brainwagon

There is an old joke about what men are good for: the punch line reads something like killing spiders, barbecue and oil changes.   I’d like to pretend that I’m a handy person, but when the truth comes right down to it, I pretty much consider myself a software guy, not a hardware guy.   Still, I […]

Well, not just one, but three four separate segments of the fence which borders the back property line are down. It’s now a job that has transitioned between “Mark should do that in an hour or two” to “we should call somebody and let them do it”. I will be hiking up the hill to […]

After a delicious supper of prime rib, mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus, what could top it off? Well, I gave Emeril’s Apple Tart Tatin with Homemade Puff Pastry. I made it with Pepperidge Farm Puff Pastry, and Fuji apples, but it turned out real good. Give it a try.

I spent a little while trying to figure this out, apparently the -r argument is significant: ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg \ -title “Superman: The Mechanical Monsters” \ -s 320×240 -b 512 -ar 24000 -ab 64 -r 29.970030 -f psp M4V12345.MP4 The -title seemed fubarred, but the rest seems to work. I’ll refine this more later. Filenames […]

To all the readers of my little experiment in self-therapy, I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!

Well, I wish my experiment in podcasting was going out with a bang instead of a whimper, but for now, I’m closing the saga that was Brainwagon Radio. It may return in some retooled form in the future: I’m thinking that to really revitalize my interest in doing podcasts I need to find an appropriate […]

Okay, I know this is an atrocity, but you might still find Recolored to be an interesting program for adding color to black and white images. You basically scribble hints into the image, and it propagates the color to nearby pixels that it determines should be the same color. At right, you can click and […]

Well, the last 48 hours has been fun. I am taking a few day off before Christmas to go visit my mom and brother up in the Portland area, and I flew in Sunday night. I thought that I might document the few mistakes that I made during the trip so that others might be […]

Last night I watched the final episode of Survivor Guatamala (yeah, I know, reality television is the opiate of the masses, so sue me) and I spotted something that made me stop the TiVo, rewind, and note something to my wife. The particular video shot is one of their classic “night vision” pictures of one […]

Well, as a stop gap measure to replace my dead Philips DVP-642 DVD player, I went ahead and picked up a TruTech TT 320 DVD player ($34.95 from Target). It’s small, and plays VCD and SVCD (although not DivX like the Philips). I figured I will use it for a while until I figure out […]

Went to see this last night with my wife Carmen, and all I can say is wow. Really well done. We both enjoyed it, although I thought that the pacing was initially a bit slow. Comparisons with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings are inevitable, and I must say: I found the effects to be […]

This showed up on digg, but turned out to be one of the most absurdly transparent “math magic trick” I’d ever seen. Imagine that your 7 digit phone number was written as abc-defg. This trick says to: Enter abc into the calculator. Multiply by 80. (Accumulator now contains 80*abc) Add 1. (Accumulator now contains 80*abc+1) […]

Bummer. My 6 month old Philips DVP-642 crapped out. Seems like the drive just went belly up, it doesn’t spin up at all or eject. I really liked this DVD player because it could play regular DivX avi files, but I must admit, I’m not really all that pleased with the longevity. Harumph.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about a screencast I did that showed how you could convert stereographs into red/blue 3D anaglyphs. Jim Gasperini has a nice writeup about “wiggle stereograms”, basically two frame animated gifs which toggle back and forth between two images. On the right, you can see that I created one […]

This post does two things. It provides a link to a cool collection of antique color photographs taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, and also tests my ability to use digg to directly post interesting articles to my blog. I wonder how well it will work. Assuming this works, in the future I’ll try to include […]