Yesterday morning I got up an hour early at 5am and after some breakfast I loaded up my bike and pedaled through the still-dark Sausalito. Going south, following the waterfront and then the steep climb up Alexander Avenue to Highway 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge. This was no ordinary morning and not my usual [...]
Here’s another one of those things that is quite amazing in that special Internet kind of way: The German Alfred Wegener Institute maintains a station on the ice shelf in Antarctica and some enterprising scientists have lowered a microphone through the ice into the water under the ice shelf and the resulting audio stream – [...]
A full month without a post! Time is truly flying right now. On the personal side, I’ve been busy with helping to prepare for our little family as the arrival of the Little One(tm) is getting closer and closer… And work-wise I’ve spent as much time as possible reading up on the new HTML5 and [...]
Ariana Osborne has some great advice about Print-on-Demand projects over on her blog. I can pretty much only say “What she said!” about that post – read the FAQs for your publishing service, proof read the layout, order a proof copy for yourself first… all of that is important… …and then there is her previous [...]
It is very satisfying to finally see something that really, really belongs into the 21st century. If you haven’t followed the developments at the International Space Station lately, here are a couple of things to meditate over: There are currently four spacecraft docked at the ISS: Three Russian Soyuz and a Japanese resupply vehicle. The [...]
My good friend Steve has embarked on a mission to Make Things – and I’m very late to point you all to his site, which is going strong with multiple mentions on and awards from Make and Instructables. And in addition to build amazing things like the very funny mini-robots for his Robot Cocktail Party, [...]
Definition of Irony: A group of smoking scientists in front of the entrance to the 13th World Conference on Lung Cancer. Saw that today on the way to the computer store and I was still thinking about how weird the world sometimes can be while I was installing the new hard disk two hours later…
This has been going around the blogosphere for a few days now, but I just have to say – the Big Mess o’Wires is one of the coolest hardware projects I’ve seen in a long while. Steve Chamberlin set out to build a CPU and the computer around it from scratch – as in, he [...]
I’m currently glued to NASA TV’s YouTube channel, with its daily dosage of videos from the Hubble repair mission in glorious HD. It’s quite astonishing to think that the Hubble telescope has been in orbit now for 19 years – I was in university when Hubble was launched into space! It’s been out there, faithfully [...]
I’ve written before about the roots of my programming life – while I first had a ZX81, I really consider the Sinclair ZX Sepctrum as the machine where I developed a taste for programming and thinking in algorithms. Most actual Spectrums are now rather long in the tooth, and many have probably near irreparable damage [...]