brainwagon

My popularity over the last thirty days appears to be falling. Perhaps I should bath more regularly. Or maybe I’m just more boring this month. Update: Or, maybe people are outside.

As a brief test of the macro capabilities of my video camera, here’s a brief clip of Sue’s new Betta splendens (Windows Media Video, sorry lads). It may look a bit washed out because I boosted the brightness (I filmed it in existing light, and it was a bit dark).

I entertained the notion of self-publishing a book on telescope making a while back, and even dabbled in the idea of self-printing a few copies. This blog shows how you can print pages into signatures and sew them into real bound books. Neat.

Off to go watch the Apple World Wide Developer’s conference keynote, mainly to see if Apple is going to switch from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel. The net has been abuzz with this rumor, it will be good to see if it really is panning out. Update: Steve is talking about pod casting now. He […]

Robby the Robot, originally uploaded by brainwagon. Just celebrity spotting in SF. Addendum: Check out the Robby the Robot Fan Site.

Lisa uses her weblog to remind her of things that are hard to remember like the instructions to her watch. I have done a few things like that (like the command line for burning DVDs on my FreeBSD box) and I thought I’d also put a couple of gnuplot reminders here. (I use gnuplot for […]

Yesterday I recorded a podcast on the way to work, but due to a computer glitch at work, I was unable to upload it immediately. As a result, I simply can’t remember what the heck it was about. I suspect that at least part of it was a rant against automobile repair places, but beyond […]

Just another test of my camera phone and automatic posting. I think my copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species is on the shelf above though. I actually think Stroustrup’s C++ Programming Language may in fact be the most harmful book of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Well, I bitched about Oakland a couple of days ago, and today I’m watching the possibility that they might string two wins in a row. I was watching last night in the top of the 9th when I received a phone call from my son whose car crapped out an hour away (I spent most […]

Just a picture of me from my cell phone Addendum: This post was really just created as a test of Flickr‘s ability to post photos that you upload to their site to a blog of your choice. It was just a picture that I sent to my wife during my long weekend away at Siggraph, […]

I suspected that the A’s may have a difficult time getting to the playoffs this year. All three of the other AL West teams had reasons for optimism: the A’s traded two of their big three talent away. The over-under line for A’s was 78 or so. Realistically they would turn out to be a […]

I haven’t posted any of my culinary explorations lately, so I thought that I would rectify this wrong by detailing something that I tried for yesterday’s dinner. I’m a huge fan of pulled pork, especially in the form of barbecue pork sandwiches. I like getting a toasted bunn, piling it with this shredded pork, and […]

For grins I’ve set up a simple IRC daemon on brainwagon.org. Go ahead and try it out if you like, my nickname is likely to be markv and I’ll hang out in the channel named #brainwagon. If you don’t have an IRC client, but do have a Java enabled browser, you could try this Java […]

Where your host describes his new DVD player which can play DivX video, rants about the commercialization of podcasting and finishes up with a few brief comments on Revenge of the Sith.

I did some quick experiments to check the compatibility of video files that I converted and my new Philips DVP 642 DVD player. I wanted to check and see if ffmpeg would generate files which were compatible and at which bitrates and resolutions. The long and the short of it: everything sensible I tried worked. […]