Month: January 2007

Classic Orders

By AMH

There’s a meme going around, most recently seen by me over at 50 Books in which you share your first time orderiing at Amazon. I looked it up and my first order was from June 1997 – back when you got free mugs from them at Christmas and free bookmarks in your orders – for a set of five books: 60 Crocheted Snowflakes, which I still use every year to make new thread snowflakes for the tree The Harmony Guide to Crocheting, the absolute best guide to crochet and its various stitches and techniques I’ve found Audubon Birds in Cross … Continue reading Classic Orders

Double Slit Mystery

By AMH

Via A, this is a really good and entertaining video illustrating the Double Slit Experiment. It’s an animated segment of a larger film on quantum physics and discusses both the role of the double slit experiment in establishing wave-particle duality and introduces the impact of the act of observation on what is being observed. Recommended for either physics fans for the entertainment factor or for anyone who wants a low-impact way to learn a little bit about quantum physics.

A Roomba that doesn’t vacuum

By AMH

I am the excitedly proud new owner of a iRobot Create, basically a Roomba with the vaccuum parts ripped out and an attachment to let you program it in C or C++. So, first, I’ve got to go in to my office tomorrow and retrieve my copy of Kernighan & Ritchie. There’s also a guide to WinAVR (the robot’s development toolset for C/C++ programs) over at SourceForge that seems pretty good. Though – damn – I haven’t had to deal with makefiles in forever… Woooooo! Robots!!!!!!!

Mini Topic Portals

By AMH

There seems to have been an explosion of carnivals since the last time I browsed the Blog Carnival Index. If you haven’t seen a carnival before, it is a group that arranges for people to collect and link to posts on a particular theme on a weekly or monthly basis. It’s hard to imagine you won’t find something to interest you if you scan through their listings. Just now I lost myself in the latest entries from the Books Carnival, the Carnival of Chocolate, and the Carnival of Game Production. Carnivals seem to come and go, but they’re an interesting … Continue reading Mini Topic Portals

Writing about books again

By AMH

I was asked the other day why I no longer write reviews of the books that I list as “recently reading” in my sidebar. The answer is two-fold – one, I started reading books faster than I could review them and I had fallen into a compulsion to only review books in the order I read them, and two, I’ve never upgraded the section of my site where I store book reviews, and it’s a bit of a hassle to post them there because it is all hand coded. But, I want to start reviewing books again. And so I’ve … Continue reading Writing about books again

Take it apart…

By AMH

I’ve got a bunch of random integrated circuits left over from my intersession course so I think I’m going to try these tips on how to uncap/open various integrated circuits on a few of them [via Make: Blog]. The pictures in that guide aree really interesting just by themselves. Perhaps cooler is the weblog that the post is from μblog: engineering from the trenches, which is just filled up with cool geek content covering most of the spectrum of electrical engineering.

More E-Voting Problems

By AMH

In a new wrinkle on security concerns about e-voting, a Diebold voting machine key is copied from a photo on the Diebold website [via Boing Boing]. According to this article, the keys for all of the voting machines are the same, are very simple, and a detailed photo was available online until this story came out. Once one has a key, the machine is open to sabatoge, including code insertion to transparently modify election results. The availability of the photo is almost an example of seemingly trivial information being potentially compromising in the wrong hands, except it doesn’t seem that … Continue reading More E-Voting Problems

So proud!

By AMH

Nothing – nothing! – that I could have to post tonight could trump how proud I am of my students right now. I’ve been teaching an electronic design and robotics course, and they have been building line-following robots working up from resistors and transistors and comparators and motors, and with the big competition tomorrow, they look amazing. I was thrilled when the prototyped circuits worked as designed, but these guys have been pusing to get their prototypes actually on the ground and following paths. Today I’ve seen them tackle figure-eights, divergent paths, and complicated looping patterns. I can’t wait for … Continue reading So proud!

Gravity Games

By AMH

Two fun gravity games just came my way… Via Clicked there is Cosmic Crush, in which you are a little planet wandering the universe, eating smaller bodies to grow up into a big planet. It’s fun once you get into it, but a bit dull to start. Less boring, but a little more frustrating, is Spaced Penguin! [via T] in which you shoot a penguin towards its spaceship in the presence of various gravitational bodies and other less astronomically accurate phenomenon. Spaced Penguin has been around for a while, but I haven’t seen its new cousin, Doom Funnel Chasers! before … Continue reading Gravity Games

It probably has better penmanship than me…

By AMH

Today in class I talked a little about what makes something a robot, or an androiod, or a cyborg, but I didn’t bring up the notion of an automaton. This article has a really nice description of Jaquet-Droz’s writing automaton, including video [via Clicked]. The article points ot that the automaton is really closer to being a precursor of the computer than a precursor of the robot, because it can change what message it writes out based on a “program” on a wheel. Though, the “program” is not truly a program, as it does not change the essential functioning of … Continue reading It probably has better penmanship than me…