brainwagon

One of the most bizarre and macabre websites I’ve seen recently is GHOST TOWN, the story of Elena, a young woman who rides her Kawasaki Ninja in through the surrounding countryside of Chernobyl. While other sites may contain more information, the pictures snapped by Elena are eerie and compelling. The events of April 25th and […]

Are you troubled by frequent alien abductions and their tricksy mind control? Well, it is good to see that amateur scientists are hard at work to make alien abductions a think of the past. Check out the Stop Alien Abductions website for information of we can shrug off the hypnotic suggestions of our alien slave […]

Yahoo! News – Decomposing Whale Explodes on Street The decomposing remains of a 60-tonsperm whale exploded on a busy Taiwan street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours, local newspapers said.

I’m kind of fascinated by the whole “balancing robot” thing so I found Dan Piponi’s Equibot to be pretty interesting. It uses a single Sharp infrared distance sensor to measure the distance to the ground, and tries to maintain that distance via by driving a pair of modified servo motors with an Atmel ATMEGA chip. […]

Satire? Or not? Check out Tornado Fighters and try to decide. The demo is AWESOME!

Today NASA is reporting that their Stardust probe, designed for capturing a sample of matter from the tail of comet Wild 2 successfully photographed and obtained the desired sample. Unfortunately, it won’t return this sample until 2006, when it will drop it’s load somewhere in Utah. Nifty picture of the comet, which looks like pretty […]

I’ve long known about Nomic, a game where the players make up the rules as the game is played. Dvorak – A Nomic Card Game is a similar interesting idea, modified to be a card game. All cards start out blank, and the players make up and add cards as the game is played. Cool!

Bill Cutler, a rather famous puzzle guy has finally found all unique solutions to The Loculus of Archimedes. I rather like puzzles of all sorts, but through some freak of nature had not heard of this particular one. Kudos to Bill!

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered two projects which both boot from CD, don’t install anything on the PC, and provide interesting functionality. The first of these ix GeeXbox, which you can get from theGeeXboX HomePage When booted, GeeXbox turns your PC into a dedicated media player. It boots a version of the […]

Occasionally I’m struck by the apparent oddness of people’s behavior. High on my list of pet peeves are people who go out of their way to destroy the works of other. Case in point: this story coming in from Mainichi, Japan. As many people know, the origami crane has become a symbol of world piece, […]

Nikon 4500 Manual Focus Calibration Chart & Depth of Field is a link to a very nice chart to help with manual focussing on the Nikon 4500. It’s hard to do normally because there isn’t a numerical distance displayed on the screen while focussing. This should definitely help, as sometimes the auto focussing of the […]

CK’s Digital Camera Page has a really nice set of manuals for certain Nikon cameras, including my new Nikon 4500.

SuperDeluxo4 wgets and curls is a nifty site which logs interesting things that you can do with the command line tools wget and curl. Nifty.

Low light CCD Camera Data is just an awesome collection of links. I modified a supercircuits camera to have manual gain control, but now some better cameras seem to be widely available. I’ll have to look at this some more later.

Kasparov fights to a draw in a six game match against Deep Junior. I’m not a very good chess player myself, but I spent a fair amount of time as an undergraduate studying heuristic search, so I am always interested when matches such as this occurs. Whenever such matches occur, there is a flood of […]