brainwagon

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 callsign W0OTM-4. We saw it drift up to an altitude of about 88K feet, before descending. They had a 20m beacon, an APRS beacon running on 2m, and a cellular […]

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 as just trying to find out how complete the coverage is here in the Bay Area. For this test, I first modified the APRS symbol to stop being the balloon […]

Over a year ago, I blogged that I had assembled a bit of amateur radio gear, the OpenTracker+. This little gadget has a couple of DB-9 ports on it. The first is used to connect to a GPS, and the other to a radio, such as my Kenwood TH-D7A. Together, they form a tracker: the […]

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 decided to just make a picture of the random bits generated when I generated two 50 digit primes. Without further ado, or explanation, check it: There do indeed seem to […]

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 on it in years. Rather than just continuing to maintain the aging content, I’d like to pass the domain off to someone who might make better use of it. Are […]

Today is the eighth anniversary of my blog. Post #3428. Happy Birthday to brainwagon!

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 to be baseball. But Ed Felton has a rather nice essay about not just why soccer is the way it is, but why any tweaking of the rules to more […]

Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo.

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, I bought an old Zeiss Jena laboratory microscope at a swap meet for (if memory serves) around $50. It’s a very nice, heavy microscope and included a pair of Zeiss […]

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 courtesy of the Internet Wayback machine if you like) and found an old chunk of code that I had archived that was written by Danny O’Brien based upon an idea […]

If you have a browser that supports the HTML5 geolocation facilities (such as Mobile Safari on the iPhone, or certain recent versions of Firefox) then you can try clicking on the following link to find out your Maidenhead grid square. It may not remain there forever, since it is just hosted on my machine, but […]

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 On2 earlier this year as a royalty-free open alternative to other video codecs. This isn’t of much use right now to end users, but hopefully this will result in a […]

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 “Google Font API” for more information. Or you could merely click this link.

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 at some of the fun you can have when you combine it with ImageMagick. How to layer/remix videos with free command line tools « The Broadcaster Project.

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, and isn’t really likely to calm down until summer is well underway, but I am still reading. Today’s posting was inspired by a posting over on G4ILO’s blog: G4ILO’s Blog: […]