brainwagon

YouTube – Youscope (oscilloscope demo) Awesome.

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 below: SPACE.com — Viewer’s Guide: Tuesday Morning’s Lunar Eclipse [tags]Astronomy,Lunar Eclipse[/tags]

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 in predicting satellite orbits. While I’ll probably never use this, the code that everyone uses are derived from the original FORTRAN code, generally referred to as the NORAD SGP4 and […]

The latest version of Google Earth has a mode where you can view objects in the sky as well. Very neat! Viewing the Sky – Google Earth User Guide [tags]Astronomy,Google Earth[/tags]

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 Pamplona for San Fermin this year. I had a press pass, to shoot pictures of the running of the bulls from the fence. I figured there’s plenty of sharp pictures […]

All I’ve got to saw is awesome. Decades of NASA photos, video coming to the Web | Tech news blog – CNET News.com The space agency and the Internet Archive said Tuesday that they plan to scan and archive more than 12 million NASA photographs and 100,000 hours of film and video footage for free […]

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 bit of a ham radio kick. I noticed that my license had lapsed, and so I renewed and then felt like doing some monitoring of the local repeater action. But […]

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 covering the landing of Endeavor. Endeavor was forced to return to earth a day early because of fears that hurricane Dean would affect flight operations at Mission Control in Texas. […]

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 where this radio was considered innovative, but crystal radios are still pretty amazing little bits of electronic fun to hack together with kids. Winding coils, tickling crystals of galena… good […]

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. It turns out that it is Omicron Ceti, a red giant star approximately 418 light years away in the souther constellation Cetus (the Whale). It is also a well known […]

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 cave, and the article includes a lot of interesting information and pictures about the real cave. Very neat! I’ve skimmed it, and will try to read it more in depth […]

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 10ghz microwave emitter. Here’s some details (I might add a few more links later, but this should get you started): Hacking the Hot Wheels Radar Gun [tags]Hacking,Hot Wheels,Microwave,10ghz[/tags]

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 around 15 minutes to see if I could spot some of the peaking Perseid meteors.  My score was: three fast moving bright Perseids 13 planes one polar  orbiting satellite hints […]

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 see it, this might be the last weekend. I know it is pretty late in the run, so a review is pointless (if you haven’t seen it already, you probably […]

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 relative position of two receivers to a very high degree of accuracy, but didn’t know the details. Here’s one method that appears to have popped up in my brief research, […]