brainwagon

I took one of the Superman cartoons available from archive.org and tried various command line tools to make a version that would play on the iPod video. I seemed to have a bit of trouble getting ffmpeg to write a .mp4 file that Quicktime/iTunes liked, so eventually I used ffmpeg to write a raw .m4v […]

I like Firefox.  It works well, robustly supports web standards, and generally is just a lot more pleasant than using Internet Explorer.   Given that I’m happy with Firefox, what could make me switch to a new browser?   Maybe Flock has the right idea: integrate a wide number of web services (such as blogging and tagging) […]

Just in case you got tired of showing off Desparate Housewives on your new video ipod, you can surf on over to archive.org and download some of their feature films to help fill those gigabytes. Some worthwhile classics: Night of the Living Dead, film noir classic D.O.A. and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Simply download […]

Well, my wife and I are coming up on our 11th anniversary of our first date, an important holiday which she leveraged to get me to buy her a new video iPod, which she’s had for a couple of days. Expect a podcast in the next few days (recorded not in my car, but in […]

I’ve started a new quickie poll. You only have a day or so to voice your opinion: will it be the White Sox or Astros who win the World Series?

Well, the table has been set, and it’s going to be the White Sox vs. the Astros in the World Series beginning Saturday. Brad Lidge should send Oswalt flowers: if Oswalt blew the game, we’d be looking at a nerve wracking game seven, and it could have been bad. Instead, the Astros win their first […]

Well, my EPROM burner from mcumall arrived, and I’m now got all the hardware bits ready to burn a cartridge for my old Atari 2600. Now all I need to do is finish the programming. I worked on it a bit last weekend, added page flipping and worked on getting the user interface better. In […]

You begin by leading 4-2 in the top of the ninth, and then bring in your reliever to get two quick outs: – B. Lidge relieved D. Wheeler – J. Rodriguez hit for H. Luna – J. Rodriguez struck out swinging – J. Mabry struck out swinging Then, you let some speedy kid bang out […]

Mneptok let me know that comments on my blog were broken (I had forgotten to reinstall Image Magick when I upgraded the operating system). That should be fixed now. Let the comments commence!

I admit it: I hate it when I don’t know stuff. I find not knowing what’s wrong with my car infinitely more annoying than knowing it will cost $500 to fix. It’s just part of my personality. It’s also somewhat annoying that I’m a pretty light sleeper. Little noises can wake me out of a […]

I’m probably going to have some intermittent downtime today as I work on upgrading my FreeBSD server box. Expect full functionality tomorrow.

I spent some time this weekend playing around with Free World Dialup. What is that? FWD allows you to make free phone calls over any broadband connection using devices that follow current accepted Internet Standards. This can be a “plain old telephone” with an IP adapter, an IP based phone or any number of free […]

BoingBoing reminded me that the Long Now Foundation has many of their very interesting seminars available for download via their online library. Far reaching, thought provoking stuff, including lectures by three different Dyson, Kurzweil (whose book The Singularity is Near is part of my current reading list, and many others. Great stuff for those of […]

Editor’s Guild has a nice article on the creation of The Corpse Bride. Apparently the entire thing was shot with the Canon EOS-1D Mark II, a commercial digital SLR, and assembled using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. While testing a variety of commercial digital still cameras, they said the following: “We shot the same scene on […]

I remember reading Russell Beattie’s blog, where he said that merely by posting something about the Apple or Macintosh, his traffic doubled or tripled or something. If I was using Adsense or something, then the recent back and forth I’ve been doing with Scoble might make me a few cents. As it is, I have […]