A GNU/Linux Wristwatch Videophone

What will Dr. Mann invent next? This highly creative inventor tells us about his wristwatch videophone, part of the WearComp project at the University of Toronto, which can unobtrusively record events. It is driven by GNU/Linux, of course. Perhaps next, he'll invent a pin to wear on our shirt collars that, when pressed, will transport us anywhere we wish to go.
by Steve Mann

Gri: A Language for Scientific Illustration

The authors tell us everything we need to know about this simple method for making plots and diagrams. Gri is a very flexible program, due mainly to its high degree of configurability. The authors show us how to use it with examples from their own area of interest—storm surges.
by Dan E. Kelley and Peter S. Galbraith

Tracking Satellites with PREDICT

This is a handy program for figuring out when the space station is overhead, or the orbit of your favorite ham radio satellite. PREDICT is also free software, released under the GPL and included in the recent Debian distribution. Learn all about this program, from installation to use. by John A. Magliacane

Detecting Chaos in the Field

Mr. Kahrs returns to our pages once more, this time to talk about using your sound card for processing field data. His example uses delay coordinate embedding to create a phase space portrait from a single time series. He discusses how to play with the parameters of this technique in order to obtain a good “unfolding” of the portrait.
by Juergen Kahrs

THOR: A Versatile Commodity Component of Supercomputer Development

CERN loves Linux, and we love articles about how CERN is using Linux now. The latest is in supercomputing clusters, where they have developed a system to function as a real-time prototype of the ATLAS Event Filter and generate large amounts of data for modeling and simulation. At this time, THOR has grown from two to over 40 Pentiums.
by James Pinfold