brainwagon

A bit racier, but kind of cool. Wish the source material had a bit better dynamic range.

If you’ve got a pair of red/blue stereo glasses, try looking at the ones below: I’ll comment more on how I made these later.

A couple of days ago I published some images that I made by shooting video of a shiny metallic juggling ball. I went out yesterday in search of a better reflector. I visited a couple of specialty industrial suppliers, hoping to score some nice shiny ball bearings, maybe 2″ in diameter. Unfortunately, 1″ ball bearings […]

I’ve been playing a bit of with video taping reflections from a shiny reflecting ball, and then undoing the map to construct a 360 degree view. You can either view these as normal jpeg images: Or you can load them into a java applet like PTViewer: Or, you can use the individual frames to make […]

I’ve been meaning to do a unique (well, fairly unique) hack for a while. I’ve had the database of major league baseball players from The Baseball Archive loaded in mysql for a while, and I’ve thought of creating a little sidebar gadget that shows all the major leaguers who were born on today’s date. Well, […]

Well, I have achieved a modest amount of success! Yesterday, I burned my first EPROM for my Atari 2600 project. After figuring out what I was stupidly doing wrong, it worked without problem, and I stuck the chip into my Atari Age carrier board, stuffed it into the Atari 2600, and, it worked! Just like […]

I was watching the previously mentioned MPEG of The Phantom of the Opera with an eye toward cleaning up it, and found that by and large, it really is dreadful. The transfer seems very poorly focussed, so getting any reasonable detail out of it seemed difficult. But, I thought I’d experiment anyway. I extracted five […]

While I was encoding videos over the weekend, I wrote a simple little filter to average consecutive frames to produce less noisy versions of title cards. I tested it on 25 frames from the titles of The Vampire Bat. It looks a little soft because I haven’t worked out the registration, but it nicely eliminated […]

Well, my EPROM burner from mcumall arrived, and I’m now got all the hardware bits ready to burn a cartridge for my old Atari 2600. Now all I need to do is finish the programming. I worked on it a bit last weekend, added page flipping and worked on getting the user interface better. In […]

I spent some time this weekend playing around with Free World Dialup. What is that? FWD allows you to make free phone calls over any broadband connection using devices that follow current accepted Internet Standards. This can be a “plain old telephone” with an IP adapter, an IP based phone or any number of free […]

Well, a few minutes of Postscript programming, and I created the label on the right for my Atari 2600 programming project. In the next couple of days, I should have an EPROM programmer in hand, I’ll be able to burn my own cartridge of my Enigma simulator, stick this label on it, and call the […]

Contrary to appearances, I actually try to read blogs of people who are perhaps a bit different than me. I do this to help fight against the perception (mostly my own) that I’m a monochromatic personality, interested only in a few geeky topics. Lisa Williams is such a blogger, who writes about a number of […]

Well, a couple more hours of debugging has made the basics of my Atari 2600 project work. Have I mentioned what it is yet? No? Well, it’s an implementation of the German World War II three rotor crypto machine commonly known as the Enigma. I wrote a simulator of the machine in C a few […]

Well, today I added a block cursor that I could move around (first real time I’ve written a general motion code for the player missile graphics, kind of whacky). Figured out the joystick handling and even added some primitive (and I do mean primitive) sounds. I also picked up some real Atari 2600 hardware to […]

My Atari 2600 programming projects needed two displays to enter characters on, so I built a little 5×6 matrix of characters (six characters are about the maximum you can put on a horizontal line). Progress!