Over the past year and a half I've incorporated Matlab into my daily work. It's a tremendously useful tool for experimenting with image processing and linear algebra. It's got a nice array-slicing syntax, so the second column of a matrix, M is M(:,2), and every other row in reverse order is M(end:-2:1,:). It also has some very useful easy graphing ( Read more... )

There are a lot of solid, useful libraries out there for scientific computing such as ARPACK, CHOLMOD, LAPACK, and others. These all seem old (with some pages last modified over a decade ago) and all seem to work reliably, but all have lousy APIs with cryptic documentation lacking any examples; none of these Just Work ( Read more... )

We don't have cable; we watch a few shows on the Providence, RI CBS affiliate (heading: 212°, distance: 11.8 miles). With analog, we get OK signal. It's sometimes a bit snowy and occasionally black and white, but it's there and there is always good audio ( Read more... )

The other day we attempted to set mew0422 up with a wireless connection from her eMac in her third-floor room to the cable modem on the second floor. One requirement was that it needed to be done this weekend, so at that point online shopping was out of the question. The obvious solution was to buy a wireless router and a wireless USB dongle for her ( Read more... )

As mew0422 recounted yesterday, we got up early on Tuesday morning and headed up out of the foothills to Moro Rock (think Half Dome light and with stairs). The view was spectacular.


( Read more... )

Some people have complained about scratched iPods. I don't really care, but I've heard a lot of questionable rhetoric on this topic yet have seen nothing quantitative about the actual materials involved. One would assume that Apple engineers made a reasonable engineering decision in choosing the material (although I'm sure some would say the goal ( Read more... )

As I mentioned in a previous post, my car radio recently gave up the ghost. I considered replacing it with an after-market unit, but I detest the idea of having a bling-bling radio with bright blue LEDs looking all out of place in my nice black dashboard with 1994 green backlights. If I wanted spinners, I'd have an Escelade; I have a Honda Accord ( Read more... )

My car radio recently gave up the ghost. In pulling it out of the center console I managed to blow the fuse for my dashboard backlight. Driving at night without a speedometer backlight was annoying, but not dangerous and not problematic. It was frustrating, so before I left to drive from Greenfield, MA to Troy, NY (a two-hour country-road drive) I ( Read more... )