brainwagon

If you haven’t heard of Theo Jansen and his incredible walking machines, I can’t do them justice with words. Check this out: His work is accessible from strandbeest.com. I find his creations amazingly cool. And others do as well, even hamsters (although cats seem less impressed): But while I’ve found these things fascinating, I didn’t […]

The chaps over at the Batsocks blog sell a cute little gadget called the “Tellymate”: a nice little serial->video converter that is very, very simple. It uses a single Atmel AVR Mega, and handful of other extra components to implement a full character mapped 38×25 character display terminal which reads characters from a serial input […]

I needed a graphic of a flag that I could scale to whatever size I needed. About 10 minutes of Postscript hacking with the specifications in Wikipedia yielded the following results: Sadly, the syntax highlighter that I have here doesn’t know about PostScript, so I’ll just have to add it here. %!PS % % % […]

I’m intrigued by various uses for embedded processors, and so are my readers. I hadn’t seen this particular microcontroller board before, the “Teensy”, which is very similar to the Arduino, except that it is uses an ATMEL AVR chip with a direct support for USB. The link also points at a nifty interface to “soft […]

What can I say? I was bored on the way home yesterday, and decided to record a 23 minute podcast, reviewing two of my moderately recent gadget purchases: The Delphi SKYFI2 receiver for XM satellite radio. The Panasonic DMC-TZ1 digital camera, a compact five megapixel camera with 10x optical zoom. I also gave a brief […]

It’s been a busy week for me, wading through piles of SIGGRAPH sketch reviews, so I haven’t had too much inclination to spend more time in front of a computer.   But I did find this article linked on the make blog: little tips about making rc micro_helicopter.  A very cool micro helicopter, which used a […]

What more needs to be said? [tags]Nuclear Bomb Computer,Slide Rule[/tags]

The Only Pen a Drunk Could Ask For – Gizmodo So you’re at your favorite sports bar watching the big game with your friends. Before heading out and driving home, perhaps it’d be a good idea to make sure you’re not legally intoxicated. At this point, it’s just a matter of whipping out the Alcohol […]

Via the Make Blog, LinuxDevices tells you how to run linux on a JuiceBox.  I bought one of these a while ago, and haven’t done much with it, other than take one of my flickr pictures and copy it to a memory card and display it as show in the picture.  I’ll have to goof […]

Feel the need to lob tennis balls at those who oppose you? Try checking out these rather nice plans for a small trebuchet. With such a mighty seige engine, none dare oppose your military might! Seriously though, these things are: interesting mechanical devices fun to play with and excellent for tossing water balloons. Unless of […]

Courtesy of superpositioned.com, here’s just about the simplest motor that I can imagine. Only 4 parts (battery, wire, screw, magnet). Too cool. [tags]Science Fair[/tags]

Over the last couple of months, I had gradually decreased the number of computers in my office to just two (well, computers that have X86 architecture anyway), and I decided that I would like to have a new amd64 based machine. I priced out the cost of just building one from components, and found that […]

Well, I spent $40 for the Windows Mobile 5 upgrade for my Dell, and it’s been a pain in the ass ever since.  Apparently I’m not alone, since now Dell officially lists a downgrade for the Axim: yep, it’s back to 2003 SE for the little guy.  Maybe it will stop blinking its stupid LED, […]

Another link courtesy of the make blog forums, this time for a brand spanking new [tag]Lego[/tag] blog. It’s too new to tell whether it’s going to be of lasting value, but I’m impressed so far. Subscribe to NextBrick or just surf on over and check out their cool Technic knitting machine or the P-38 and […]

I saw this on digg this morning: A hacker has taken the next step and accomplished the unthinkable, hacking the 2.60 Firmware PSP! It is now possible to play homebrew games on your PSP no matter what firmware it has. Sony, give up on trying to stop us! I haven’t tried this out yet (the […]