brainwagon

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, a stupendously fast version. Using hashing, it can run patterns for 1060 steps in just a few seconds. Amazing.

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 I remember writing was a version of Conway’s Life that would run on my Atari 400 computer (very slowly I might add). But I’ve also been intrigued by a very […]

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 significantly over voltage, but still, pretty amazing. They just didn’t let the magic smoke out, they literally destroyed the chip. The most daunting challenge facing computing isn’t speeding up computers, it’s […]

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 Photography Link Roundup. I’ve linked to some of the articles listed before, since I’m generally interested in the topic, but there are some new bits here too. Good stuff.

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 put on the device to increase its capabilities in a number of innovative directions. The most recent versions of these devices are somewhat less hackable though. The series 5 devices […]

Matt Blaze and company have a new paper just out entitled Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems, which details a number of problems with the methods and equipment normally used by law enforcement to tap phone equipment. These include vulnerabilities that allow the surveilled party to make it appear to call numbers other than the one […]

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. This link hit our photography mailing list yesterday, and I spent some time reading it. It’s really quite clever. Basically it uses the microlens array to serve as thousands of […]

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 serial number with a grid of yellow dots which appear in the printout. Presumably these codes are inserted to make the job of the Secret Service simpler in tracking their […]

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 that you have an example of a program which worked well, despite the development process being completely broken? It just doesn’t happen. The article that Scoble quoted quoted Microsoft VP […]

Well, above is a screendump of my latest computer acquisition: a Microvax 3800 which I installed NetBSD on. Wackiness! What’s even more wacky is that it didn’t cost me a cent. Well, maybe that isn’t so wacky, after all, would you pay money for a Microvax? 🙂 Basically, I’ve been on a bit of a […]

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 links to fairly nice sound samples, at least if you go in for that classic, 8-bit style sound.

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 FPGA based CPU designs. Mostly marked as a bookmark to re-examine later.

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 download of video. What is even better, he snapped video of the project and made it available for download. Caveat: it appears to be encoded in some kind of Quicktime […]

Leo has shamed us all by writing up a webpage detailing all the things he found interesting at SIGGRAPH 2005. Very nice.

This is mostly just a reminder to myself to look on the Applied Geometry homepage for these course notes on Discrete Differential Geometry.