Next Saturday, I’ll demonstrate my musical chess system at the 3rd Annual Handmade Music L.A., at CRASH Space in Culver City. There will be a number of other tinkerer/musicians there as well, showing innovative pieces of homemade music technology, including circuit bending, noisy circuits, repurposed video-games machines, and amplified motors. Hope you can join us! [...]

The other day, I idly wondered about the band-aids or surgical tape visible on Michael Jackson’s fingertips. I took out my smartphone, and started typing in the query “why did michael jackson wear bandages on his fingers“. As I typed the first few words, the search box filled with a slew of Google search suggestions: [...]

I first saw the Peter Sellers movie “Being There” in 1979, and fell in love with Johnny Mandel’s two piano pieces on the soundtrack. For years, pre Internet, I didn’t know what the pieces were. Although they sounded like classical piano music, they are not credited in the film, there is no soundtrack album, nor [...]

I’ve added two new collections of Dinosaur mazes to the puzzle collection, which are great for kids. Each collection contains 50 booklets, with 12 mazes per booklet. Within each booklet, the mazes start out easier, and then get progressively harder. If you’d like to see mazes in other shapes, let me know! Easy Dinosaur Mazes [...]

In the first few years of Flickr‘s existence, I made a lot of interesting composite images, using large quantities of Flickr photos, Perl, and the ImageMagick library. A few of these images have historical interest, illustrating the rapid growth of both Flickr and YouTube. This slideshow shows a few of these images, and provides descriptions [...]

I just found a book in the Kindle bookstore that (incompetently) rips off some of my sudoku puzzles. The book is called “The Most Difficult and Hardest Sudoku Puzzles” and is “copyrighted” by one Johnny Cohen. Here’s the cover: The cover helpfully informs you that the book is a BEST SELLER. Here’s a sample of [...]

I made four of these laser cut music boxes as christmas gifts to my family. The pattern was generated with a Processing script, which I wrote. The lid contains an inlaid Hilbert space-filling curve. On each of the sides is a colorful J, representing each of my four family members (our names all begin with [...]

I’m currently working on an interactive Sudoku page (to be followed by other puzzles as well). If you’d like to play with a very early “beta” version of it, you’ll find it here. The page is designed to work in modern web browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox 4+, IE 9+), and also works on iPads. A [...]

This weekend I compiled the data to produce the above graph, showing the level of activity on Twitter. I figured this out using a commonly known method. Every tweet has a unique id number, for example the 20 that appears in the URL of this tweet which kicked off the service: http://twitter.com/#!/ev/statuses/20 Assuming these id [...]

Some weeks back, I used Facebook’s open graph API to read about 1.2 million names from Facebook users. I used it to construct this file, which shows, for each name, the number of times it occurs, the number of times it’s used by males, and the number of times it occurs in females. To keep [...]