brainwagon

Okay, this isn’t that impressive, but let me explain. Larger version of the same… I recorded about 4.5 minutes of audio from one of the weather satellites, using my small pocket recorder and a Kenwood TH-D7A. In most respects, I shouldn’t expect anything good to happen. I’m using a cheap little voice recorder. I’m using […]

With all the satellite mucking around I’ve been doing, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of building a little setup to receive weather satellite information directly from the weather satellites that are in polar orbit. They broadcast mostly around 137Mhz, and use an AM modulated subcarrier to send information via FM. I haven’t got a […]

Well, I finally bored some holes in the case (kind of banging it up a little in the process, next time, I’ll put tape over all the edges) and mounted my radio in a real metal case. After warmup, it seems quite a bit more stable, and there is less problem with microphonics and frequency […]

I worked out some of the math for creating maps using the globular projection. The diagram below shows that it worked. I have a little programming project going for which this is a minor subtask. I’ll update you more later.

Today I had a bit of spare time, and so created a new avatar for myself using inkscape and an old photo. It’s not too bad, even if I do say so myself, and in theory I can even make it work in SVG format. Fun. [tags]Inkscape,Art,Avatar[/tags] Addendum: Learn how to do it here.

For some reason, today I decided to make a picture of the earth from space, using the NASA Blue Marble Next Generation dataset, some infrared satellite data (from today, no less) and my trusty homebrew raytracer. Ten minutes of work, and I got the image on the right. Not too bad, even if it doesn’t […]

Today I learned something interesting while surfing the web: that somebody had made a simple program that can be used to compile your own custom maps for Garmin GPSes. Since I picked up a Garmin Legend CX recently, I thought that would be a good thing to play around with. So, tonight, I tried to […]

Did you ever have one of those weekends when you had too much rattling around in your skull to make any headway on any of it? That’s sort of what I’m up to this weekend. Rather than let it all rattle, I’ll toss some of it out here: I heard that OfficeDepot was liquidating their […]

It looks like I’ll be attending the Maker’s Faire in San Mateo coming up on April 22nd and 23rd. My proposal to show my Atari 2600 Enigma Machine was accepted, so I guess I get to setup a little table display and yack at people about writing programs for the old Atari 2600. If I […]

Josh over at tinyscreenfuls is digging some of the fancy “pencil sketch” effects that the Mac can do with its internal camera.  Back in 1998, I experimented with writing some filters that did much the same, with some examples that I generated shown on the right.   Macintosh?  I don’t need no steekin’ Macintosh. 🙂 And […]

Well, I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but here is what I know: It’s not hard to compile asterisk for the amd64, but… You need to be careful compiling the ztdummy kernel module: in particular, you must define USE_RTC when compiling, because the sourcefile incorrectly only checks for USE_RTC if __i386__ is defined, […]

Over the last couple of months, I had gradually decreased the number of computers in my office to just two (well, computers that have X86 architecture anyway), and I decided that I would like to have a new amd64 based machine. I priced out the cost of just building one from components, and found that […]

I spent a little while trying to figure this out, apparently the -r argument is significant: ffmpeg -i superman_the_mechanical_monsters.mpeg \ -title “Superman: The Mechanical Monsters” \ -s 320×240 -b 512 -ar 24000 -ab 64 -r 29.970030 -f psp M4V12345.MP4 The -title seemed fubarred, but the rest seems to work. I’ll refine this more later. Filenames […]

Well, the last 48 hours has been fun. I am taking a few day off before Christmas to go visit my mom and brother up in the Portland area, and I flew in Sunday night. I thought that I might document the few mistakes that I made during the trip so that others might be […]

Check these out with the red/blue 3D glasses. Kind of cool, huh? If you followed my tutorial on how to do this with black and white images, you can probably figure out how to do this. Basically, the red image is just the red channel of the left image, and the green and blue channels […]