I wrote today about the origins of Lego Mindstorms today on the WIRED blog that I contribute to, Geekdad. You may not know that Lego Mindstorms gets its name from a book by Seymour Papert called Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.  I first read this book in the 1980s, and I took Papert’s educational […]

I’ll be teaching an advanced Flash class at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies (ETech) conference this coming Monday, in San Diego. In this 3 hour hands-on class, I’ll be covering some of the advanced graphics features introduced in Flash 8, which enable you to do make things like high performance games, painting effects, motion blur, and […]

I’ve begun contributing to the new blog geekdad, part of the WIRED family of blogs. If you are a geeky parent, like me, you will love this blog. Still in its infancy, it is collecting some incredible posts full of projects you can do with your kids, like capturing spider webs, stop motion movies, model […]

I just made this trance-inducing screen saver for my Macbook Pro using Quartz Composer. If you watch it long enough, especially in a dark room, you will eventually see the eye of God. Or maybe you’ll throw up. I’m not sure. It is definitely doing weird things to my eyes… The walls are bulging… (Note: […]

A little something I made for my students during today’s actionscript class. Here’s the flash source code, and here’s an article that explains the technique I use to generate those groooovy colors.

…and thanks to Sherrie Graham, whose quince blossoms adorn the top of my blog this spring. You know, it’s funny how these little seasonal adornments work. I get an idea in my head that I want a little seasoning; a little sumpin-sumpin up there, and thinking there must be a million of ’em, I go […]

Daylight savings, whose ostensible purpose is to save energy, is an incredible annoyance to those of us in the US, and the recent changes in the system only make things worse. If you want to find a computer that hasn’t been fixed to compensate for the three week difference in DST this year, try calling […]