brainwagon

A classic illusion is the hollow face illusion, where a concave casting of the face appears convex. This is demonstrated neatly here, with a simple cardboard cutout whose head appears to track you as you move around. Very neat. There are lots of other cool illusions on the parent website, check them out too.

Wired is running this interview with a lawyer for Tivo regarding their new changes to respect broadcast flags for pay-per-view content. While it’s bad news for consumers, I think it is refreshing to hear a lawyer speak this candidly. Best exchange: WIRED: TiVo has always been about empowering the viewer. Why change now? ZINN: Macrovision […]

If you would like to wander back to the days of the Keith Partridge and Greg Brady and make a really groovy pad, you can go learn How to Make Lava Lamps at Oozing Goo. They also listed the two patents on the Lava Lamp, namely U.S. Patent 3,570,156 and U.S. Patent 3,387,396. Frankly, the […]

*** PONGMECHANIK *** is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. Don’t miss the explanatory video either.

While reading today’s slashdot article on hacking the RoboSapien, I turned up a link to the Unofficial Robosapien hacks and mods site. Some good information about the IR protocols used to control the little robot. You can also look at Servo Magazine’s Hack-a-Sapien contest.

UNIX® on the Game Boy Advance is an implementation of the 5th version of the Unix Operating System for the ARM chip inside the gameboy. To do this, it runs SIMH, a PDP-11 simulator which has been ported to a bunch of different systems. The original RK05 disk image is combined with the PDP-11 simulator […]

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 […]

Alex Maclean thinks of Perl programming as a type of performance art. He improvises new programs that generate music while standing on stage. He explains the framework he created and how he uses it to control sound generating application.

Apple has just released a new iMac G5, and damn, it does look awfully cute. I like the trend of shrinking the footprint of computers, and in the grand scheme of things, the prices aren’t terrible considering it includes a 17″ LCD monitor and a new 1.6ghz G5 processor for only $1300. Very cool stuff.

BoingBoing reports that Joshua Kingberg was arrested at the RNC in New York for operating his bicycle mounted dot matrix printer. It’s an enormously cool hack: you basically ride the bike and it leaves a message in its trail in the same way a dot matrix printer works. The message is written in a water […]

Those lads at engadget.com have a nice tutorial as part of their How To Tuesday series on producing 3-D anaglyphs using free software. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a nice link.

Engadget reports on The Wave Pillow, an Internet enabled pillow that connects to a server and checks the waves at a beach that you specify, and then vibrates in time to the waves. Supposedly then, you can decide to either wake up, grab a surfboard and miss your classes, or alternatively roll over, go back […]

Just an update on the Linksys WRT54GS router that I bought. I’m as yet too chicken to reflash it, but I did install BatBox on my system. It just creates a ramdisk and installs some basic software onto the system, including a simple telnetd so you can log in. If you look at /proc/cpuinfo, you […]

GeekDIY has a nice little project: How to make a Smoker from a Trash Can. It’s very similar to Alton Brown’s cardboard box smoker, but a little more refined and permanent. Interestingly enough, when Alton Brown was interviewed on NPR, he actually constructed very similar smoker. I could really use some smoked salmon, I’ll have […]

Slashdot is running an article about a Cornell group who built an unmanned model aircraft using rather conventional hardware and Microsoft Windows XP embedded. What intrigued me most about the story was that the group tested their algorithms for flight control by using them to control a simulated aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator. A brief […]