Mon, 16 Jan 2012 Under my “nom de musique”, The Drunk Kitty Project, I just released an EP of a few of my older tunes on BandCamp.com. All five tracks are only $1.99 — check it out there, on on FaceBook, if you prefer.
Tue, 06 Dec 2011 I recently ordered a kit to build a Prusa Mendel RepRap FDM 3D printer, so of course, waiting for the kit to arrive, now I’m seeing the entire world through the lenses of “what can I print when it gets here?” Here’s a few cool things that cost extravagant amounts of money that I bet I could make myself:
What would you print with a 3D printer?
reprap Fri, 02 Dec 2011 I was visiting my great grandmother (Nennie) in Portsmouth, NH, and my Uncle Jon was there, and he and I went out to the local bakery and brought half a dozen eclairs back for dessert.
I was maybe 8 or 10 at the time. Somewhere in there.
And I had one, and it was delicious. Probably should have had half, but no, I ate the whole damn thing.
And then I kinda felt woozy later, but my mom dismissed it as too much sweets. And so I went to bed on the little travel mattress in the floor of the drawing room, just off the main living room, where I was staying the night (gorgeous, big old house — I once dreamed I’d buy it back into the family someday, but I doubt that will ever happen).
And then, about a half hour after I went to bed, with almost no warning, I threw up, all over my pillow and bed and pajamas and hair.
I remember it vividly.
So, even now, 25-30 years later, I become slightly nauseous even looking at an eclair.
[And now, to wait for my mother to read this, and tell me how I’m remembering it all wrong.]
Mon, 14 Nov 2011 
I love, love, love Kindle books and the iPad. Two great tastes that taste great together. However, the does seem to be a trend I've noticed with screenshot images in technical books. To be fair, this seems to be an issue from the publisher side of things, and not an endemic Kindle issue, as the Steve Jobs biography had wonderfully high-resolution images in the appendix to the book. Some publishers even do well with tech books.
But some publishers, perhaps under the assumption that the pics are just there to look pretty, crunch them all to hell so you can't tell what's going on. For instance, on this page in Real World Modo about the Shader Tree, the image, even in its zoomed, full-screen version, is simply too low-resolution to comprehend. I may have to actually pick up the dead tree version of this book, just so I can tell what the heck is going on.
Publishers, please get your heads out of your asses when it comes to digital books. I really want to go all-digital, I really do. I'd love to have my library in the palm of my hand. But crap like this, and prices for a few megabytes of bits that cost more than for Amazon to ship me a dead tree, are not helping your case. An ebook is still a book. Don't expect that just because I prefer information in digital form that I also prefer a sub-standard experience.
Fri, 04 Nov 2011 
An experimental analysis of the song “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar, digitized from a 45 RPM vinyl single.
This experiment was entered into to find if sampling the vinyl disc at a higher rate (by slowing down the input to a digitizer at the same sample rate) and then resampling would result in a “cleaner” auditory experience, in much the same way that oversampling an image on a scanner and then down-sampling to the required size often results in a cleaner image.
The green line represents the song as recorded at 44.1KHz playing at 45 RPM from my Technics SL-BD20 turntable with a brand new cartridge and needle.
The magenta line represents the same setup, but with the turntable playing at 33 1/3 RPM. The resulting 44,100 Hz sample recording was then sped up to 59,535Hz to match the original 45 RPM speed and then resampled back to 44.1KHz.
To my ear, I was hard pressed to hear any difference between the two, except possibly a slight difference in the tone of the “pops” picked up by the stylus due to damaged or dirty vinyl. The difference in the roll-off on the high end could potentially be due to the RIAA EQ curve built into the turntable not operating at the correct frequencies. The other general slight shift in frequencies, I would attribute to either a mistake in my resampling calculations, or a discrepancy in my turntable’s stability at different speeds (quite likely).
I’m well aware that I’m likely coming to bad conclusions due to poor experiment design, lack of understanding of all factors involved, and poorly-functioning equipment, but still it had to be done. For SCIENCE!
Regardless of the experiment’s inadequacies, the results do not seem to support the original hypothesis. The upshot being, I couldn’t tell enough of a difference between the two digitizing methods to go through all of this rigamarole when digitizing my collection of 45s.