Little Bird Electronics - Australian company selling hobbyist electronics stuff – plus they’re a reseller for Sparkfun, so you can get anything Sparkfun sells without the insanely slow and expensive postage.

My Science Project – experimental gems such as “How many condoms can you put on a dildo?” (at least 625), “Does Viagra keep flowers fresh?” (yes), and “Can you nail Jell-O to a wall?” (if you prepare it as a fibre-reinforced composite material – i.e. embed 2-minute noodles in it – then yes.) “You have questions and we’ve dedicated this site to finding answers. We’ll do the hard experimental work so you don’t have to.“

The following all courtesy of +Richard Kulesus:

• Nine stubborn brain myths that just won’t die, debunked by science
• Webdesigner Depot – What’s new for designers, Dec 2011 - lots of useful stuff for web designers.
•  UsabilityPost – Competing With an Archetype – about why Samsung’s iPhone/iPad alikes are doomed to litigation hell
• A sculpture made out of suspended fishing line and buttons.

“When a third friend accesses it, the Web server goes into a momentary “kill me now” loop and fails to respond. During this moment of revered silence, ISA Server decides that the server has gone “beddy-bye” and closes the connection. “

The Old New Thing – the blog of veteran Microsoft developer Raymond Chen, with all kinds of stories about Windows development WTFs. (Raymond Chen has in fact contributed to TheDailyWTF.)

Personally I wanted something a bit nicer looking, so I had to come up with my own approximation of the inductor circuit symbol:

Much nicer!

Microsoft Word: fine. Microsoft Excel: fine. Microsoft Visio: crash.

Turns out this is actually a documented bug with the Virtualbox Guest Extensions, of all things. Versions of the guest extensions between 4.0.0 and 4.0.4 just don’t like Visio.

The solution is either to upgrade to a newer version of the guest drivers (4.0.5, a development version) or downgrade to the 3.x series of guest drivers. I did the latter and Visio now works fine.

Yay!

For those not in the know, the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is an algorithm for signal processing in the time domain, as opposed to the Fourier Transform and Wavelet transforms, which are frequency-domain approaches. At the time I wrote this there was no decent implementation of the EMD for streaming data, so I tried to write one. I won’t say I was successful, but I like to think I took some steps in the right direction.

Without further ado:

• My thesis document, “Online Empirical Mode Decomposition”, L. Yip 2010
• My MATLAB code. Released under the Apache License 2.0, which permits any kind or reuse or modification provided you preserve the copyright notice and disclaimer. See Appendix B of the thesis document for usage instructions. Please tell me if you find it useful!

The thesis document should be considered the documentation for the MATLAB code (that is, read them both.) The MATLAB code is heavily based on some prior work, in particular Rilling, Flandrin and Goncalves (2003), and Meeson (2003). See the thesis document for full references/acknowledgements.

Like this:

Everyone knows that Caps Lock is CRUZE KONTROL 4 COOL, so I marked the indicator light as such. When it’s on, I know that my computer is ready for me to TYPE AWESOME THINGS, LOUDLY.

Speaking of “typing loudly”, my old keyboard was of the “clicky” type, with mechanical keyswitches under every key. Typing on it felt like an 80′s typewriter (appropriate: it dated from the 80′s), or possibly a battleship, presuming you could find a way to type on a battleship.

Here’s a picture to give you the flavour of the thing:

My next keyboard mod will be to replace the Caps Lock keys with one of these buttons….

You know from looking that when you press this button, Serious Stuff Happens. I got one from Seeedstudio a few months ago, and I’ve had no idea what to do with it; it just looks so intimidating that it would feel like a waste to use it for anything short of, say a Nuclear Launch Command Authorisation… or a Caps Lock key.

- Lewis.

I believe that Michelle drew this in my notepad while I was slumped over asleep in my chair. Clearly I paid a lot of attention in those lectures…

Oddly enough, I did go to nearly every single lecture (8am every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!), including the occasion where I rode straight from an all-nighter at Bronson’s place to attend the Ergon guest lecture. I even stayed awake and took notes!

Sadly enough, I have 90 pages of notes from this subject. They are now going directly to the paper recycling bin.

- Lewis.