Project Gutenberg – Audio eBooks Read by People lists eight different books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all read by humans (much better than the terrible simulated voices of other Gutenberg entries). These will soon be parked on my iPod for consumption later.
For those of you with curl installed, the following will fetch all 25 parts of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
curl -o 'advsh32#1.mp3' -G 'http://gutenberg.net/etext05/advsh32[01-25].mp3'
You can read all the blog posts of Jeremy Botter made as a soldier on duty in Iraq as a PDF file. Interesting stuff, and testimony to how the ability to immediately self publish on the web allows us to experience and communicate with others in ways we our parents couldn’t imagine and our children can’t imagine being without.
On the lighter side, you could read these logs of the interrogation of Saddam Hussein.
I promise I’ll be back to something more frivolous and less baseball related tomorrow.
The inner workings of the Supreme Court have always held a certain fascination for me, and since my wife got me an iPod, I’ve found two audio resources to help me learn.
The first is oyez.org, an online archive which contains many mp3 files of oral arguments before the Supreme Court, all licensed with permissive Creative Commons licenses. During a recent trip, I listened to the oral arguments concerning the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and the case of Jose Padilla. They also have many recordings from older and historic cases. It’s often pretty hard to understand the proceedings unless you are well versed in the fine details of the legal arguments, but it is nifty stuff nonetheless.
The other is the Barnes and Noble Portable Professor Series entitled Shaping Justice – Landmark Cases of the Supreme Court. It is an eight CD audio book which covers the history of the U.S. Supreme Court and details 13 of the cases which have shaped the power and scope of the Supreme Court. It can be a bit sketchy at times (I’m still not sure I really understand what “substantive due process” actually refers to) but the choice of cases are intriguing, and several seem particularly timely, especially Korematsu v. United States, 1944 which details the decisions regarding forced internment of Japanese citizens in World War II.
The rising cost of gas makes one consider alternative sources of fuel. Lately I’ve been hearing a great deal about biodiesel fuels. I found a recipe for cooking up a batch. Unfortunately making biodiesel still appears to be more expensive than ordinary petroleum (at least when made from fresh soy), so it might be a while before this catches on, but the chemistry is at least mildly interesting. I was trying to sort out the potential for using waste fats and oil, but it seems rather obvious that even when my diet consisted largely of fried food, I used more gasoline by volume than cooking oil. Thus, while using waste oil may be temporarily cheap, there simply isn’t enough supply to make it more than a curiousity on the path to renewable energy.
Keeping with the stereo theme, Jim Gasperini wrote up an idea so simple that is surprising how effective it is. To display stereoscopic images, he merely creates an animated gif with the left and right eye images. That’s it. While it doesn’t give a true 3-D effect, the resulting images do seem to give that feeling of depth.
Heck, the idea is so simple, I had to try it out. I dug around the web looking for stereo pairs, and came up with some nice public domain source material: pictures from the Spirit Lander. You can view the result on the right. Sure, they aren’t as cool as naked people in the surf, but it will demonstrate the idea. It would help if there was some left to right and right to left motion in the frame, and the degree of motion is somewhat large. I swiped a couple of pictures from Rob Crockett’s gallery and retried it with better results. I’ll try to get some more of my own examples up sometime soon.
Ever on the lookout for nifty projects, I stumbled across this stereo video display. It works by synchronizing cheap board level video cameras with a rather simple circuit, and then using lcd shutter glasses on the display.
I’ve seen broad descriptions of similar systems, but this one is very detailed and includes complete descriptions of all the necessary hardware and modifications.
Some similar gadgets are on the Digital Stereo Photography page, along with nifty gallery images taken with his hardware.
Today’s useful link of the day is to Mini-FAQ Macro Photography, Frugal, mostly Digital. This page has lots of good ideas for getting images from digital cameras, microscopes and flatbed scanners. I’ll have to try this sometime. My Zeiss-Jena microscope I bought at a flea market for $15 isn’t getting enough use.
For some reason I found myself looking for plans for cheap 3D scanners at 1:15AM this morning, and came up with the Lair of the Chrome Cow. Surprisingly, I remember this site being mentioned on an old slashdot posting, but I guess I didn’t look. It’s got some nifty ideas.
I’ll have to think about them tomorrow.
An amateur constructed rocket reached an altitude of 100km and became the first such craft to reach space. This incredible achievement is described here by the ARRL, or the Amateur Radio Relay League. The rocket also carried an avionics package designed by radio amateurs. The rocket apparently transmitted telemetry on the 33cm band and ATV on the 2.4ghz band.
I’m looking forward to seeing some of the pictures from the flight. To all those who worked on the project, hearty congrats!
Just a short blurb to inform my readers about two interesting bits of code that I’ve looked at in the past week.
The first is a voice-conferencing system called Skype. Skype is made by the same guys who brought you Kazaa (of which I am distinctly not a fan), and is exactly what it pretends to be: a great little free application that allows you to immediately do voice conferencing over the Internet with end to end encryption. It seems to work very well, with excellent sound quality, and they even have a PDA version for the Pocket PC. I used to use Yahoo Messenger, but Skype is much slicker.
The second is something you’ll have to compile yourself: Olithink, a chess program that is only 1600 lines long, but plays quite reasonably. It uses bitboards, alpha-beta search, transposition tables and pondering. It makes me rethink the idea that chess programs are too complicated.
… what you can put off ’til tomorrow.
Sometimes procrastination can pay off, courtesy of Moore’s Law.
While chasing down a fairly pedestrian story on Slashdot about building your own LCD picture frame (seems rather obvious, use a box, a VIA motherboard, some minimal carpentry) I did find an interesting link to Mini-Box.Com.
The link was in reference to their small power supplies, but they also sell a cute little embedded PC called the mini-box M100. It’s a mere 20cmx4.4cmx22cm and weighs only 1 kilo. If it had two network ports, it would be idea for an embedded gateway/firewall box, but it also has enough power to do PVR or jukebox functionality well.
Price is around $400, which is high but not insane. I can’t justify gettting one for myself (I have a surplus of computing equipment at the moment), but if you have need of such a thing, you might give it a look.
I recently joined orkut.com, and find it pretty interesting to participate in a community based soley upon invitations/trust. One of the first interesting things I discovered was a link to a cute toy apparently sold in the Bletchley Park Museum: a single rotor Enigma machine. Nifty! You can read more about it Stuart Savory’s Pocket Enigma®: The revised Review
I may have to write a Python implementation and then cryptoanalyze it.
Over the years I’ve been interested in complex and chaotic phenomena. Anyone looking at my desk would confirm this to be true. Sometimes I think scientists have all the fun though, like when they use half a million
ping pong balls to study the motion of avalanches in snow. There are many unanswered questions, such as why avalanches produce so much low frequency acoustic energy. Cool stuff.
Today Slashdot is running a story about hektor, a robotic graffitti artist. It is a computer controlled robot, driven by an Adobe Illustrator plugin that moves a spraycan over a wall and paints a desired pattern. The cute thing about it is that it uses a very nifty drive mechanism. Rather than using a traditional two dimensional gantry, it slings the paintcan in a harness between two independently controlled chains. I spent a short break before a meeting working on the control mathematics for a similar setup that used linear steppers. It’s not too bad, perhaps I’ll write up a quick similator using Python (and maybe PyGame) to test out the idea.
The whole topic reminded me of some work I did a while ago that was inspired by Don Lancaster called flutterwumpers. He had many nifty ideas about using Postscript to drive very simple machines drill circuit boards, route signs and the like. He uses some simple PostScript code to drive everything,
which makes it pretty cool (and cheap, given GhostScript).
Another interesting link is to the Free and Easy: CNC Machining project on SourceForge. These guys built a prototype dual rotary table which looks pretty nifty.
