Bob died on the afternoon of August 21st at his home in Asheville, North Carolina. He was 71. Bob was diagnosed with brain cancer (glioblastoma multiforme or GBM) in late April 2005. He had received both radiation treatment and chemotherapy to help combat the disease. He is survived by his wife, Ileana, his five children, Laura Moog Lanier, Matthew Moog, Michelle Moog-Koussa, Renee Moog, and Miranda Richmond; and the mother of his children, Shirleigh Moog.

Bob was warm and outgoing. He enjoyed meeting people from all over the world. He especially appreciated what Ileana referred to as “the magical connection” between music-makers and their instruments.

No public memorial is planned. Fans and friends can direct their sympathies and remembrances here.

Bob’s family has established The Bob Moog Foundation dedicated to the Advancement of Electronic Music in his memory. Many of his longtime collaborators including musicians, engineers and educators have agreed to sit on its executive board including David Borden, Wendy Carlos, Joel Chadabpe, John Eaton, David Mash, and Rick Wakeman. For more information about the foundation, contact Matthew Moog.

Thanks for the machines.

Two laptops and a wireless router – my new laptop arrived on Tuesday and I set up the network last night after much ado and the help of a friend.

Broadband is almost a novelty in itself, let alone wireless capability. The only problem I have to deal with is the intermitten dropouts from the network, which isn’t too much of an issue, except when you’re in the middle of a large download. One solution – the obvious, is to connect by ethernet, but that isn’t the most practical and it’s not as technically romantic as having packets of 0s and 1s that make up a piece of software whizzing around all of the place.

On a tangent, it takes me back to my days of university with the concept of naming computers on a network. The main network for our computer science division had computers names after characters in The Magic Roundabout, then there were application servers which were named after characters from Winnie The Pooh and finally the new lab which was opened in 1996 which had a series of Wintel boxes running Solaris from memory that was known as ‘The Vegie Patch’. If you took an educated guess, you could probably work out the names of the hardware on the network here.

There’s a hidden feature that ‘launches’ the BMW M3, however the functionality has been toned down for markets outside Europe.

A cheat code in the software running the BMW M3’s sequential manual gearbox contains what is known as an Easter Egg. Press the right buttons in the right order and the car will launch you from a stop after revving the engine to 5,000 RPM. But don’t look for a how-to in the owners’ manual — this feature is undocumented, an inside joke of sorts.

It’s the first time an egg has been included in an automobile’s operating system. Care to find out what buttons you need to push?

I also saw a new 645ci last week. Wow! Whilst the classic 635csi is one of my all-time favourite motors, check the latest addition to the 6-family. This is one mean looking motor car.

Japanese scientists have come up with a device that can effectively make an object seem transparent. Essentially, a series of moving pictures are taken from behind the object and projected onto to the object being camoflagued, creating this illusion of transparency.

Here’s some footage plus a more in-depth description (well, it’s still quite high level) of how it works here.