brainwagon

The incredibly useful dpreview.com has an announcement for a new release of the image noise reduction program Neat Image. If you’ve got photos which are grainy because you are pushing your camera to the limits of its ISO setting, try putting Neat Image to work on it. I’ve blogged about it before, it’s very cool, […]

Isn’t it always the way, two days after I buy a DVD player, the same model goes on sale on Amazon and $10 cheaper with free shipping. Oh well. If anyone else needed one, check out Techbargains.com – Philips DVP642 DVD Player Deal.

I did some quick experiments to check the compatibility of video files that I converted and my new Philips DVP 642 DVD player. I wanted to check and see if ffmpeg would generate files which were compatible and at which bitrates and resolutions. The long and the short of it: everything sensible I tried worked. […]

On a whim, I decided I needed a new DVD player. It’s not like I don’t have DVD players, but the one I had in my living room had one disadvantage: it was old enough that it wouldn’t play any DVDs that I burned. It’s simply old enough that it wasn’t an issue. Eric Haines […]

The Make blog listed the Juicebox, a cute little embedded microcontroller board based upon the Atmel AVR chips. Pretty neat.

Well, my new Polar S410 heart rate monitor seems to work: I wore it for the first time at the gym last night when I did my combination of interval training on the recumbent bicycles and 15 minutes of elliptical training. On the right you can see my resulting pulse rates, edited slightly to remove […]

Sweet Zombie Jesus, does Microsoft need some lessons on introducing products? It’s a rhetorical question: the answer is yes, yes, they do. Yesterday was the unveiling of the Xbox 360, the new generation of Xbox which should be available before the end of the year (unless of course the Longhorn team is in charge, in […]

I ran across a cool Windows program the other day: NASA World Wind. It’s an application that allows you to view landsat and shuttle radar topography data from any view on earth. What’s doubly cool is that it has high resolution photography of urban centers throughout the US, at considerably beter resolution than the imagery […]

Looks like I won’t be left out in the cold when Microsoft releases their Windows Mobile upgrade later this year: Aximsite – Dell to offer Windows Mobile 5 to X50 owners Dell will offer a Windows Mobile version 5.0 software upgrade for the Dell Aximâ„¢ X50 handheld family later this year. The new software is […]

It appears that Dell has released a new ROM update (A03) for the Dell Axim x50v. Haven’t tried this out yet, but I will this evening. Seems like it should address a couple of the relatively minor problems I’ve had with it: Improved the compatibility with certain CF cards Improved the power management within the […]

I ran across a reference to the patent on the wheel system used by NASA in their Mars Rovers, and thought that Patent 4,840,394 – Articulated Suspension System might be worth noting for future examination. A vehicle is provided which maintains a substantially constant weight, and therefore traction, on all wheels despite one wheel moving […]

A hacker’s project of old, perhaps as would have populated Make magazine had it existed in July of 1887: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Scientific American Supplement, July 9, 1887 HOW TO MAKE A STAR FINDER. Being all of wood, it is easily made by any one who can use a few tools, the only […]

As a public service, I thought that this might be of interest: a Python program to load your iPod Shuffle.

I recently began to have difficulties with my Windows XP box. For reasons which were not clear (and given XP’s “weld the hood shut” architecture, impossible to diagnose) I could not install Visual C++ on the machine. I realized that over the last couple of years, I had acquired a lot of cruft in my […]

If you’ve got your copy of Make, you know what this is all about. Feral Robotic Dogs