Technology

Free Software Advocacy

By AMH

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Free Software Foundation member’s meeting at MIT, and during the lunch break I overheard an interesting conversation. I cluster of five stereotypical geeks (male, bearded, pony-tailed, etc.) were talking. One of thm was regailing his friends ith a story of a clueless woman he had the misfortune of listening to talk about her computer usage. This woman was talking to a friend about typesetting a paper using LaTeX – it was later determined that she worked in some capacity in a physics lab. She described how it was good for equations … Continue reading Free Software Advocacy

Illustrating Tags

By AMH

It’s been making the rounds quickly, but if you haven’t seen the Visual HTML Jokes pool over at flickr, it’s worth a browse. Some are just puns, but others actually do a nice job illustrating what the tags do, like the header tag/skyline one. I could see a selection of these actually making for a nice presentation of html tags in a class….

A Roomba that doesn’t vacuum

By AMH

I am the excitedly proud new owner of a iRobot Create, basically a Roomba with the vaccuum parts ripped out and an attachment to let you program it in C or C++. So, first, I’ve got to go in to my office tomorrow and retrieve my copy of Kernighan & Ritchie. There’s also a guide to WinAVR (the robot’s development toolset for C/C++ programs) over at SourceForge that seems pretty good. Though – damn – I haven’t had to deal with makefiles in forever… Woooooo! Robots!!!!!!!

Mini Topic Portals

By AMH

There seems to have been an explosion of carnivals since the last time I browsed the Blog Carnival Index. If you haven’t seen a carnival before, it is a group that arranges for people to collect and link to posts on a particular theme on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s hard to imagine you won’t find something to interest you if you scan through their listings. Just now I lost myself in the latest entries from the Books Carnival, the Carnival of Chocolate, and the Carnival of Game Production. Carnivals seem to come and go, but they’re an interesting … Continue reading Mini Topic Portals

Take it apart…

By AMH

I’ve got a bunch of random integrated circuits left over from my intersession course so I think I’m going to try these tips on how to uncap/open various integrated circuits on a few of them [via Make: Blog]. The pictures in that guide aree really interesting just by themselves. Perhaps cooler is the weblog that the post is from μblog: engineering from the trenches, which is just filled up with cool geek content covering most of the spectrum of electrical engineering.

4D screenshots!

By AMH

As part of putting together a document about the courses I have been teaching, I decided I wanted to be able to share some screen capture video. I’ve done next to nothing with that sort of software, so I solicited recommendations and two people pointed me in the direction of Camtasia Studio. They have a 30 day demo version which, from the little that I tried, seems to give you access to a fairly complete version. I didn’t use the audio or webcam functions, but it looks like it would be really easy to combine annotation from one of those … Continue reading 4D screenshots!

Geeky stuff to keep you warm

By AMH

I’m getting down to the wire on a few projects, so here is some random fun to get you through the middle of the week…. I’m a huge Stephenson fan, so I’m excited that the SciFi channel is making a mini-series out of Diamond Age. It isn’t my favorite Stephenson book, but I actually like it a lot – more than I think a lot of people do. I really love the idea of the instructional friend book/computer. It reminds me of some of the parts of Ender’s Game I liked a lot. They’re having Stephenson do the adaptation, so … Continue reading Geeky stuff to keep you warm

Boolean Quilt

By AMH

In class tomorrow we are going to talk about 5 variable Karnaugh maps, having just done 2-4 variable Karnaugh maps. I’m partial to the 5-variable versions pictured at that link with the diagonal lines to indicate the top versus bottom of the map. Working through some examples for my lecture notes today, I noticed that they look an awful lot like quilt patterns, like these traditional Nine-patch Blocks. I am now determined to design a quilt based around a five-variable boolean expression – I envision blue fabrics for true, white for false, and maybe yellow for don’t cares. I just … Continue reading Boolean Quilt

Internet Side-effects

By AMH

There are tons of articles that have been written about the impact of e-mail, IM, text messaging and the link on communication, but this is the first article that I’ve read that discusses their impact on the scientific community [via A&L Daily]. Besides claiming that scientists communicate more informally using the internet than when written letters were the most common form of communication – a non-controversial claim – it looks at the historical impact of not having a tangible record of scientsts’ communications. Analysis of conversation through letters has often been used to trace the path of ideas and ascertain … Continue reading Internet Side-effects

Building Cool New Stuff

By AMH

I was looking for fun mini-projects last night over at instructables (I made this Simple Circuit Game today but with a buzzer instead of an LED during lab today – if you’re local stop by and play!) and along the way I discovered a ton of instructions for office toy guns, mostly out of K’Nex. The video on the K’Nex Gatling Gun is really awesome. But then again, K’Nex are awesome. At the least, I want to dig mine out and make a K’Nex iPod dock.