MINDPOWER is a brand new self-working magic trick I made, in which the computer actually reads your mind, using subtle hints from the way you move the mouse, as well as the little-known but very useful ESP opcode in the Intel instruction set. Using these techniques, the computer is able to not only guess your […]

I’ve always been a sucker for bands and artists that rock critics deride as “pretentious”. Thirty years ago, I aspired to be Rick Wakeman in his heyday, wearing a floor length golden cape, and surrounded by banks and banks of mellotrons, synthesizers and organs, the London Philharmonic, and a choir; making a truly majestic noise […]

This month, I’ve made a couple of minor changes to the puzzle pages, in response to feedback from puzzle solvers like you. Firstly, I have added a scratch area to my collection of Tough Sudoku Puzzles, as shown here. My Super-Tough and Insane puzzles have always had this extra grid for working out the puzzle […]

I’ve acquired a nice little collection of third party apps, freeware and shareware, since switching to a Mac recently. There are three that deserve special mention, because they work together to make using the Mac an even more efficient and harmonious experience, especially if you are multitasking. QuickSilver My first few days using the Mac, […]

Wolfgang’s Vault has an impressive collection of live recordings of concerts at the Fillmore East, Fillmore West and other Bill Graham venues. The concerts cover a period from the mid 1960s to the 1980s and include many famous bands in their prime, include Cream, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, James Brown, David Bowie and others. They […]

I have built up a pretty large collection of cool perl scripts that use the Image::Magick perl extensions – some of these are documented in Flickr Hacks. Recently I switched to a using a Mac, and I’ve been having a devil of a time using these scripts, because they require ImageMagick, and LWP, and I […]

I thought the winter solstice would be an appropriate time to make another one of these graphs, and here it is. To build this graph I collected about 40,000 thumbnails of photos that have been tagged “Sunset”. I positioned each thumbnail horizontally according to the day it was taken, and vertically according to the hour […]

After having used a Windows machine for my principal desktop machine for the past 7 years, I am glad to say I’m back to using a Mac for my main machine, as I did for most of the 90s. One of my favorite tools on my new Mac is Quartz Composer, which makes it possible […]

An amazing tuba solo which includes electric-guitar like effects.