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.

Barbara Katz sent me this link to a whiteboard that has been preprinted with a Sudoku grid, suitable for solving the puzzles here on my site. Coooooool….

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 […]