brainwagon

Well, I’ve burned a few DVD blanks today just to see what I can do. For source material, I decided to go to the feature film section of archive.org. They have a bunch of films available in MPEG2 format, all fairly good quality and ready for download with minimal transcoding. For my experiments, I chose […]

Disneyland is now using compressed air to launch pyrotechnics. I read about this before my trip, but it slipped my mind while I was watching the display last weekend. Nevertheless, I did manage to snag a quick Quicktime of the show from my location inside the California Adventure park. Disney is donating the seven patented […]

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing out An Audio Blogging Manifesto, both in text format and as an mp3 file with inspiring background music.

Sigh. XM Radio pulls PC hardware amid piracy concerns | CNET News.com Guess they aren’t interested in taking my money.

Thanks to the gents on Metafilter for calling my attention to Kenneth Snelson’s exposition on Tensegrity. He has a nice presentation that shows the relationship between traditional weaving and tensegrity structures. Great stuff!

Well, it’s Monday, and I’m back from my weekend trip to Disneyland. With the wife, son, and two of his friends in tow, we conquered California Adventure and the classic park. I must admit, I had a great time. Despite my 40 year old state, I decided that I would try to go on as […]

Otherwise we would have ended up with a brand new puppy and I’d be laying down papers in the kitchen and trying to scold them for chewing on my old shoes. Damn, they were cute. More photos from Carmen’s hiptop blog, from which I also swiped my new photo on the right.

I was amazed to watch this old episode of Computer Chronicles which chronicles the swansong of the Apple II series of computers. What the people involved in this episode do not seem to realize is that eight bit computers were dying. Less than four years later, Apple would finally discontinue the Apple IIgs and abandon […]

Kudos to Metafilter for digging up this one. Try reading the story John Cura: Snapshots of History by Mark Lewisohn and then pine about the lost treasure that his quarter of a million pictures of early British television represents.

Apparently the legendary Dick Van Dyke put in an appearance at SIGGRAPH 2004 and demonstrated some of his animations. It’s really very cool that a 79 year old acting legend can show he’s still learning and growing. Thanks to Jim Hill for writing this up. Almost makes me wish I had gone to SIGGRAPH.

Ever wanting to keep up with the other hackers on the street, I recently decided to upgrade my 802.11b network to run 802.11g. Toward that end, I purchased a Linksys WRT54GS router, largely based upon a rather silly feature: it’s actually a full Linux device, and you can develop and reflash it without huge difficulty. […]

A couple of quick items regarding radio, that incredibly passé form of media that nonetheless seems to occupy a great deal of my time. Nerosoft is coming out with a $20 program called TimeTrax which records songs and programming off the$50 XM PCR Satellite Radio, and stores them as MP3 with appropriate tags and all. […]

Freshmeat listed an interesting new project called Long Exposure Tools. Like many cool ideas, it’s actually very simple. It takes multiple exposures, and combines them in various ways to simulate long exposures. That doesn’t sound that cool, but the nifty thing is the various modes that it uses to combine them. Their primary example shows […]

Casio has developed lenses made out of transparent ceramics for use in their digital cameras. Apparently using this material can reduce the overall size of their telephoto lenses by nearly 20% because of their higher refractive index. Most crown glasses have refractive indices of around 1.5, while this material has a refractive index of 2.08. […]

I decided finally to install gallery so that I could create The Brainwagon Photo Gallery to display my amateurish attempts at photography. For now, the gallery contains only my photos of yesterday’s Berkeley Kite Festival. I’m not used to photographing highly backlit things (even with the cloudy skies yesterday, the skies are much brighter than […]