brainwagon

By way of the ReadyMade Blog, check out how to use common kitchen ingredients like coffee as photographic developers.  I’ve had an interest (mostly academic and appreciative) in alternate photographic processes for some time, and while this relies on standard emulsions, the use of ordinary kitchen stuff for developers and fixes is really quite intriguing. […]

I laughed out loud. Scoble didn’t think it was funny, and just said “Ouch”. Of course all that is truly funny is true.  This is what you reap when your product development is all about filling out long checklists of features and signing partnership deals with third parties. [tags]Microsoft,Parody,You Tube[/tags]

Phil Plait’s blog is the first mention I’ve read that actor Darren McGavin had passed away. Phil and I must have been watching the same TV shows as kids, because I loved Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and have recently found through the miracle of TIVO that the episodes still hold up fairly well, which can […]

It’s a strange fact that any two words (or interests) that you might have will eventually find a webpage that illustrates them both.  Of course, every geek in the universe likes Legos, and a couple of years back I made an aborted stab at learning something about Mayan hieroglyphics.   I didn’t think I’d find a […]

Via Ars Technica is the announcement that many films from the National Archives will be made available via Google Video.  Their pilot program had 104 videos, consisting of many newreel clips from WWII, documentaries about the formation of the national parks service, and documentaries from Nasa including the 1969 documentary The Eagle Has Landed, documenting […]

Juan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod to store maps. He realized that the thumbnail viewer in his iPod video displays six thumbnails in each row of his video iPod, so he stitched together a map of […]

The perversion of intelligent design can be seen in Cornelius’s Hunter’s title and opening paragraph on ID The Future: The main problem with our red state-blue state culture today is that good pizza is only available in the blue zones. As Harold Hubis, moderator of last night’s evolution vs. ID debate had warned me, last […]

I was a little bit disappointed when I found out the total was a bit short of what the header proclaimed, but you should still check out 1001 things to do with liquid nitrogen LN2 also works great for sweeping and cleaning hard floors such as concrete or wood. Get a couple liters in a […]

Michael Desmond, writing for PCWorld, wrote this article called Ten Reasons to Buy Windows Vista. Me? I’m completely unconvinced. Let’s walk through what he thinks are the strengths of Windows Vista: Security. The funny thing is, I expected all the previous versions of Windows to provide security, and for the most part, I’ve been cruelly […]

Houston Police Chief Wants Surveillance Cameras In Private Homes “I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.

I must admit, my experimentation with VOIP phones using my new Sipura SPA-3000 is going a bit slower than I like.  Still, I hope to document some cool VOIP stuff over the next couple of months.  To whet your whistle about what is possible check out this link on the SipBroker Wiki.  They outline an […]

Well, even though he’s no longer an Athletic, I’d like to wish Arizona Diamondback Eric Byrnes centerfielder a happy birthday. I loved to watch Byrnes’ flat out style of play. The last game I saw him play in Oakland, I had seats out in left field, right above where he was playing in left field. […]

Via the Make Blog, LinuxDevices tells you how to run linux on a JuiceBox.  I bought one of these a while ago, and haven’t done much with it, other than take one of my flickr pictures and copy it to a memory card and display it as show in the picture.  I’ll have to goof […]

I’m just passing along a link from Eric’s email to me today: 3D Painted Rooms – 2Loop.com These rooms are painted so that, when looked at right, optical illusions will appear. Very cool. I especially like the second to last one.

Gravity is a very, very weak force.  Back in 1798, Cavendish used a torsion balance to try to estimate the value of G, the gravitational constant.   What’s cool is that you can reproduce this experiment yourself.   Check out Bending Spacetime in the Basement, which includes some nifty videos of the torsion balance in action. [tags]Science,Gravitation,Science […]