Last week, I wrote a short Python script that uses a USB GPS device under Linux to help with navigation. It doesn’t have maps or anything — it just gives distances and, while you’re moving, the direction to the destination (as in “two o’clock”). It prints this info on the terminal and speaks it using …
Yearly Archives: 2008
Friday Night
So there I was at the stroke of midnight, contemplating the four-knights opening by the dim glow of a flashlight, ears popping under the extra five pounds per square inch of pressure. On Friday night, Dan (who you may remember as the Robot9000 bot author), Finn and I invented midnight underwater speed chess. A nice feature …
Center of Population
What’s the world’s center of population? The center of population for a region is, roughly, the center of mass of the inhabitants. The Census bureau defines the center of population of the US (currently in Missouri) as the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly …
A List
I was cleaning my room when I found this list in a pile of papers: It’s my handwriting from the last couple years, and it looks faintly familiar, but for the life of me I have no idea what it means or why I wrote it. … can anyone help figure this one out?
Hooray robots!
A number of people have asked me about building the robot sketched in yesterday’s strip. You’re definitely welcome to, and I’d love to see the results. There are a couple engineering details that might trip you up. Rotating the webcam is one of them — I don’t make this explicit, but the idea in the …
Two Female Leads
Quick, name a few recent popular movies where the two top-billed stars are female. Here’s a miscellaneous survey I just did, tallied by gender of top billed/second billed star: M/M M/F F/M F/F 20 biggest movies of 2007 10 10 0 0 20 biggest movies of 2006 11 7 0 2 20 biggest movies …
New Electric Skateboard
Happy pi day, everyone! My skateboard was broken for the past five or six months, and rather than get it repaired, I traded it in for a new, more powerful model. For a cost of about $120, I now have a board that can go zero to 20 mph in four seconds. This is a …
Ball Pit, Phase II
I posted a while back about a ball pit I’d installed in my room. Everything in that post was true, but the pictures were a little misleading. Looking at that, you don’t necessarily realize how cramped those people are. I framed the pictures to make it look larger than it actually was (THAT’S WHAT SHE …
Keeping Time
A big thanks to khmer for putting together the piano arrangement in today’s comic. Thanks also to the readers who tried playing it. I hope you didn’t realize what it was until too late.
FRUIT OPINIONS!
Holy crap. This strip’s been up for 800 seconds and it’s already the most controversial thing I’ve ever written, beating out comics about cunnilingus, the Obama endorsement, and my making 4chan tiny on the map of the internet. It turns out everyone and their mother has a fruit opinion, and every one of those opinions …
xkcd 