brainwagon

I’m personally declaring that the whole “more cowbell” thing is officially over. It was funny when Walken did it. It was perhaps amusing the next million times it was repeated. But the next day, it was already stale, and it’s only gotten worse. Why not just go back to saying “You are the weakest link!” […]

Each of the last two years, I’ve made mp3 files of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear available here. This serial ran from November 29th through Christmas Eve, and I realized today that I haven’t got it queued up yet for this year. Expect it (and a more worthy introduction) by the end of […]

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog since before Thanksgiving, mainly because I’ve been doped up on expectorants in some attempt to shake this nasty bug. I’ve still got some sinus congestion, and every time I exhale I can feel fluid squishing around in my lungs, but at least the chills have stopped and with […]

I’d like to take a moment to thank all of my readers and listeners and to wish them all the very best on this Thanksgiving Day. There are lots of things that I’m thankful for this year, including my beautiful wife and my son, the health of my entire family, and my serious attempts to […]

I always seem to get sick around the holidays. Starting yesterday afternoon, my throat started getting sore, by the time I was home I had the chills, bodyaches and general lassitude (annoying, given that there is lots of cleaning and cooking to do). It’s now 5:11AM, and I’m up with a dry cough, slurping back […]

Oh, dear, lord. Could the episode I watched have been any more ridiculous? In the episode Urban Hellraisers, the plotline featured a gang of young college hoodlums who decide to play a live action version of Grand Theft Auto Urban Hellraisers. It featured the following incredible plot points (I’d normally fear spoiling the plot or […]

Check these out with the red/blue 3D glasses. Kind of cool, huh? If you followed my tutorial on how to do this with black and white images, you can probably figure out how to do this. Basically, the red image is just the red channel of the left image, and the green and blue channels […]

I admire those people who cook fifteen different dishes from their cookbook that was handed down for ages. I just don’t have the kitchen or frankly the patience to do that. I don’t mind doing a turkey (it’s really a snap) or things like sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, or green beans with pearl onions and […]

While digging up a reference on digital waveguide synthesis, I found out that Julias O. Smith has published his textbook PHYSICAL AUDIO SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR VIRTUAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND AUDIO EFFECTS on the web. Very cool. Only had time to skim it briefly, but I’ll have to go through it in more detail in the […]

A couple of weeks ago, I was playing with creating red-blue anaglyphs using the GIMP and images from the Library of Congress collection of stereograms which you can download. Today, I spent a couple of minutes to do a simple screencast that shows how to do it (WMV, I’m trying to figure how to rip […]

By way of the Make Blog, check out this terrific collection of homemade musical instruments. I rather liked the Aeolian harp, and may have to build one to replace my windchimes at home. Addendum: I’ll piggyback this page of musical automatons (with lots of great details) that Make also linked to.

Does it bother you when hardware doesn’t behave the way it is supposed to? I recently bought a new Bluetooth dongle to use with my laptop, and this relatively simple task turned into the subject of a rant. Just once, I’d like to buy a chunk of hardware that either just worked without any installation […]

Where your host briefly displays his anger about Sony rootkitting their customers, but then happily lapses off into musing about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and food.

Wired News is running a terrific editorial by cryptography and security expert Bruce Schneier. He poses a question that I hadn’t considered before: Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of […]

I must admit, I’m a fairly unschooled student of baseball history, which is part of the reason why I’m trying to read up on the subject and play around with various baseball databases. Today, on a lark, I decided to try to figure out how tall the average baseball player was (just a tad over […]