brainwagon

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 about puppet making, watching puppet making videos, and scouring the web for inspiration and guidance. To date, I’ve only completed one puppet (his name is Gerfil, and he may still […]

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 perfboard, added a couple of switching transistors (2N3904s) to power the LEDs, and built a small 7805 regulator (which doesn’t yet have any filter caps, I’ll get to that). But, […]

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 paltry $.99 (if you used your CVS discount card). That was simply too much to resist, so I got a couple of strings, and thought that I would use them […]

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

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 sounds produced by this thing to actually be pretty darned interesting. It might be fun to build one of these and work on your own soundtrack for Return to the […]

Haven’t had much of this lately for Tom, so here’s an amusing musical interlude.

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 program itself is rather unremarkable, but I still thought it was kind of cute. [tags]Lego,Fractal,Mandelbrot,PostScript[/tags]

Want some cute animal pictures?  Try checking out this minor gem: Animal Children by Edith Brown Kirkwood from Project Gutenberg.   It’s got lots of really strange pictures that look like conventional animal pictures cut up and then clothing drawn around them.  Strange stuff, but oddly kind of fun too, might be fun for a kid’s […]

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, every geek in the universe likes Legos, and a couple of years back I made an aborted stab at learning something about Mayan hieroglyphics.   I didn’t think I’d find a […]

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. [tags]Nuclear Explosion, Art, Navy, Bikini Atoll[/tags] Addendum: I bet I would have gotten more traffic to my website if I used the tag Bikini instead of Bikini Atoll.

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]

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 cats while he was away. Very cute.

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 they used a button maker to generate one. So did I. Feel free to download it, and use it to link back to me. 🙂

Another cool project linked from Make: HOW TO make DVD Panoramas. The idea is simple: find a DVD that has some panning panoramic shot, dump bitmaps of a bunch of shots, and stitch them together with your favorite panorama software. I particularly liked this one. Grunka lunka dunkity-gredient You should not ask about the secret […]

Need a kooky craft project for geeks? Look no further than Project Cryo, a spiffy mod to your mouse to… well… go have a look.