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Archive for 2006

Counting down the minutes….

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Solstice to Solstice

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

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 […]

KrazyDad meets Quartz Composer

Friday, December 8th, 2006

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 […]

Tuba!!!

Friday, December 8th, 2006

An amazing tuba solo which includes electric-guitar like effects.

Sudoku Whiteboard

Monday, December 4th, 2006

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….

New digs for jbum @ Yahoo!

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

I’m pleased to report I’m now working at Yahoo! Music in Santa Monica, doing AJAX and Flash programming, among other things. After admiring the numerous improvements at Yahoo over the past couple of years (and even cowriting a book about one of their smarter acquisitions), it is great to be actually contributing to a company […]

The Mid Air 25-Key Wireless USB MIDI controller: A review

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

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 […]

Prinsengalerij

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

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? […]

Lego NXT versus classic Mindstorms

Monday, November 13th, 2006

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 […]

Lego NXT. It’s what’s for xmas.

Friday, November 10th, 2006

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 […]