brainwagon

Every once in a while, you encounter a person who collects something truly odd. This guy has a website dedicated to the insulators that are used on telegraph poles along British railways. That’s… just… Wow. How niche can you get? Teleramics – Insulator collecting UK

The new WordPress 2.1 Ella was released about 17 hours ago, and since this coincided with a few minutes of boredom, I upgraded. Check out the link for details on what’s improved: most notable to me is that it does appear to be significantly faster. I noted a couple of strange things though: the “Press […]

When I was probably ten or twelve years old, I remember that the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott somehow came to my attention, probably through something related to Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations column in Scientific American. It is an interesting book that tries to present an easy-to-understand example of how we might visualize four dimensional […]

We woke up and got in line for the Best Buy in hopes that we might get a Wii. They had fifty. We were fifty second in line. Sigh. [tags]Nintendo,Wii,Disappointment[/tags]

I’ve mentioned it before: when you are interested in as many strange things as I am, web surfing can be dangerous to your time. Lately I’ve been going through my blogroll with two purposes in mind: Delete the stuff that I don’t read anymore, or consider boring. Tag the remaining links with slightly more meaningful […]

Let’s face it: I’m not Canadian, so I don’t really care about hockey. But still, I found the following story to be both amusing and thought provoking, and i suspect that similar situations can occur in baseball (a sport that non-Canadians enjoy) so I’ll comment briefly. All-Star games are odd things because they take place […]

During a stop to the new Coppola winery in Healdsburg, I noticed that they had a kit for a pinhole camera on sale for a mere $4.99. I’ve goofed around with pinhole photography a bit before, so the allure was too much to resist. A couple of hours later, I had the camera on the […]

You only need to make one mistake when it snows in Portland: that’s trying to drive at all. Here’s a clue: walk to your car. If you can push it sideways away from the curb, you shouldn’t attempt to drive it. Just stay wherever you are at. If you do decide to venture out, at […]

This took me a few minutes, but I figured it out, and archived it here so I wouldn’t need to spend that time again. mplayer -cache 128 -tv driver=v4l:width=640:height=480:outfmt=i420 -vc rawi420 -vo xv tv:// It works. [tags]My Projects,Webcam,Mplayer[/tags] Addendum: You can specify which video device by adding it to the tv options: mplayer -cache 128 […]

It’s sometimes odd to think of the ways that the eddies and currents buffet you around while reading on the Internet. Frequently, you encounter odd bits that resonate with stuff you have seen before. On such current lead me to return to a topic which I’ve dabbled in from time to time: gravitational n-body simulation. […]

When I dropped into Tom’s office earlier today, he mentioned that he had found a copy of Albrecht Durer’s Of the Just Shaping of Letters available as a printable PDF. This version was scanned from the 1969 Dover reprint of the 1917 edition which is in the public domain. Cool! A bit of googling turned […]

I should have mentioned this before, but in case anyone didn’t know, there’s been a naked eye comet visible in the west as the sun is setting (at least, for people in the northern hemisphere), and for the last couple of nights, I’ve had binoculars out and let my fellow Pixarians have a glimpse at […]

Another link stashed away for safe keeping: A Paint-Brush Laser Range Scanner It’s really quite clever in the way it uses a double frame to provide a reference coordinate system and allow for free motion of the camera and the laser.

Despite having done quite a bit of computer graphics over the years (even getting paid to do it), I haven’t really done much in the way of computer vision. I’m currently trying to work on a project for the upcoming Maker’s Faire that has something to do with computer vision (he says slyly, teasing his […]

Just thought I’d stash a reference to this paper on low cost motion capture. It uses two webcams to track the lower half of someone’s body. Just keeping this for inspiration in a related project.