In response to a message about a donation of a large quantity of 16.9K resistors to the 6502 Group, Scot K. Anderson replied with a story of an unusual usage of resistors:
This reminds me of a story, a cautionary tale. When Crump Electronics went out of buisness a buddy called and said “lets go get [...]

A friend pointed out the paper The Peculiar Story of United States v. Miller, in which law clerk Brian L. Frye analyzes the only major Second Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court. This case is commonly cited by parties on both sides of the issue, but the actual decision is very narrow, and [...]

I have a lot of respect for Congressman Tim Ryan for taking the Food Stamp Challenge. Recently as he was taking a commercial flight the TSA confiscated his peanut butter and jelly, depriving him of meals for two days. I posted the following comment on his blog (here slightly edited), though it [...]

Kevin Timmerman sent me email about having built a USB version of the closed-caption decoder that Richard Ottosen and I developed.  He used an FTDI TTL-232R cable which incorporates a USB-to-serial interface chip.  He has added many new features to the firmware, including ANSI cursor addressing, XDS, and V-chip support, and also has fixed some [...]

I saw Shrek the Third with friends this evening.  It was fairly entertaining, but not up to the standard set by the first two films.  The story is weaker and consequently less engaging for adults.  For me, the highlight was a new character played by Eric Idle.
I rate it 8 on a scale of 0 [...]

On Friday night we watched Viva Zapata, Elia Kazan’s 1953 biopic, starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn. It is well thought of (IMDB 7.6), but I found it an uneven collection of performances that were within themselves jewels. Once such scene takes place when Zapata is speaking with Mexico’s new president Francisco I. Madero. [...]

Hanford Lemoore and I were both early employees of ReplayTV.  Hanford writes about how he became a DVR user more than a year before any were available commercially, and how he has now gone DVRless for over year.
I watched very little television before using a DVR.  I would set my VCRs to record the few [...]

As reported by the BBC, it wasn’t a reunion.  David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Rick Wright played together, and Roger Waters played solo.
Shine on, you crazy diamond!

I was visiting Cape Canaveral for the first launch of a new manned Gemini mission, as the guest of a friend who worked for NASA.  There was a failure seconds after liftoff, with an abrupt drop in rocket thrust, and the spacecraft crashed into the launch facility.  While the resulting fires were being extinguished and [...]

I was listening to the “Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan,” and he played “Mama Get Your Hammer (There’s a Fly on Baby’s Head)” by the Bobby Peterson Quartet.  Aside from being an amusing song, it was an interesting juxtaposition with a billboard I happened to be driving past at the time: [...]