brainwagon

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has begun its mission around the moon, and has managed to image most of the Apollo landing sites. Check out the following link: NASA – LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites.

I was up on the hill behind my house, moving a little antenna that I have, and was immediately struck by how blazing it was. Now that I am back inside, relaxing with the laptop, I did what every geek would: surf over to weather.com to find out how hot it was. This is what […]

I was tinkering. Wrote some code to low pass and downfilter a 48khz audio signal to only 8khz. Here’s some example output. It filters out audio above 2.7khz or so, and then downsamples to 8khz. The audio is just some test of Holst’s Mars, just meant to test. #include <stdio.h> #include <sndfile.h> #define NTAPS (55) […]

Last week, Google announced that they were developing an OS, originally targeted toward netbooks. I think it is a great idea. If there is one lesson that our cell phones are teaching us is that we want Internet connectivity, video and audio on our devices, and that we pay a huge tax in performance and […]

Well, everyone in the area seems to have blogged or facebooked this already, but here’s my view. We were heading out for some last mnute shopping around 8:00PM on Saturday, and encountered a beautiful, vibrant double rainbow opposite the setting sun. The iPhone video doesn’t really do it justice, but it was pretty awesome looking: […]

A topic which interests me greatly is the idea of sustainable housing, especially durable housing that can be constructed by relatively unskilled labor using readily available local materials. Courtesy of the Maker’s blog this morning, I found this excellent web page which showed how an individual constructed a small woodland home using strawbale construction in […]

This is one of the more impressive electronics hacks I’ve seen in a while: it uses an Atmel microcontroller as a replacement for an RFID chip in a very novel way (energy transmitted from the RFID reader powers the chip directly, no power on the microcontroller, so it is passive just like the RFID devices […]

An interesting part of the Nintendo Wii design is that they rely on bluetooth for connecting their joysticks and (as it turns out) their Balance Board peripheral. This makes them pretty darned hackable. I’ve seen lots about using the “WiiMote” with computers, but this is the first I’ve seen that interfaces with the Balance Board. […]

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was pondering the stages of Simon Singh’s Cipher Challenge that I didn’t complete “back in the day”. I was examining the DES portion, which still seems like it would take a while to solve, so I decided to skip ahead and figure out what the final stage […]

Today came the news that Michael Jackson, the legendary King of Pop, died of cardiac arrest at age 50. Yes, I was a fan. Who wasn’t in the eighties? He was absolutely brilliant. He brought the combination of music, choreography, and film making together to completely change the landscape of pop music and television. As […]

I like cooking. Well, eating really. Okay, eating and cooking. But in particular, I like what is generally called comfort food. The silly thing about most restaurants is that they don’t do a very good job of making comfort food. If you really want comfort food, the best way is to learn how to make […]

Well, my iPhone 3GS arrived on Friday, and I’ve had a couple of days of tinkering with it, so I thought I’d give my impressions about what’s cool. First off, it’s a G3 phone (I previously had the first generation, EDGE only phone) so it’s networking is significantly faster. Combined with the processor speed increase, […]

The blogosphere was atwitter with the news that many iPhone 3GSs seemed to have shipped early, and indeed might be delivered early. I checked mine, and found that it had indeed arrived in Anchorage yesterday afternoon, but alas, checking it’s status today online met me with the following screen on UPS’s website: So, it looks […]

WARNING: If your browser is “lucky” enough to support the video tag (like certain beta Firefox 3 releases, or Safari) then there should be an image below. It might also slow the loading of the page a bit. Be patient. If you aren’t lucky, it should load really fast. If you can read this, it […]

Some people have been using the CHDK firmware to do motion detection and capture pictures of lightning strikes. Despite the fact that lightning has been hitting Tampa all week, I didn’t get around to trying this until last night. I wasn’t entirely successful, but I did capture these two exposures: This lightning strike hit almost […]