A promising refinement of the $14 Steadicam device described in the first issue of MAKE Magazine. I subscribed to MAKE and loved the first issue.
The modified design adds a tripod head and makes changes to avoid needing to drill through steel — which should make it much easier to build. It’s a [...]
Braaaaains.
Once dismissed as a simple collection of relay ganglia, the enteric nervous system is now recognized as a complex, integrative brain in its own right. Although we still are unable to relate complex behaviors such as gut motility and secretion to the activity of individual neurons, work in that area is proceeding briskly–and [...]
SymmetryLab’s Machine is fun to play with. You can assemble spinners and elastics and pistons into machines. Nearly as fun to play with as that physics/machine Java applet from a while back.
For as long as I’ve had this machine, I’ve been annoyed by relatively infrequent graphics wig outs. Windows XP was running out of GDI resources and everything went downhill. Nothing could paint itself, windows couldn’t be created, and generally things went very badly. I could delay the need to reboot [...]
I signed up for an Amazon Web Services API key and wrote a script to read from the current version of my book barcode scanner station.
The barcode scanner reads a UPC and sends it to the STAMP. Code running on the STAMP determines if the code is an “bookland” UPC [...]
The Google APIs are neat but I was never really attracted to write anything to use it. The only application I could think of would have been too much work because the platform had no SOAP implementation and it wasn’t worth writing one for what I had in mind.
When I saw the announcement [...]
I need to find an updated version of HashCash soon. In the meantime, I turned on a bunch of bristly comment-spam-unfriendly options, such as “you must be registered to comment”.
UPDATE: Some evidence exists that HashCash has been worked around by some comment spammers. So I guess it’s time to roll my [...]
A while back the data disk in my Linux machine failed. That machine served me well for around 4 years. Since I wanted a faster Linux server anyway, I built a new machine and migrated the data (from the backup). The old machine got pushed into a corner for eventual [...]
I followed the super-easy instructions to upgrade to WordPress 1.5. I’d been waiting for this release before sinking any time into my template. So now there’s no excuse.
Update: Alas, HashCash doesn’t work with WordPress 1.5 yet. I’ll look into it more later.
I’ve been exploring a couple projects lately:
Build a MythTV machine. To this end, I’ve picked up a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350, pcHDTV HD-3000, Radio Shack VHF, UHF and HDTV Indoor TV Antenna, and a 200G Maxtor disk. I’ve put the HDTV card and disk in what used to be my XP desktop machine. [...]
Since addressing comment spam a bit ago, I haven’t seen any further incidents of comment spam.
Comment spam struck for the first time tonight. In retailiation, I’ve installed DNS-anti-spam and Wordpress Hashcash.
We’ll see how it goes.
I re-subscribed to World of Warcraft (before my previously paid for month ran out, so there was never actually a time when I wasn’t subscribed). They made substantial progress on the stability woes. It’s not perfect, but I’ve been able to play as much as I’ve felt like lately.
Last night I read about Wil Wheaton’s experience with the Debian Sarge installer rc2. He said it’s easy to use and works. I’ve been a Debian user for years on my servers. Every few years I make a half-hearted attempt to see what Debian’s desktop environment is like, but [...]
I’ve cancelled my World of Warcraft account. I advise anyone considering getting WoW to wait until they get it to work.
WoW apparently was more stable during the beta.
Because of they handle refunds (they don’t give them), I’m paid up through 2/4. If it works by then I may [...]
The friend I mentioned in the first post about Watcher has released Watchr, his take on this app.
Greasemonkey is a firefox extension that is to JavaScript as user stylesheets are to CSS.
I can’t decide if I’m fascinated or horrified.
Last night at around 1:00 a.m., A friend and I were discussing an application that watched a Flickr RSS feed and popped-up IM-alert style notifications when new photos were posted.
Over the course of the next 8 hours or so, Watcher was born.
It’s my first released application written in wxPython. It’s crude and [...]
A few months ago I started using an RSS reader to help read a lot more blogs (and sites) than I had been regularly reading. Reading all these blogs has in some part exacerbated the itch I have to write things and post them to the Internet where, presumably, nobody will read them. [...]
The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software is an interesting read.