Calculating the 12th root of 2 with bc...

Since I keep looking this up...

$ bc -l

e(l(2)/12)

1.05946309435929526455

Bob Moog Doodle

Google Doodle Honors the Father of the Modern Synthesizer - Bob Moog | GeekDad | Wired.com

Letter Block Challenge

With a 13 month old at home, we have a set of 26 letter blocks at home. This evening I came up with a challenge for myself that took far too much of my time: Spell words with all the letters and leave as few as possible left over. The blocks can't be twisted to represent letters that have already been used.
My best so far is 5 blocks left over. Two hours before this post, my best was 6 left over, so obviously not the best use of my time.

New $100 bill

I'm always a fan of money redesigns... I'm looking forward to getting one of these new $100 bills in my hands:

From NewMoney

Above image is a full screen capture of: http://www.youtube.com/uscurrency

Sesame Street: Soliloquy On B

Patrick Stewart at his finest.

Inaguration Gigapan

Click on the image for a large screen capture of a small part of the gigantic 1474 megapixel stitched gigapan photo created by David Bergman.

Jump right to Yo Yo Ma taking an iPhone photo on the gigapan site...

No, it really wasn't photoshopped...

Turns out the photos I thought were fake really showed up in the live video of the debate:

Using a laptop from bed...

I've been wanting to build something like this for a while, and thanks to some tools I got as a gift and a bit of inspiration from the price of the product at lapdawg.com and its apparent inability to secure a laptop at this angle, I created an earlier stand with an inverted T shape that wasn't quite as stable as this newer version where I moved the attachment point to form a nice stable A frame without any bolts anywhere near the bed...

Bobby Ore Beginner Stunt Driving Class

It only took me five years to post the video of the stunt driving class I took....

Unboxing the Roland Fantom G8

Raw footage of my first ten minutes with the Roland Fantom G8. The background music at the start is the demo song loaded when the keyboard is first turned on.

Power on is 4 minutes in. The first sound that comes out is a bit unusual. I would have expected a piano like the A90EX this replaced.

I'm learning how to use this thing as you watch, sorry it's so boring, but since there is so little other info on the new Fantom G, I thought others might be interested in the learning curve.

Why doesn't work my PC?

Wow.

Remote control iTunes with a web browser

If like me, you happen to share an office and have speakers hooked up to one computer playing music all day, it helps if everyone else in your office can skip songs, pause, control volume, etc, so I wrote a quick little app. It's still pretty rough around the edges, but it lets you connect to port 8080 of the machine running itunes and acts as a web server that lets you control it.

Wriststrong Bracelet and the Environment

I guess viacom doesn't care much about the environment...

iPhone vs N95

I arrived at the AT&T store in Mountain View to find about 15-20 people in line, so I thought I'd check out the Apple store at Valley Fair mall that Woz was supposed to be waiting in line at... It had hundreds of people waiting, so I left to check out the AT&T store in San Jose. I was probably number 54 in line when I arrived sometime between 3pm and 4pm. As it turned out, I was the last person to walk out of the store with an iPhone, and had I gotten there 8 people earlier -- which would have been possible had I not made the other two stops to check out the situation at the other locations, I would have even got my first choice model. I suspect most of the 4GB models that Apple sold were sold after stores ran out of the 8GB models.

Anyway, this is the first side-by-side comparison that I know of of these two phones, so I thought I'd share it and the story of the "drama" of getting an iPhone that fortunately only lasted about four hours total for me. Apple could have sold at least 100 more opening day had they shipped enough product to the AT&T store nearest their headquarters. At least one Apple employee was observed criticizing the entire operation at the AT&T store, giving the manager a hard time.

Update: At 4PM Saturday, it was possible to walk into the Apple store at Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara and walk out with a 4GB iPhone at 4:04PM. The iPhone launch is clearly not another Wii launch.

Ten Years of Kernel.org

I just finished making the logo to mark 10 years since kernel.org was announced... Happy birthday kernel.org!

What's up Googlerz?

And then after a long silence, there was more change... on 11 September 2006, I accepted a position at Google... after a quarter working at Google, I've still not made it to all of the cafes, but the least-often-mentioned benefit is that I finally work somewhere that requires no explanation to non-technical friends and family.

No relation to Villa Montalvo

I started a new job today at a startup more secretive than Transmeta was when I started there. Basically the whole point of this post is that you shouldn't use my Orion Multisystems email address anymore.

Illegal Aliens

I put the coordinates of Area 51 into Google Maps for "Groom Lake Base, Bldg 170" I found the July 2003 space imaging overview and detail images of Area 51 and created an overview and detail overlay for Keyhole 2. I'm also noticing that maps.google.com has certain areas intentionally pixelated or colored over (like the roof of the white house or the capitol building).

Moog Voyage

Saw Bob Moog at robotspeak.com in San Francisco today. He demonstrated the Minimoog Voyager Anniversary Edition. I purchased the one he demonstrated on, and Bob was nice enough to sign it. I also got an Etherwave Pro Theremin the same day which Bob also signed for me. Bob told all sorts of stories of the history of electronic music. I put an mp3 of the event and a review of the Etherwave Pro on my website.

Cold Fusion

Purchased the cold heat soldering tool from Fry's and used it to add a FM transmitter to the pitch preview of my theremin. It's not very easy to solder with since you need to complete a circuit at the tip with the solder, but it did live up to its promise of not burning a hole in my carpet. I put photos of the operation on my website.