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Archive for September, 2005

Hallucinatory Stereoscopy

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

In an amusing review, StereoTimes, compared the the Sonic Impact T-Amp (shown here), a new $30 dollar digital amplifier, just slightly unfavorably to audiophile equipment costing $5000. The T-Amp’s perceived clarity allows sound-staging and stereophony to reach hallucinatory stereoscopy: near-field listening with the Celestion F15’s revealed a stereo illusion that would satisfy even the most […]

An Index of Sudoku Strategies

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

Sudoku is a game of pure logical deduction, just like Kakuro and other Japanese number puzzles. Unlike games of luck such as card and bingo games, guessing is never required. I’ve now learned a number of methods for solving tough Sudoku puzzles by hand, including X-Wing, Swordfish, Jellyfish, Squirmbag, Turbot-fish, XY-Wing, XYZ-Wing, Conjugate Pairs, Bowman […]

Fridge Squircles

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

Flickrini Strzelecki writes: My fridge is now covered in flickr posters. They are cool mosaic type collages of photos posted to flicker groups. I sometimes find myself standing there, fridge open drinking from the milk bottle drawn to looking at the miriad of little pictures in these collages. Want some posters for your fridge? Get […]

Mochas and Modern Medicine

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005

There’s a drug rep riding up in the elevator with me to Doctor Schott’s office, a pretty young woman in her 20s. I know she’s a drug rep because in addition to a shopping bag with a big box that says Protonix on it, she is carrying a tray with four different Starbucks beverages on […]

Hey, I’ve been laminated!

Friday, September 16th, 2005

Check it out! Paul Bausch, the author of Amazon Hacks and Yahoo Hacks, had one of my posters laminated! I think this means he likes me! Well, that, and he agreed to co-write the forthcoming Flickr Hacks from O’Reilly, with me. I’ll be working on some of the more technical hacks, and I intend to […]

1-888-DISH-HELP

Friday, September 16th, 2005

I found it a little odd that this advertisement was running on my local cable TV service: A pale white guy (PWG) and an attractive lady of indeterminate ethnicity (ALIE) are standing in front of a table holding two satellite dishes, one with the DirecTV logo and the other with the Dish Network logo. PWG: […]

Strange Angel

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

George Pendel’s Strange Angel is about pioneering Rocket Scientist Jack Parsons, who played a pivotal role in the creation of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). A self-taught explosives expert, Parsons also led a double life: He was fascinated with the occult, and was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the local chapter of the Ordo […]

Revolution in the Valley

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the creators of the original Macintosh computer, recently published a book, Revolution in the Valley, about his experiences at Apple in the late 70s and early 80s. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes and valuable lessons about software management, many of which seem awfully familiar to me. Andy’s love of […]

Mosaic Portraits

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005

Meet Fubuki (Ty Siscoe), one of the most prolific and talented photographers on Flickr, the photo-sharing service. I constructed Fubuki’s portrait out of thumbnails from his large collection of excellent photos, using the Flickr API. My software is written in Perl, using the ImageMagick library. For more of my mosaics, check out my flickr stream.

Humans ain’t computers

Thursday, September 1st, 2005

Currently my sudoku software does a very crude job of estimating puzzle difficulty. There’s an especially wide range of difficulty levels in my “super tough” puzzles – some of them are pretty easy, others are genuinely “super tough.” My experience shows that most other computer programs do a pretty poor job at this too. The […]