brainwagon

Carmen came down this morning with a mouse in her hand, asking “Should this thing be hot?” She of course knew the answer, “No”. I figured she needed a new mouse, but I got out a screwdriver and opened the thing up. It appears that a Zener diode on the backside of the board was […]

I like the ability to create sidenotes. What are sidenotes? You can go here to find some JavaScript code that implements them. Neat. I’m not especially fond of the existing CSS. I think boxing text that can be word-wrapped is very ugly. I might take some of the ideas embedded in this and adapt it […]

Early reports are that a record explosion (measuring in the kiloton range) may have happened in Norway as a meteor crashed into it. More news when I get it. [tags]Meteorite,Norway[/tags] Addendum: If my timezone math is correct, Oslo is +2 hours to GMT. The ARCES array maintained by NORSAR (an organization apparently tasked with seismic […]

This is another one of those postings that I make almost entirely for my own benefit. Today at lunch I was having a discussion with Tom about a particular problem that I was having trouble understanding: namely, understanding why the formulas for optimal sizing of pinhole camera aperatures were, well, what they are. Where do […]

If you want some information about how Pixar made Cars, check out the comments on this thread on Digg. True, most of them are completely incorrect, but probably at no greater rate than the commercial news media. Addendum: when you see totals like “17 hours per frame”, they almost certainly (and in this case do) […]

Don’t ask me why I found this interesting, I just do, and wanted to bookmark it for later perusal. NIST Image Group’s Fingerprint Research

While I was trying to find the formulas for picking the optimum size for pinholes in pinhole photographs, I found that Lord Rayleigh had published an article on the subject. A bit of googling revealed this treasure trove of historical articles on pinhole photography. Lord Rayleigh’s paper is actually much more sophisticated than any paper […]

As if more were actually needed… It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look. Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying […]

I spent some time getting Ubuntu’s new Dapper Drake release installed on my HP AMD64 box. It seems to work fine now, but it wasn’t flawless to install. The desktop install ISO crashed just after booting while mounting the root fs from the CD. Hard to tell what was going on, but the kernel seemed […]

In Emigrant’s Pass, I stopped to take some photos from their stunning vista point. One of my pictures included this tree (click on it for a larger view). Look closely. Can you identify the species? Yep, it’s one of these. Addendum: I didn’t notice that it was this particular variety until I got the picture […]

This is just unbelievably cool.

In the late eighties, I was fascinated by the possibilities of nanotechnology as raised by Eric Drexler. Here we are twenty years later, and I get the feeling that the early promise and enthusiasm have largely been blunted by some hard realities, and I’ve been meaning to go back and reread the book again, perhaps […]

Podcasting inspiration Josh Bancroft has a new venture entitled unboxing.com, a veritable shrine to gadgetitis, with all sorts of pictures of people unboxing their latest toy acquisitions. I must admit, I’ve done my fair share of this, but lately I’ve been trying to clean up my office and get rid of some of the older […]

For the most part, the critics have been really panning The Da Vinci Code, the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s hugely popular book of the same title. Starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatou and Ian McKellan, it is the story of Robert Langton, a historian specializing in the meaning of ancient symbols, who is called to […]

Just a fun little sight seeing via Google Maps: Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Update: a nasty freak accident sent a piece of a wing sailing up into the crowd 25 rows back. It appears that a fan was struck, but he supposedly left under his own power. Update2: Wow! What a finish! Sam Hornish Jr. edges […]