brainwagon

Mostly this podcast concerns itself with my latest geeky project: writing programs for the old atari 2600. Why would anyone do this? Have a listen! Hear the sense of childish joy I take in wasting my time! In the podcast I mentioned my implementation of PDP-1 simulator so I could run the original Spacewar! game […]

I’ve been mucking around more with programming the Atari 2600, and have just begun to figure out the vagaries of moving the player missiles around. It’s complicated. Basically, as the video hardware scans from left to right, you set the horizontal position of a player by issuing a store to hits horizontal position register. The […]

From time to time, I get this curious nostalgia for the computers of my youth. Don’t get me wrong: I love having megaflops to burn, and would gleefully accept more. But sometimes I hearken back to the simpler days of my youth and my first computer: an Atari 400 that I bought with the money […]

Well, the destruction (and hopefully, eventual replacement) of my old rotting redwood retaining wall has begun. The guys really tore it up good today, hopefully, nice bricks will be soon replacing the crappy old wood. Whew. That will be one bit off my mind. I know nobody but me cares, but I’ll put pictures here.

The other day I was watching TV and saw an advertisement for One a Day Weight Smart Vitamins. Most of the diet plans that I’ve seen lately recommend augmenting your diet with vitamin supplements, something that I’ve done only irregularly through my year and a half attempt to reduce my weight. Since I was out […]

I’ve been thinking for quite some time that I need to make some cards that I can hand out to people when I meet them so that they can remember my blog. These aren’t really business cards, but rather just reminders. Here is my first (well, second actually) attempt: To illustrate what a geek I […]

I feel strangely sad by the following graph:

In a previous blog entry, I mentioned that I had picked up a $12 Mattel Juicebox that I was thinking about hacking. I’ve done relatively little with it since then, but this morning I felt compelled to at least convert a picture from normal jpeg format to the internal format used by the player, without […]

Courtesy of the Make blog, here are some instructions on building a very simple refracting telescope. I’ve done something like this before by scavenging lenses from broken binoculars I find a flea markets and mounting them into lengths of PVC pipe. Of course real telescope makers grind their own mirrors. 🙂

I do monitor various weblog indexers to see who is linking to this blog. Most of the time, they are really good at finding my own inter-site links, but occasionally I find out that I get links from unexpected sites. What was really cool was to discover that The MacAlba linked to me as one […]

I can’t really stop geeking even when on vacation with my wife. We stopped in at the Target in Napa to pick up some toothbrushes (I always forget to pack ’em) and found that they had the Mattel Juicebox on the clearance aisle. The Juicebox is a tiny little media player intended for kids, but […]

As a brief test of the macro capabilities of my video camera, here’s a brief clip of Sue’s new Betta splendens (Windows Media Video, sorry lads). It may look a bit washed out because I boosted the brightness (I filmed it in existing light, and it was a bit dark).

Well, today I wore my Polar heart rate watch to the gym, and downloaded this nice log of my 45 minute workout. I did 30 minutes on the treadmill, alternating a quarter mile at a four mile per hour pace, and a quarter mile of running at a five mile per hour pace. I then […]

Hey folks, I’ve passed some of my helpful technical tidbits on to you, it is time that some of you work for me. 🙂 I have a Nikon Coolpix 4500 that I want to control from, well, some bit of hardware that I have lying around. Ideally that would be Linux/FreeBSD/some Unix, but Windows would […]

I’ve got a lot of toys in my office. My friend Jeff and I used to play Starcraft online quite a bit, back when both of us were single guys living the high life. During that time I had just begun dating my wife, and so I have a number of toys that our son […]