I’m pleased to report I’m now working at Yahoo! Music in Santa Monica, doing AJAX and Flash programming, among other things. After admiring the numerous improvements at Yahoo over the past couple of years (and even cowriting a book about one of their smarter acquisitions), it is great to be actually contributing to a company […]

First released for $180 in 2002, the M-Audio Oxygen8 was a breakthrough. This 2-octave USB MIDI controller with eight programmable knobs appealed to a broad audience. Desktop musicians liked it because it had a small footprint and could fit in the limited space on their desks, next to their PC keyboard. Mobile musicians liked it […]

Of the many unusual words one can type into Google, my current favorite is prinsengalerij, which produces a veritable cornucopia of portraits like these: I knew the Internet had a long tail, but I had no idea it also had a goofy pointy hat! Who are these distinguished looking men with their elegant hats? Rosicrucians? […]

I’ve been playing with my new Lego NXT system over the weekend. So, what’s good, not so good, and so-so? First the good. These NXT features are a definite improvement over the older Mindstorms More memory Faster CPU More sophisticated OS / Firmware Ability to store named programs and files Bluetooth Ability to play snippets […]

This Christmas, if you are the parent of a 10-17 year old kid, and you buy your kid an expensive gadget that isn’t the item shown above, say an mp3 player, or a video game console, or even another type of robot, then you will have missed out on an excellent chance to not suck […]

Flickr has a lot of sunset photographs. Too many, some would say. To build this graph I collected just a few of them, by searching for photos that have been tagged “Sunset”. I collected only 100 photos from the hundreds posted each day of the preceding 365 days, so that the photos are evenly distributed […]

APEX Electronics is a technology junksurplus yard, just a few minutes from my home in lovely Sun Valley. This past weekend, the southern california chapter of Dorkbot made a field trip up there. I always miss the Dorkbot events, because they happen on Saturday afternoons, when I’m teaching high school kids at Art Center. Fortunately, […]