I kept myself busy over the Christmas break (when I wasn’t feeding the birds and entertaining my cat) by adding 13 new Interactive Puzzle pages to this website. The puzzles work in modern web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE 9 or later), on iPads, and on some Android tablets . I think these puzzles are […]

For the past few days, I’ve been preparing a wireless carillon that will hang on our Christmas tree this year. The carillon is a set of 9 brass bells, which can play different tunes. It is connected to an Arduino micro-controller that controls the bells. The Arduino receives messages from my desktop computer via an […]

An article about my work with Flickr photographs — in which I noticed that blended digital photos make orange — appeared on The Atlantic website today. If you’re interested in reading my paper on the subject, “Emergent Orange”, you’ll find it in the publications section of this website. For the record, I am a bit […]

I occasionally get requests to add new puzzle varieties to the collection. I have to ignore a lot of these, because there are 24 hours in a day. However, the last request I received, for Masyu puzzles, was hard to ignore, since I’ve enjoyed solving these myself for the past few years, and I’d love […]

Emergent Orange describes the orange hue that is produced when you average together a bunch of randomly selected digital photographs. The illustration shows 5 different sets of photos (randomly selected from Flickr) accumulating over successive rows. The first row is a single image. Then 2 images, 5 images, 25 images, and 100 images in the […]

Next Saturday, I’ll demonstrate my musical chess system at the 3rd Annual Handmade Music L.A., at CRASH Space in Culver City. There will be a number of other tinkerer/musicians there as well, showing innovative pieces of homemade music technology, including circuit bending, noisy circuits, repurposed video-games machines, and amplified motors. Hope you can join us! […]

The other day, I idly wondered about the band-aids or surgical tape visible on Michael Jackson’s fingertips. I took out my smartphone, and started typing in the query “why did michael jackson wear bandages on his fingers“. As I typed the first few words, the search box filled with a slew of Google search suggestions: […]

I first saw the Peter Sellers movie “Being There” in 1979, and fell in love with Johnny Mandel’s two piano pieces on the soundtrack. For years, pre Internet, I didn’t know what the pieces were. Although they sounded like classical piano music, they are not credited in the film, there is no soundtrack album, nor […]

I’ve added two new collections of Dinosaur mazes to the puzzle collection, which are great for kids. Each collection contains 50 booklets, with 12 mazes per booklet. Within each booklet, the mazes start out easier, and then get progressively harder. If you’d like to see mazes in other shapes, let me know! Easy Dinosaur Mazes […]

In the first few years of Flickr‘s existence, I made a lot of interesting composite images, using large quantities of Flickr photos, Perl, and the ImageMagick library. A few of these images have historical interest, illustrating the rapid growth of both Flickr and YouTube. This slideshow shows a few of these images, and provides descriptions […]