brainwagon

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, you get: 0 5 2 6 3 1 5 7 8 9 4 7 3 6 8 4 2 1 | 81 1 0 5 2 6 3 1 5 […]

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 many microcontrollers to access peripheral devices using only a couple of wires. This hack notes that most modern graphics cards communicate with monitors in a similar way using a technology […]

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 fun. QR-Code Generator

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 Samuel’s checker playing program and Robert Nealy. Samuel’s program managed to beat Nealy, who advertised himself as a master, but in fact he makes a number of rather questionable (I’m […]

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 that I started a couple of years ago, but which I abandoned because I felt that it hid some obscure bug. Today, I tried adding some additional code to determine […]

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 also has all sorts of other interesting links, to things like heliographs or mechanical computers. Worth mining for more info. The Museum of RetroTechnology

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 article called “You’ll Own Robot Slaves by 1965!” which I remember making me think “Heck, it’s 1970, where is my robot slave?” Okay, heck, I was six. But oddly enough, […]

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 attempts to make it work. I dusted it off, and was reminded about its many shortcomings. Perhaps some day I’ll fix it. But I did dust off a checkers font […]

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 a tantalizing link. Generating trigonometric tables – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Practical Fast Polynomial Multiplication

Here’s another of those home built cpus that I find fascinating. Big Mess o’ Wires Check out the crazy wire wrapping.

“When a proposition is ludicrous enough, we lend it undeserved credibility when we respond too politely.” — Robert M. Price

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 computers. They are often praised for being clever and short. They seemed to start back during the time of the Commodore 64 and other 8 bit computers. But check out […]

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, nothing doing. Still, I got WB6YTE (whom I’ve worked before) and N7JK (who I don’t think I’ve worked before). Considering the low pass, my hand held arrow, low power and […]

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 columns in Scientific American. As a grade school student, I remember reading these columns and through them, discovering for the first time the actual excitement of mathematics. It’s hard to […]