We had a fun house party, the West Oakland Social Democrat Party, at the physical location of Myrtle Street Labs this last Saturday.  Here’s the street cam footage from 7pm until 3am after the party.

Thanks all to everybody who came out, especially to our fabulous djs Mike Evans and Steve Best, and Erik Gilling who [...]

Stored exactly one year ago this day, this sequence of images captured by our streetcam is still one of our favorites.  The camera had only been online a week or two when, in the corner of my computer screen at work, I saw her walk by and stop in front of my car.
If you pay [...]

I really like plastic.  I like zip-seal plastic bags, my nylon clothing, my bike helmet, my zip ties, my cling film, my leftover containers, my nalgene bottle, my cellphone, and the keyboard I’m using to type this message.  I like all the forms it takes: nylon, polystyrene, polypropolene, PVC, ABS, polyester, polycarbonate, and others I [...]

An excellent short article in this week’s New Yorker, in the Talk of the Town section, explains how two cognitive biases make the case for health care reform difficult to make with the American public. I recommend you read the article yourself, but I will summarize its major points here.
The combination of two human [...]

This month’s Wired magazine published a good, but I think oddly critical article about Craigslist, called Why Craigslist is Such a Mess.  I say “oddly critical” because I don’t think Craigslist is nearly as bad as the article makes it out to be.
In a separate piece, Gary Wolf explains the motivation for writing the cover [...]

I’ve heard it suggested that the Dutch health care system is a model that the United States should study as we decide if and how to restructure our own health care system.  Curious how the Dutch system works, I did the obvious thing, and happened upon Just Landed, an online guide for travelers and expatriates.  [...]

Here at Myrtle Street Labs I was conducting research for a different post, and stumbled upon this.
There is a gigantic hexagon on the north pole of Saturn. Its not apparent in the visible light spectrum, but the Cassini probe can image infrared radiation.
Apparently this isn’t even that strange. The earth has one, too. [...]

Les Paul: inventor, tinkerer, engineer, and musician.
Nobody else has done more to shape the sound of modern popular music than Les Paul. Inventor of the solid body electric guitar, multitrack recording, and the tape delay. He was also a talented musician and all-around fine human. We’ve lost a good man.
Les Paul: June [...]

This is the footage from the street camera from 6pm (during setup) to shortly after 8pm.  Sadly, we had an outage and didn’t record between 8pm and 10:30pm.  Our sysadmin let the hard drive fill up and we had our first video outage for months.

I have a Craigslist RSS feed that searches Bay Area job listings for anything that matches “embedded linux.”  I’ve been watching the feed for about three years now, and its been interesting.  I originally created the feed to watch for jobs I might be interested in applying for.  In this respect it has been a [...]

During Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, Senator Graham said “unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re gonna get confirmed.” Everybody understood that he meant an emotional tantrum, not literally melting before their eyes.
The word “meltdown” is in such common usage today that we hardly give statements like that a second thought. Toddlers have meltdowns.  [...]

You had probably already figured it out for yourself, but science has proven it.