RC Airplanes

My new hobby is flying RC airplanes. It sounds pretty geeky and a bit childish, but man is it Zen. Also it isn't as geeky as my friend's new hobby which is ham radio.

That's my plane up there!

Stop Thief!

I've resurrected an automatic kitty feeder at home with a video camera. The quality of kitty feeders on the market seems to vary from bad to awful. In our case, our feline thief was able to simply paw at the feeder door causing an enormous amount of food to dump out on the floor. So I built an attachment to cover the door. So far so good. Here is a video of the first test.

Biological Counters

How do we know how to keep a beat with no metronome anyways? I was thinking about this a lot today. Humans can keep rhythm really well. It's like we all have clock crystal oscillators and digital counters in our brains. I wonder what that circuit looks like in biological form. Wouldn't it need some kind of oscillator?

That got me thinking why we need to keep accurate time anyways. Why can we keep a beat so well? My theory from an evolutionary standpoint is that we developed the ability at the same time we developed the ability to move. Around the time frame one of our amoeba ancestors made some neural connections enabling the ability to send out correctly timed nerve pulses which rhythmically moved part of its blob body, we developed the ability to keep a beat and make music.

Look at the Fanboys!

Still waiting for their shiny (smudgy) new iPhone 3Gs. That's right. I took this picture today.

Eject the Second Optical Drive on Your Mac

Ever wonder what would happen if you had a second optical drive on your mac? How would you eject that second optical drive? Option-Eject. How would you eject the third? No idea. Sometimes I think Apple takes the "less buttons is simpler" design mantra a bit too far. Having fewer buttons doesn't always make a product easier to use.