brainwagon

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

… 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]