brainwagon

Carmen bought me a new game for my PSP today: Locoroco I must admit, despite the fact that PSP hardware rocks all over the DS hardware, I spend way more time playing with my Nintendo DS than I do with the PSP. The simple fact is that there are more games I feel like playing […]

While I’m still in a rant mode, try looking at Bruce Schneier’s latest column on Wired: Wired News: Quickest Patch Ever Now, this isn’t a “vulnerability” in the normal sense of the word: digital rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove copy protection is a good thing for some […]

The word is: conversation. What’s wrong with that rather innocent word? Scoble and his commenters seem to love it. The topic under consideration is the ongoing privacy scandal at HP, where chairwoman Patricia Dunn apparently authorized the highly unethical and possibly illegal practice of pretexting to determine which board members were leaking information to the […]

Not my usual fare for this venue, but it made me laugh.

Coolest thing ever!

From our legislature… WHEREAS, Recent astronomical discoveries, including Pluto’s oblong orbit and the sighting of a slightly larger Kuiper Belt object, have led astronomers to question the planetary status of Pluto; and WHEREAS, The mean-spirited International Astronomical Union decided on August 24, 2006, to disrespect Pluto by stripping Pluto of its planetary status and reclassifying […]

Courtesy of Flutterby, it appears that the cryptography museum at Bletchley Park has actually completed construction of their Bombe, the machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman for the cracking of the German Enigma code during World War II. Cool. I’ll have to put Bletchley on my list of sites to see. [tags]Cryptography,Bletchley Park,Enigma[/tags]

While reading Beiler’s Recreations in the Theory of Numbers, I ran across this rather odd conjecture attributed to Goldbach: that all odd numbers are either prime, or can be expressed as the sum of a prime and twice a square. That seemed rather interesting. There were two known exceptions, in particular 5777 and 5993, which […]

Some of the people at works are real choco-holics. Hence: Grilled chocolate sandwich. Their suggestion? Use pound cake instead of bread. Damn, I’m off to lunch now.

A couple of days ago, I got bitten by the bug again to think about trying to actually commit some of my braincells to the learning of some Mayan hieroglyphs, and maybe make a program which actually could draw dates written in the Mayan long count calendar. To do that, I needed some bitmaps of […]

I’ve begun exploring Google Books a bit, since they promise to make many books which are out of copyright available for free download as PDF files. In that vein, I give you Lick’s Recreations in Mathematics, which isn’t nececessarily the best book on recreational math that I’ve seen, but it’s easy availability makes it worth […]

I was trying to dust off some of my books (mostly unread and completely unabsorbed) about the Maya Calendar, and ran across Mesoweb Resources, which includes a nice introduction to Mayan hieroglyphics in PDF form that you can download and study. Nifty. [tags]Mayan,Hieroglyphics[/tags]

Dummies Book Cover Generator/Maker 2006

Earlier I mentioned that I had come across a fix for the annoying Java permissions problem of my LG CU500. Yesterday, I finally got my USB cable, traipsed upstairs to my wife’s PC (the only one still running Windows) and performed the vital steps on my phone, with the net result that now my phone […]

While surfing, I stumbled upon this page of ImageMagick v6 Examples. It’s kind of strange, but I still do a rather large amounts of image manipulation with command line tools (usually the netpbm utilities, mostly because they have been around forever. For some reason, I never really started using ImageMagick, but that’s probably a mistake: […]