Electronics seems to me to be more fun as a hobby than it used to be. Back in the 70's-80's you had to build everything from scratch, so you had to spend a lot of time crawling before you could walk. Now there are a lot of black boxes available. Need an ultrasonic ranger? Black box. A micro-controller? Black box. LED array controller? ( Read more... )

I was going to create a new journal to allow myself to explore some stuff in a more anonymous setting, but after multiple rounds of picking names and passwords and such for email and Livejournal accounts, I finally just gave up. The clincher was when LJ told me the username I picked was good, and then I set up matching email, etc., and then (only ( Read more... )

I guess I am a committer to open science as an idea. Software that cannot be inspected for internal problems has no place in science. Software that costs so much to obtain that many people cannot use it to replicate or analyze results in the literature is wrong. Literature that we cannot all read equally should should not count fully as science ( Read more... )

Made my first, direct, manually-constructed calls to the Twitter API today.

There is a great disturbance in the Force.

Does anyone know of an email client program that does the following:

[1] Folds multiple email accounts into a single stream of email ( Read more... )

This journal is an aide-memoir for us. It should not be a reductive record of what happened to have happened, but it should be more a full record of what was intended to have happened. I think that's the more accurate version, don't you?

Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden.

--- Rosa Luxemburg (1917)

So where are we on eBooks? I want to migrate to this technology (especially every time I have to pack about 100 boxes of books!) but it seems to be the wild west now. Every bookstore has a viewer; catalogs of books can be inflated by cheap, draft-quality Project Gutenberg texts; some viewers support PDF, some don't; some titles and genres are ( Read more... )

• The Secret Life of Plants
• The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel
• Ibu Taymeeyah's Essay on the Jinn

What is the unspecified referent that makes the following make sense:

"Phil Collins is the Chris De Burgh of South Park."

If you can, I love you.