brainwagon

The motors that I ordered from American Science and Surplus arrived this morning. I got a pair of Trico windshield wiper motors, originally destined for installation in a Saturn, but now pinched to serve a more noble purpose. Haven’t powered ’em up yet, next stop: a deep cycle battery or gel cell. Nothing like the […]

Well, I am now closing in on a working MythTV installation (I hope), although a few problems remain. The quality of video coming from this old Brooktree 878 card is terrible, and as yet I haven’t been able to get sound working reliably. Besides prebuffering incorrectly, something having to do with the mixer is wonky: […]

Underneath my relentless attention, I believe I’ve figured out one of the problems with my SV24 computer that I complained about earlier. I complained that something appeared to be shorting out. Closer thought told me that it sounded like the same sound the computer makes when the reset button is pushed. Worth checking out, think […]

What do you do when you have the flu? Well, I sit down and try to debug a computer system which has become unreliable. In particular, the little gem is the gadget pictured on the right, my old SV24 with an 850Mhz Celeron Processor in it. I’ve thought about turning it into a MythTV box, […]

Glancing around the surplus market yielded the following computer which seems like it would be entirely capable of driving my as yet unstarted robotics project. Dell Optiplex GX1 PIII 450Mhz./ 128MB/ 6GB/ CD(Desktop) I found out that tigersurplus has the same sort of systems for less money, but it’s about the same when you add […]

Well, in an effort to push my as-yet unstarted robotics project forward, I decided to begin as I always do: by spending money! I ordered two windshield wiper motors from American Science and Surplus which I hope will do for powering my little robotic minion around. I’ll have to do an evaluation of their power […]

I must admit to a certain fascination with ancient Egypt, so it was kind of cool to note that the Library of Congress has a number of nice photographs in their collection for download, including stereo pictures like this one. A dab of the Gimp, and you can repair some of the minor tears and […]

Well, I couldn’t resist. I went ahead and bought one of the aforementioned Linksys NSLU2 boxes (colloquially referred to as a slug) and began tinkering. It’s a fun little box, and along with the help of guys on the irc channel #nslu2-linux I’ve got it running with a 20gb drive attached. In fact, I even […]

If anyone has been following this blog for any period of time, you know I’m a bit of a gizmo freak. It’s not that I have the latest and greatest cell phone or PDA. Actually, I’m pretty much a cheapskate, and I don’t like tossing huge sums of money just following the latest trendy thing. […]

After a bit of frustration with the sound quality on Linux, I decided to go back to ground I’m more familiar with me: I installed FreeBSD 5.3 onto the laptop. Curiously enough, FreeBSD has a project similar to the aforementioned ndiswrapper: called Project Evil. Surprisingly (somewhat) to me, it appears to work as well. I’m […]

In the last couple of days, I’ve been targetted by referer spam bots. These dorks access pages on a weblog repeatedly in an attempt to get their referer tag listed on your home page. I’ve been trying to figure out how to combat this behavior, and can see two different ways of dealing with it: […]

Tom Duff pointed me at Traditional (?) Implementations of a Phase-Vocoder: The Tricks of the Trade by Götzen, Bernardini and Arfib. Useful Matlab code included.

Well, today I wasn’t feeling especially well, but I did manage to get a tiny bit of tinkering done. My idea was to implement the framework necessary for playing with a vocoder as a first step toward creating some more robotic voice filters and experimenting with pitch shifting. I noticed that the Fast Fourier Transform […]

Every once in a while, I want to generate some pure sine waves for audio purposes, and I have to go digging around to find this simple technique, so I thought I would write it down here. Suppose that you are trying to generate a 440Hz (middle A, if memory serves) sine wave sampled at […]

As part of my dose of IT Conversations recently, I listened to this interview with Stephen Wolfram, author of the book A New Kind of Science. Wolfram is an odd duck, but I found his talk to be suprisingly good, and he raised an interesting question: do random programs do anything interesting? He decided to […]