brainwagon

A while ago, I wrote a simple script to fetch pictures from one of the Mount St. Helens volcano cams. I only ran it for a short time, but I collected an afternoon’s worth of images and just now got arround to assembling them into a short MPEG movie. The script was remarkably easy to […]

During my last audio podcast, I promised that I was going to make a short video showing how I record my audiopodcast sessions, and here is the resulting video, encoded in as a Windows Media file. It runs for 6:42, and is about 10Mbytes in size. (Normally, I would use a more standard format like […]

Well, I’ve burned a few DVD blanks today just to see what I can do. For source material, I decided to go to the feature film section of archive.org. They have a bunch of films available in MPEG2 format, all fairly good quality and ready for download with minimal transcoding. For my experiments, I chose […]

Well, I finally caved in. DVD burners and blanks are now cheap enough that burning CD-Rs seemed like a waste of time, so I went ahead and picked up an inexpensive Toshiba model while at Fry’s yesterday. A quick bit of surgery and it was neatly installed in my server box, and I then set […]

Well, my week long vacation is slowly slipping away, and it appears that I’ll do relatively little programming during the 11 consecutive days that I have off. Still, I’ve worked my way through a couple of niggly tasks that have been nagging me for a long time, so my time isn’t entirely wasted. Today I […]

I recently reinstalled my Hauppauge Win-TV card in my server box, and have been working a bit at getting my webcam software up and running. But rather than just play with occasional image capture, I was wondering what the possibilities would be for recording live video for later playback. So, I embarked on a bit […]

Since discovering that the classic baseball tune Take Me Out To The Ballgame was in the public domain, I decided that I might like to have a version of it that I knew was free to use however I might like to. I found out about the ABC Music Project. These programs were principally used […]

I’ve been reading papers lately about using image processing techniques to remove artifacts and damage from old motion picture film. Some old films are remarkably pristine, but some, like my copy of Douglas Fairbanks’ 1924 version of Thief of Bagdhad show lots of wear and tear. I think it will be possible to write an […]

The conventional wisdom of baseball is that five game series are easier for bad teams to win than seven game series. But how much easier? I made a graph: The red line is seven games, the blue, a five game series. The difference is about 3% max.

While watching the Athletics lose another game (sigh), I dusted off this paper and coded up a quick implementation. It seems to work, although I’m having some problem with the tone mapping bits, and haven’t bothered getting any color into it yet. It’s not really very useful, except perhaps for making backgrounds for your desktop. […]

I was mulling over the mathematics of the World Series in one of my more bored moments, and decided to write some simple Python code to test an idea. The question underlying these graphs is essentially this: given that the probability of Team #1 winning any individual game is a probability p, what is the […]

Just another example of an image that I scanned from the Dover book and colorized. I kind of like it! Now, the correction: in reviewing Fishman’s book on the Public Domain, I am reminded that the term “copyright free” is not synonymous with “public domain”. From Fishman, page 3/27, The words “copyright free” are often […]

I was looking for some clip art that I could use on my website, so last time I was at the bookstore I acquired a copy of Dover’s Old Fashioned Animal Cuts, a book of copyright-free images ready to be scanned. It’s a fairly nice collection of hundreds of black and white images which are […]

Today’s weigh in saw me give back last week’s loss. Not too surprising given the fact that I have been eating a bit more. A company picnic full of yummy barbecue food probably didn’t help much, but there were plenty of other times when excessive snacking happened. Oh well, I shall try to do better […]

I have a Canon LIDE 20 scanner, a super cheap LED flatbed scanner. I figured there was no way that it would possibly be supported under Linux. After all, none of my other scanners ever was, largely because I am so cheap I never buy SCSI scanners. But remarkably, it does work, and right out […]