brainwagon

I did some quick experiments to check the compatibility of video files that I converted and my new Philips DVP 642 DVD player. I wanted to check and see if ffmpeg would generate files which were compatible and at which bitrates and resolutions. The long and the short of it: everything sensible I tried worked. […]

After yesterday’s post, I decided that I’d like to try to make some better reflection maps. So I shot this image of my office reflecting in a Christmas tree ball. The image is pretty noisy because my office isn’t brightly lit. (Addendum: I also had the camera set for outdoor white balance, which makes the […]

Well, according to the Bay To Breakers website, I came in 21,753rd. Carmen came in 21,747th. Yesterday it seemed to be different: we saw 2174 and 2175 which didn’t seem right to us (there were lots of people ahead of us) but maybe their website had a glitch. My official time was around 2:42:21, but […]

Eric’s exploration of digital infrared photography over on flutterby has urged me to try to take some more infrared photographs. Toward that end, I’ve created Experiments in Infrared Digital Photography in my brainwagon photo gallery. So far, there are only three images, all derived from a single shot of some plants that I did yesterday. […]

I’m bored, so I decided to amuse myself with a self-referential puzzle. This post on brainwagon.org (including the title “a self-referential puzzle” but not any footers) contains thirteen As, four Bs, four Cs, seven Ds, fifty five Es, nineteen Fs, five Gs, ten Hs, twenty nine Is, fourteen Ls, four Ms, thirty three Ns, seventeen […]

I’ve made no progress on my robot project, but the makeblog linked to Wiper Motor Page, which had a LOT of useful information about using wiper motors. Stashed for future reference.

Thanks to Susan for telling me about zhongwen.com, really cool site for learning chinese characters. I’m not sure how long this particular brain worm will last, but until it does fades, I’ll have a nice online reference for my exploration of Chinese characters. If you know zero Chinese (like me), you can still use this […]

I wanted to get a file with the schedule for all the major league baseball games this season, but remarkably, it seemed difficult. Sure, you can surf over to each team in the league, and by clicking through their websites, eventually get to a file with comma separated values in it, but it’s fairly tedious, […]

I’ve got a very simple LiveCD of FreeBSD booting off of CDROM. If you are brave, you can surf over to itsyBSD.org and download the iso image, burn it to CD and give it a try. It doesn’t install anything to any hard disks, so nothing can be hurt by giving it a try, but […]

Well, I’ve decided on a name for my tiny FreeBSD LiveCD project: itsyBSD, pronouced “itsybitsy”. 🙂 I haven’t got any files to download yet, but if you click the link you’ll end up at a wiki which will hold my documentation for the project. Hopefully in the next week I’ll have an iso you can […]

Well, I figured out why my attempt to create a LiveCD for FreeBSD was dying: init was compiled with shared libraries, and something was apparently screwy. I replaced it with a version of init which was statically linked, and then found out that all my other binaries were also still dynamically linked, and they failed […]

Congratulations and huzzahs for me. By dropping 67 lbs and exercising over the last year, I managed to cut my total cholesterol from 262 to 200, with my LDL going from a high 202 to a much more reasonable 138. Still got a ways to go on the weight loss, but things are looking good!

Well, I’ve bit the bullet. I’ve decided that I have a couple of projects that could benefit from my own ability to produce a customized version of Unix that can boot from a CD (or alternatively, a flash memory device), so I’ve embarked upon trying to follow the path of others who have gone before […]

You know, the thing I really like about Chinese calligraphy isn’t that I have an abiding interest in China, or in learning the Chinese language, or even in trying to become more comfortable with a brush and ink. It really is just that for the couple of hours that our classes tend to last, I […]

I installed Damn Small Linux onto one of those 64 megabyte USB dongle thingies, and walked it around to various machines to see if I could get it to boot. Results: My old Shuttle SV24: no dice, didn’t boot. My laptop: sadly no, doesn’t boot. My HP desktop machine: yep, boots and works fine. It’s […]