A while ago I decided I wanted to play around with a FPGA - Field-Programmable Gate Array, basically it lets you design new hardware ICs (Integrated Circuits), without needing a multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plant. So I set out to research the available pre-made development kits I could play around with. They’re quite a bit more expensive to get into than microcontrollers (where you can buy a $3 chip and build a programming cable out of some old scraps of wire), so I looked for the least expensive boards that still had a decent set of features.

I ended up making a comparison chart of FPGA development kits, like I said this was over a year ago, so it may be a bit out of date, but the low-end of FPGA’s doesn’t move all that fast. Most of the information is still valid, but you might be best to do some research yourself before you take the plunge. I only considered boards that featured FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera, since I found other vendors are not competitive in the low-cost arena (low-cost was the most important feature to me at the time, I didn’t want to spend $5000 just to play around. And yes, there are $5000 development boards).

View Chart Full-Screen

If you’re curious, I ended up getting the DE2 (with the educational discount). It costs a bit more, but it has significantly more features, such that I’ll probably never run out of stuff to play with.

The ones highlighted in green are the ones I feel provide the best value, and just coincidentally fall at the $50, $100, and $150 price points.
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I’ve just discovered a true adblock plugin for Google’s Chrome web browser. What these guys have done, is taken the Chrome sourcecode (aka Chromium), stripped out Google’s tracking features, and added in a clone of AdBlock Plus. There’s no fancy UI for it yet, but it supports real regex ad-blocking, unlike those other hacks that either require you setting your hosts file with a million lines, or some annoying proxy you have to configure, or a silly bookmark you have to click on every page.

Check it out here: SRWare’s Iron. As mentioned in the news, make sure to download adblock.ini and place it into the program directory after downloading.

Enjoy the power of Chrome, with the convenience of adblock!

I’ve been playing around with making HDR photos from only hand-held shots. Mainly because I’m too lazy to always go and get my tripod, set it up, attach the camera, etc etc. It’s a lot easier to just stand there & take a few shots at different exposures while holding the camera as steady as possible.

In the past, all the HDR processing tools required that your images were taken on a tripod and perfectly aligned, or if they weren’t aligned, it could do some simple corrections, but anything too complex would mess it up.

I’ve tried several applications, including Photomatix Pro, PTGui Pro, and Autopano Pro. I know what you’re thinking, two of those three applications are mainly for automatically stitching panoramas…but it turns out automatically aligning images for panoramas is also very useful for creating HDR images.

My very quick comparison of these HDR / panoramic image apps: Photomatix Pro appears to give the most control over the HDR generation process, and with tweaking, gives the nicest output…HOWEVER it’s not very good at handling images which are not perfectly aligned. Autopano Pro is the best at correctly aligning the images, and for creating panoramas in general, but it sucks at HDR tone mapping, having two sliders with obscure labels, that don’t really make it look very nice.
Finally, there’s PTGui Pro — it’s not the best at aligning, and it’s not the best at the HDR generation, but it’s pretty good at both, so in most cases it gives the best overall results.

Below, you can see an example of a shot I took, that would be impossible without some sort of HDR effect:
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To get a little more experience with ActionScript 3, I wrote up a very simple class which will take a rule number, and then generate a cellular automata based on that.

The movie below requires Flash 9 or above to be installed. Some rules to try out: 90, 30, 73, 110, 150. Valid numbers are 0-255, but not all produce interesting results.

Direct link to flash movie (got some people complaining the SWFObject script doesn't work under Vista)

See Wikipedia for more info, and Wolfram.com has a list of all 256 possible results
Here's the code:
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So apparently ICANN has decided to start allowing people to purchase new Top Level Domains. Existing ones are things like .com, .net, .info, .biz, and so forth. They are going to charge a hefty $100,000 for the privilege however. Personally I think it's a terrible idea, and it's just a plot to make some quick money on their part. Anyway, my buddy guesses there will be 950 vanity TLDs registered in the first auction (where a vanity TLD being one that refers to a company, person, organization) I say that's way too high, I'd be surprised if there were over a hundred.