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 technologies they developed to a non-profit which is supposed to license this technology more widely through the pyrotechnic industry.

You can view the Quicktime here.

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!

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 eight bit computers entirely. Remember: the Apple II gs was a 2.8 Mhz 65C816 processor, charitably described as a 16 bit processor. In the 12 years since then, we’ve now arrived at computers which have gigahertz clockrates, half a gigabyte of main memory and 100s of gigabytes of storage. Moore’s law is really amazing.

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. Here is the most lucid description of the procedure I’ve found. Note: I have not yet done this on mine, and doing so will likely void your warranty, so be aware.

Why would you want to reflash your router? I can think of several reasons:

• It would be nice if it booted with the defaults that I like: with the ports for ssh and httpd forwarded to my desired host, the correct SSID and WEP keys enabled and so on.
• I use sitelutions.com for my dynamic dns stuff, it would be great if it could update all of my hosted domains automatically.
• It could be nice to have traffic shaping to keep my son from chewing up all my bandwidth.

Anyway, I haven’t done any of this yet, but someday when I am bored I’m virtually certain to give it a whirl.

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. Leave it running over night and you could have hundreds of songs, all ready to download to your iPod. That’s very cool. Gizmodo expressed the concern that the RIAA probably has lawyers by the truckload ready to squash this, but frankly it wouldn’t be difficult to write an open source version of this: a brief google on the web revealed most of the information that you need. Basically the XM device looks like a USB serial device, and a lot of the protocol has been reverse engineered. Cool stuff.

I’m mostly interested in doing this not for songs, but rather for sports: I’d like to be able to record and timeshift baseball games. It’s not clear to me if you can get local games via XM radio, but there is the possibility of using Griffin Technology radioShark. There are two small problems with it: it’s not available yet, and as yet they only seem to have software for the Macintosh. Still, I’ll keep my eye open, since it records both AM & FM.

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 several exposures of a busy street with cars driving along. When combined in various ways, you can generate a custom plate that shows the street either as entirely empty or alternatively entirely packed with cars.

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. Transparent ceramics have many of the same properties of sapphire, but at a greatly reduced cost. You can look here for more details, without the corporate self-promotion. The military applications are rather obvious, as are their uses for fireplace glass.

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 the kites) so these are mostly snapshot quality, but they do give a flavor for what you see at the kite festival.

If you go, expect a backup along University and to pay for parking.