brainwagon

William Gurstelle, author of a couple of my favorite books, Backyard Ballistics and The Art of the Catapult, has a new book, Adventures from the Technology Underground and a blog, Notes from the Technology Underground. I ordered the new book via Amazon, and the blog is now in my Daily Read list.

He’s hopping around the Middle East as I type this. Google Earth is pretty cool for a free download too, so check it out. Ho ho ho.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen a number of eBay auctions for religious figures which appear spontaneously in grilled bread items. It seems to me that the budding young entrepaneur could make a killing with the right laser engraving equipment. Courtesy of the Make Blog.

You know what’s more useless than those tapes and DVDs of a fire burning in the fireplace? How ’bout the same thing, but formatted for your video iPod. Courtesy of those fine gents at WGN.

Okay, I know this is an atrocity, but you might still find Recolored to be an interesting program for adding color to black and white images. You basically scribble hints into the image, and it propagates the color to nearby pixels that it determines should be the same color. At right, you can click and […]

The 137 page decision in the Kitzmiller case in Dover Pennsylvania has been handed down: Kitzmiller Decision: Plaintiffs Prevail The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed […]

I’ve had this project in a pile of bookmarks that I was sorting through, and am linking it here so that I can find it again sometime later: H. P. Friedrich has nice design for a crystal radio build from stuff a computer person might have around the house. Interestingly, he even makes the variable […]

While not as openly hostile as the kind of stuff that Sony was doing with their active-rootkitting stuff, it’s actually not that hard to create a CD which many applications find unrippable: wander over to Ed Felton’s Freedom to Tinker blog for instructions on how to Make Your Own Copy-Protected CD with Passive Protection. Note: […]

This Documentary On Japanese Sushi on Google Video is just too strange for words. Check it out.

The Free Information Society has links to a bunch of WWII era propaganda posters, including this rather amusing one linking promiscuity with dating Hitler. Holy crap. You can’t make stuff like this up.

The world is just not fair. I mean really, if I wore this pink and black striped tie, people would laugh at me. But if Jessica Alba wears it, she’s “edgy” or “trendy” or “hip”, or whatever it is that the young people are saying now. You know, that very well might be one of […]

Need some fun holiday mashups? Try Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings on for size.

Ben Fry has some cool graphics which visualize the code in several old Atari 2600 video games. Basically, he disassembles code and marks all possible branches with arcs between the lines of code, and changes all data tables to graphical representations of the bit patterns, revealing many sprites and other data tables. I dunno how […]

well, despite having been linked on Slashdot, I think that the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project is pretty cool. They digitized thousands of old Edison wax cylinders, cleaned up their audio using digital tools, and made the audio and the original 24 bit wav files available for download. Too cool.

Lee Felsentstein writes about what he thinks are the Problems with the $100 laptop, and I think many of the issues he raises are good ones, worthy of serious discussion. The question shouldn’t really be “should we give a laptop to every child or not”, but rather “if we are going to invest millions of […]