brainwagon

While experimenting with Icecast2, I tried out the icesclient. It very nicely handles either live or precompressed streams, and can provide audio encoded reencoded at lower bit rates. But this seemed to be overkill to me: I already had a number of streams encoded at the rate that I wanted. Not only was it wasteful […]

After finding an mp3 of the original War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater broadcast, I decided to try to experiment a bit with experimenting with Internet Radio. I setup a small icecast server, and then wrote a small client using libshout to actually send the 24kbps mp3 stream to the icecast […]

While mucking around with my GPS, I immediately thought about providing my own map capability. The question immediately arose: where can I get street level map data which can be freely used? It turns out that the US Census Bureau maintains such data for the United States and various US territories. You can order the […]

I just recently bought a new laptop, and on a total spur of the moment bought a Delorme Earthmate GPS to go along with it. It’s a pretty slick little unit that plugs into the USB port. After playing with Street Atlas 2003 for a few minutes (and getting directed over speedbump after speedbump) I […]

I’ve been trying to hone my Python skills. Python has lots of nice commands for manipulating text, including standard libraries for doing base64 encoding. After a few abortive tries, I came up with. #!/usr/bin/env python data=””” aWYgX19uYW1lX18gPT0gJ19fbWFpbl9fJzoKICAgIGltcG9ydCBzeXMsIGJhc2U2NAogICAgc3lz LnN0ZG91dC53cml0ZSgnIyEvdXNyL2Jpbi9lbnYgcHl0aG9uXG5kYXRhPSIiIicrZGF0YSsnIiIi XG4nKQogICAgc3lzLnN0ZG91dC53cml0ZShiYXNlNjQuZGVjb2Rlc3RyaW5nKGRhdGEpKQo= “”” if __name__ == ‘__main__’: import sys, base64 sys.stdout.write(‘#!/usr/bin/env python\ndata=”””‘+data+'”””\n’) sys.stdout.write(base64.decodestring(data)) (You can download the code […]

I’ve been experimenting with digital photography using my Nikon 4500, and have took some kind of cool pictures. The palm on the right was shot with a Wratten 89b in bright daylight. A little photoshopping, and it looks pretty nifty. Anyway, I’m constantly on the lookout for new links, and ran accross SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Ten […]

Je suis en vacance au Paris, mais je vais aller chez moi souvent. A toute a l’heure! P.S. You can get your slashdot fix for 1 euro an hour at the cyber cafe near the Jardin du Luxembourg.

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing my own weblog, and toward that end have been playing a bit with Python and the Webware application framework. It has some nice ideas, and I’m slowly making some progress. Witness the following for an (often in flux) example.

I’ve been trying to tune up some of my telescopes for the upcoming Mars event. In late August, Mars will be closer to the earth than it has been in all of recorded history. While surfing around, I noticed that there was a Python package called PyEphem which provided Python bindings for the popular Xephem […]

The problem with the web is that sometimes you hit a website that drags you off into a direction completely unrelated to anything you’ve really considered before. This happened to me most recently when I encountered a site which described the work of John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer who designed a television system that […]

Well, I didn’t try to take any pictures of the lunar eclipse, but I did try to take a picture of the post-full moon using the maximum zoom setting on my Nikon 4500. Exposure was for 1/60 second at f/5.1, and was a simple handheld exposure. The image was cropped from the normal 3.8 megapixel […]

I have to admit that I’m a pretty big fan of CSI. Not the crappy new CSI: Miami, but the original one. It gets Tivo’ed at my house all the time, as well as many CourtTV shows like Forensic Files. The previous blog entry got me thinking about aquiring fingerprints clandestinely, and I thought about […]

Since Carmen and I both just got new digital cameras, we are taking a lot more photos and Carmen wanted me to create a simple way for her to put her photos on the web and to organize them. I used some of the ideas that I got from writing my primitive blosxom clone, and […]

I love the new Nikon, and have had some fun playing around with it. I used Panorama Factory to stitch together 11 images to construct a view of Pixar that is 16500 pixels wide. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a 77 megabyte TIFF, so I thought I’d just give you the smaller 2048 pixel […]

I’m planning an anniversary trip to Paris with the missus, and decided that it was time to retire our aging Kodak 210+ camera and buy something new. We decided that we would each buy each other a new camera: I got Carmen a Canon A70, a very nice 3M pixel camera that is both small […]