <p> I generated this with <a ...
FPGA Miscelleny
This is just a potpourri of FPGA related items. I’m fairly interested in hardware design (although have not really done very much of it). I’ve ...
OLED displays…
The new up and coming display technology is Organic Light Emitting Diodes, or OLED displays. OLEDs will be cheaper to manufacture, have a much faster ...
What are they teaching our children?
{.alignright} Allrighty, I know, if I am going to get irritated by the ignorance of human beings, I shouldn’t read Slashdot . A recent article ...
Bizarre Fish
I love to watch nature documentaries and the like on PBS, but most of them go over information that has been rehashed a million times. ...
Listen to the engineers…
CNN is running a story today entitled [CNN.com – Shuttle engineers warned of burning wing – Feb. 27, 2003][1]. It appears that serious doubts about ...
The Music Industry
I was reading a Slashdot article this morning entitled A Music Industry Case Study , and was suddenly struck by the apparent absurdity of the ...
Space Object Identified!
In a previous article , I posted pictures taken by my friend Phil of the Orion Nebula and hypothesized that they were of a geosynchronous ...
Bird Pictures
Carmen noticed some interesting raptors perched on our back fence and asked me where my binoculars were. I have a pair of nice Celestron 7×50 ...
Smoke Detector Can Save Your Life!
Some things you just don’t think about until they save your life. On Valentine’s Day my wife and I were awoken at 3:30 by our ...
Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!
On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin was born. I think a strong argument could be made that Darwin is the most influential scientist of all ...
It’s important to have an opinion…
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that most people believe that it is more important to have an immediate and distinct opinion rather than an ...
nntp//rss
I like to peruse sweetcode , a very nice website that contains pointers to interesting but perhaps not very well known software projects. During a ...
Behind the Curtain of Java
INTERNALMEMOS.COM has a nifty article written by a colleciton of Sun Software engineers about the inappropriateness of Java on the Solaris platform. I think it ...
Man vs. Machine
Kasparov fights to a draw in a six game match against Deep Junior. I’m not a very good chess player myself, but I spent a ...
Strange Space Objects
{.alignright} {.alignright} My friend Phil sent me these pictures he took using a Canon D60 through a small wide angle telescope. He sent me these ...
Shuttle Columbia Lost over Central Texas
I woke up around 8:30 Pacific Time today, and flipped on the television to watch my usual lineup of Looney Tunes cartoons to start my ...
Noah’s Ark Found!
I am fascinated by pseudoscience, creationism and all sorts of other leger de brain that people engage in. Occasionally I end run accross websites that ...
Ark of the Covenent Found!
I am fascinated by pseudoscience, creationism and all sorts of other leger de brain that people engage in. Occasionally I end run accross websites that ...
Ouch!
You think your day is bad, be glad that you aren’t a crab. Don’t watch this if you are squeamish or feel particularly kindly towards ...
Motherboard Monitoring
Modern motherboards kick ass. They have all sorts of temperature sensors that can tell you what the current temperatures, fans and voltages are. I’ve had ...
Robot Sumo
{.alignright} I stopped by Barnes & Noble on the way home the other day, and was bemused by a couple of books, including this one ...
Cryptography Potpourri
I’ve also maintained a bit of an amateur interest in cryptography. While I understand a bit about modern ciphers such as DES, IDEAL and RC4, ...
Mantaining a Robotic Sense of Balance…
I’ve always been interested in robotics (particularly of the amateur variety) and in the past few days I’ve discovered some excellent links. Slashdot ran an ...
Oops, did the decision of Eldred v. Ashcroft open a new legal challenge to the DMCA?
Jack Balkin , a scholar on First Amendment issues presents some really interesting criticism of the majority opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft that may frame ...
Thanks Larry!
A great post-mortem of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision is going on Lawrence Lessig’s weblog. I’ve decided to add it to my newsfeeds on the ...
Cool code…
While searching for some information about Duff’s device, I ran aground on The Apocrypha , a collection of interesting code including Duff’s device and emulating ...
Dark Day for the Public
The story is just now breaking that the Supreme Court has upheld the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act as constitutional in a 7-2 decision. I ...
Hello, my name is Mark
I admit it. I have a hard time with names. Actually, that isn’t true. I actually memorize names fairly well. The only problem is that ...
New Time Radio
Every once in a while I have a chain of thoughts that connects seemingly unrelated things together into a new set of ideas. One of ...
A gift from the public domain…
While surfing around for Christmas ideas, I landed upon a link to L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz ) and his classic ...
The Evil Film/Music/Media Conglomerate
While reading slashdot, you can’t escape the rants like this about the evils of the MPAA and RIAA. People respond in great numbers to postings ...
Cool Panoramic Images of Hong Kong
Dan Lyke apparently visited Hong Kong recently, and took some very nice pictures of the skyline at night. His panorama is very nice indeed, shot ...
More on copyright
Lawrence Lessig has another nice short opinion piece entitled Racing Against Time . If you’ve followed Lessig’s crusade against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension ...
High Speed Photographs
I can always rely on Craig to send out interesting links having to do with guns, airplanes or just destruction. SUDDEN IMPACT !, From AMMOMAN.COM ...
Fun with environment maps
I’ve been goofing around a bit with trying to acquire environment maps from real environments for use in computer graphics. The usual method (quite old, ...
Happy Thanksgiving!
Well, as I place the sage and thyme stuffed bird into a toasty oven, I am reminded that it is Thanksgiving and that I have ...
King Tut’s Tomb
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb by Carter and Canarvan in the Valley of the Kings. I’ve been ...
Weblog of the century…
Somebody at work presented a link to this site because it contained a review of the new Monsters Inc. DVD, but it turns out to ...
Back from the dead…
Slashdot | Bringing Back the PDP8 relates the efforts of Andrew Grillet and his attempt to make a PDP8 clone using FPGA chips. I’m virtually ...
New RSS Feeds
In an afternoon of goofing around, I added some RSS feeds to my website. Check them out on the right. ...
Faster isn’t always better
It’s been about a year since I put together my last computer, a small system based upon Shuttle’s SpaceWalker SV24 motherboard and case. In most ...
If ignorance is bliss, they must be very happy…
One of my personal pet peeves is creationism: the bastard child of bad theology and bad science. I’m pretty familiar with most of their silly ...
I wonder…
I was reading memepool today, and they had an article on Dr. Michael Kelly, a guy who sells video tapes purporting to teach martial arts ...
Leonids returning
Last year I carted my wife and son out to view the Leonic meteor shower, and we were blessed with a pretty spectacular show. I ...
Aliens fly among us!
Try checking out overflight.com for instructions on how to build a fire balloon that will likely trigger widespread reports of UFO invasions in the local ...
How to combat copy protection measures…
Today BMG announced that they are going to stop producing CDs. Instead, they are going to produce specially encrypted CDs which have had problems in ...
Cheap DVD players
As part of my preparation for the Hackers conference, I decided to use open source software to make a nice presentation, and instead of presenting ...
On disappointment….
Well, the World Series is over. _ Sigh. _ The Giants had their opportunities. Saturday’s game was in the bag. And then it wasn’t. And ...
On the Public Domain…
I was toying around with GNU vcdimager this week, trying to make some nice interactive video CDs. I was looking for some video footage in ...
Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Slashdot is currently running a thread under the rather sensationalistic title The End of Minix . It declares that since the XFree86 project has decided ...
The Giants Win the Pennant!
After the Giants came from behind to beat the Cardinals on Sunday in a brilliant and exciting game, my wife decided that we needed to ...
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Since my wife has endured so many of the movies that I wanted to see (mostly having the words ninja , vampire or cheerleader in ...
Eldred vs. Ashcroft Oral Arguments Heard
Today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Eldred vs. Ashcroft , a challenge of the Constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright ...
Small OS for Small Media?
While tinkering around the house the other day, I remembered that my wife’s old laptop had suffered some kind of win98 related meltdown (it claimed ...
Wooden Periodic Table Table
Thanks to Wayne Wooten, who sent me to this Ig Nobel prize winner . Surprisingly decorative and informative! ...
Hack of the Day — ASCII television
While killing an extra few minutes waiting for my wife to pick me up for the ballgame lastnight, I was surfing the web and found ...
Legal Liability for Software Defects
ZDNet UK is currently running a story about the comments made by Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer about Microsoft. This provoked the usual backlash of anti-Microsoft ...
Welcome Back!
A long lost booster section from Apollo 12 has apparently reentered Earth orbit, for the time being at least. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has ...
Are Massively Multiplayer Games a Good Idea?
I was reading an article on slashdot that announced that OSI (presumably the company that administers Ultima Online) would begin to offer advanced characters for ...
Goofing around with pygame
I was trying to decide on the easiest way to make a graphical user interface for the Scarne’s Challenge puzzle game that I’ve been experimenting ...
AES Broken?
I subscribe to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter, because I have mostly passing interest in things having to do with cryptography. Today’s included a rather startling ...
Nice Biology Site
I read talk.origins quite a bit. It is mostly a grand waste of time, but I like to read about the topic of evolution and ...
Zounds! Sounds!
While browsing through sweetcode’s archives I found an interesting link to Andrew Plotkin’s program boodler . Boodler is a soundscape generation tool written in Python. ...
Do something good!
Recently I experienced something new: the excitement of rushing my wife to the emergency room for stitches. She slipped while hiking and gashed her arm ...
Awari Solved
The University of Alberta has a very cool group that does research into gameplay. Recently they solved Awari , a very old game that is ...
Alphabet Soup
While surfing around on sweetcode today I found a link to a project called Alphabet Soup , a wacky project by Matt Chisolm that attempts ...
The Tower of Babel
I’ve been working a bit more on my weblog over the past few days, trying to clean up and remodularize the templates that I’ve been ...
The Oakland Athletics
Damn. I love baseball. It didn’t use to be that way. I found baseball to be rather dry and slow paced and not very interesting. ...
Bad Science
I originally created several topics for this website to classify various types of Science. These included Science , Mad Science and Bad Science . Today, ...
Update: Scarne’s Challenge
After running all night, I can assert with confidence that there are no paths of length 71 or less. I’m obviously not going to get ...
Surprise, Success!
My exhaustive testing indicated that the shortest path to the goal position in Scarne’s challenge was at least 71 moves long. I relaxed the criteria ...
First try at Scarne’s Challenge
After a couple more hours of typing, I managed to get a start on Scarne’s Challenge. I’ve got a simple version of IDA* with transposition ...
On cycles in Scarne’s Challenge
You can swap two pieces in place in Scarne’s challenge, but not in the normal 8 or 15 puzzles. This is because there are no ...
On search…
Well, I decided to start my exploration of the Scarne’s challenge by writing a simpler program to test out my recollection of how the A* ...
Scarne’s Challenge
At the Hacker’s picnic the other day, Bill Ragsdale was trying to drum up interest in participating in writing computer players for Scarne’s Challenge, a ...
Revamp in Progress
Excuse our dust. Eric Meyer’s book on cascading style sheets made me rethink the strategy and design of my website, and it will probably take ...
Why is being a programmer so difficult?
Just like the talking Barbie who drew the ire of feminists everywhere by claiming that "Math is hard", I find myself asking more and more ...
Eric Meyer on CSS
I just picked up a copy of a new book on Cascading Style sheets by Eric Meyer. He’s a wizard of all things having to ...
Threats to Open Source Software…
Open source software owes its existence to the convergence of three technologies: Fast, cheap computer hardware Fast, cheap networking Cheap compilers Inexpensive PC hardware provides ...
Say Goodbye to Microsoft Webfonts?
I love twiddling around with fonts, but let’s face it: most of them completely suck, especially for display on screens and in web browser. Without ...
LinuxWorld Expo
I had no meetings scheduled for the afternoon, so I decided to trek into San Francisco and attend the Linux World Expo . I was ...
An Essay on Typography
Recently I’ve become rather interested in the topic of the design and printing of books. It seems that many modern books are incredibly poorly designed ...
Two Down, Two Left
In an earlier story I mentioned the project to fly a model airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. So far they have managed to lose two ...
Image Mosaics
Yesterday I set my webcam grabbing images from television. I made some modifications to the frame grabber to archive time stamped versions of each image. ...
Will CGI Collapse the Hollywood Economy?
I have a love/hate relationship with Slashdot . They do occasionally point me at interesting stories, some of which I shamelessly swipe for this site. ...
My Webcam
I decided to dust off some of the old webcam software I wrote years ago and merge it into my home page. Right now it ...
Why, Oh Why Aren’t Web Standards Standard?
I think that creating content for the web is incredibly tedious. Sometimes it is hard because you don’t have anything good to write about. Sometimes ...
Trans-Atlantic Model Airplane
National Geographic reports that a group of model airplane builders are about to attempt the first transatlantic crossing with a true model airplane. A model ...
Founding of Brain Wagon University
I was goofing around with PostScript some more, and the idea of making some fancy certificates or diplomas got into my head. But what good ...
Primality Testing is in P
RSA encryption relies on being able to find large primes. For quite some time, the Miller-Rabin test has been known to be able to determine ...
Office Toys
I like to have toys in my office. I like puzzles and gadgets, cool lights and just weird stuff in general. I’ve got got a ...
Amateur CCD Imaging
I’ve been interested in CCD imaging for quite some time, but haven’t had the scope + budget to really get involved. Nonetheless, I monitor a ...
Gert’s Astronomy Page
Often I donate my Friday evenings to teach telescope making at the Chabot Science Center. Gert Gottschalk often shows up to participate, and he reminded ...
The Amateur Scientist
When I was a young, I used to spend a great deal of time at our local library, which was within two blocks of my ...
P.S. Postscript is handy…
Most people probably just think of Postscript as being that stuff that lives in your printer. I am probably one of the one in a ...
Knock off that bloody racket!
CNN is reporting on a Thai computer programmer who is selling a computer program that is supposed to repel mosquitos and rats. The program supposedly ...
All for the sake of science…
Sometimes you hit the motherlode of strange when you are just randomly surfing. I revisited Bill Beaty’s Amateur Science Page. It’s a great site, with ...
DIY Metalworking
As part of my experiments with telescope making, I’ve been exposed through the efforts of some of my friends to the world of metalworking. i ...
Intelligent Design
Recently the topic of intelligent design has been getting quite a bit of play in the media. Proponents of intelligent design claim that the evidence ...
If the Dow Jones doesn’t worry you enough…
If you are looking for mostly irrational things to worry about, you could always worry about asteroid impacts. CNN is running a story about a ...
VLF Radio
An interesting portion of the radio spectrum lies below the normal AM broadcast band. Amateurs are allowed to operate weak transmitters in the region of ...
Takes a licking…
Just like the Energizer Bunny, many of our early space probes seem to be ticking along way past their original lifetime estimates. According to an ...
Rare Earth
One of the most important and interesting question that science can ask is whether or not life exists elsewhere in the universe. The recent book ...
Welcome
I created this weblog mainly to serve as an outlet for the many myriad topics that my job, family and interests thrust into my brain ...