brainwagon

Okay, okay, I know I am choking the bandwidth on my page by putting out these images, but here is an ammonite fossil done the same way, with some more minor tweaking in GIMP. This also more clearly demonstrates that the scanners have considerable depth of field. You can look here for more inspiration.

I have this old trilobite fossil that I bought from the Discovery Store. I find it kind of neat to have a specimen from 530 million years ago sitting on my desk. I made this picture by plopping the fossil onto the flatbed scanner at work and just scanning it at 300dpi. The original scan […]

I admit it, I have a ham radio license. I’m KF6KYI, a lowly Tech licensee. I went through a brief phase where I learned alot about radio, but then it kind of fell off for me as I realized that few people were interested in doing the kinds of work with radio that I was. […]

The project that I’ve spent the most time on lately is actually myself. Last December I was having some health difficulties and visited my doctor, who reported that my weight was as high as it had ever been (a staggering 323 lbs, ouch!) and that my cholesterol and blood pressure weren’t looking much better. I […]

I’m a bit of a classic cryptography nut, and I also have had a lot of fun writing bits of Python code. Python is awfully good at sucking up text files and performing statistics and the like, so I thought I would go ahead and describe some of the fun things I’ve been doing. I’ve […]

I’ve upgraded this blog to use the latest release of WordPress. It’s unfortunate that the software mingles functionality and appearance in the way that it does, it makes upgrading more painful than it should be. In particular I had to make some changes to the index.php to rearrange the appearance of the menu portion to […]

Well, the IPOD is working, if not flawlessly. It seems to get it to work I need to plug the iPod into the USB card and then plug the combo into my laptop. Other combinations seem to work unreliably. But I’ve managed to put about 2 days worth of audio on it, and have been […]

I have begun work on a program to play checkers, tentatively called Milhouse. I’m mostly doing it to keep my programming and research skills tuned up, but also because I’ve always enjoyed working on game playing programs. To make it more interesting, I’ve decided to write it as a literate program using Norm Ramsey’s simple […]

This weekend I had the pleasure of driving out to visit “Steamboat Ed” Haas. Ed is a heck of an amazing guy who (among other things) has his own steam powered launch and has worked on Battlebots. He nicely had a bunch of people out to his newly completed 2-story shop, and we had a […]

I’ve become my own latest project. During a recent checkup, my doctor noted my increasing weight (323 lbs) and my high cholesterol. He recommended that I join Weight Watchers, begin a regular exercise routine, and come back to see him in a few months to have my cholesterol rechecked. Well, on my own I managed […]

Over Christmas my wife and son presented me with a couple of new Siamese Fighting Fish, or bettas. Betta is actually a fish genus, with many species, the most common of which is Betta Splendens. They are called Siamese Fighting Fish because they are aggressive nasty little fighters, and you can’t keep more than a […]

I’ve got a lot of books. I have no idea really how many. For a long time I wish I actually had a master list of all the books I own. This goes beyond mere anal retentiveness: it dawns on me that I probably have thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars worth of […]

Okay, it’s nothing really innovative. Jef Poskanzer was the first guy I know who did it. Then my friend Jeff Eaton did it. Now I’ve done it: write a program to loot images of of Microsoft’s TerraServer. Basically I wrote a simple Python script that when given a latitude/longitude in the US, constructs an html […]

Along with my usual rash of bills, today’s mail call included a DVD from Project Gutenberg. This CD contains 4 gigabytes of public domain texts, about 9500 individual volumes. Nifty! A single DVD which could be the start of a serious library. I’ve got some ideas for projects that make use of some of these […]

Recently I’ve been trying to establish better wireless networking in my house, and toward that end I purchased a couple of books on wireless networking. The first was Jeff Duntemann’s Drive by WiFi Guide, which is despite a rather egotistical and strange title, actually fairly good. The second was Building Wireless Community Networks. While less […]