brainwagon

Materials licensed under Creative Commons licenses are becoming more and more popular, and more and more mainstream. As reported on BoingBoing, Knitty is a web-published knitting magazine, and for a special breast-cancer awareness issue, they decided to publish their patterns under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs license. Check out the patterns: I’m more […]

You can view all sorts of aircraft crash videos from NASA including the rather famous one of the fuel that was supposed to resist ignition pictured at right. If this is an example of what anti-misting kerosene would do, one is left to wonder what the traditional misting variety could do.

Mark Simonson has a really nifty website on typography. I originally found it because he built a mechanism for holding filmstrips of fonts out of Lego so he could scan them, but if you dig around you will find that there are plenty of other nifty things having to do with type design and typography, […]

A Cunning Stunt

Somebody had an idea that I had a long time ago: to use evolutionary techniques to evolve a better keyboard layout that QWERTY or even Dvorak. I sense a certain logic of design in the Dvorak that seems absent in the best of his evolved designs, but the evolved designs look pretty good overall.

The book Smalltalk-80: BIts of History, Words of Advice is now available for free download as a PDF file. Cool!

Got this off the Blogdigger WMV feeds: 99: Boots of Escaping can’t compare to Boots of Striding and Leaping, imho… I’ve got the boots of escaping, I’ve got the boots of escaping! Direct link to the WMV file

Free Reads has a collection of short fiction read by their author Jim Kelly. More food for the insatiable ipod!

While reading today’s slashdot article on hacking the RoboSapien, I turned up a link to the Unofficial Robosapien hacks and mods site. Some good information about the IR protocols used to control the little robot. You can also look at Servo Magazine’s Hack-a-Sapien contest.

The caption reads: Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be econimically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, […]

Those kind lads at Boing Boing sent me to this cool walking robots site by some gents at Berkeley. Their robot, RHEX, uses compliant legs to move really quickly over rough terrain. Be sure to catch the videos for added amusement.

Eric Idle, you’re my hero. SLITFOASNSFW (Strong Language In The Form Of A Song, Not Safe For Work). Thanks to Dan Lyke of Flutterby! for linking to this one.

Those clever lads and lasses at Metafilter had a very cool link to Isabel Gill’s Six Months in Ascension, written in 1877. Sir David Gill went to the island to observe Mars to determine its distance from the sun more accurately, and his wife Isabel went along to help out. This peek into a Victorian […]

UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. To do this, it runs SIMH, a PDP-11 simulator which has been ported to a bunch of different systems. The original RK05 disk image is combined with the PDP-11 simulator […]

Stuff by Samuel Clemens, a good antidote to watching the RNC.