Random projects that I do to improve my life, try out an interesting new technology, learn a new skill, etc.
Introduction Lately, when not crushed under the tedium of self-studying two AP exams, I’ve been trying to refine the clay soil from my backyard into clay. A post about that is coming. This post is about an interesting effect I noticed today as I test-fired pieces of clay. Basically, clays often contain iron oxides (compounds…
Introduction I have a … thing for the periodic table. In elementary school, I copied it twice, by hand, of my own volition. The first attempt was crooked with many spelling errors and multiple different pen colors. The second was neater, but element 8 was still written as “oxegen”. Last year, in the never-ending quest…
A drafting pencil is a mechanical pencil with a long (~4mm), thin tip called a “lead sleeve” that makes it great for scribing along the edges of rulers, also making it easy to see what you’re writing. Unfortunately, the thin lead sleeve gets damaged very easily when the pencil is dropped, breaking the brittle graphite…
Gedit (the GNOME text editor) has a word counter plugin available on GitHub (here), but I didn’t really like it since it couldn’t display the word count of a highlighted section of your document. To do that, you would need to highlight something, and then use the Document Statistics tool from the dropdown menu. I…
The Humanity icon theme for Ubuntu does not have an icon for STL files and other 3D modeling files, so I decided to create one. Using the default empty file icon, I added a cube with gradient fill and the letters “stl” underneath with LibreOffice Draw. Then, I went to /usr/share/mime/types to find out what…
Line AC power is a lot more dangerous than low-voltage DC power. As such, it requires different methods of connecting wires together temporarily. For example, you can use the same wire nuts used for permanent connections, though it’s not particularly fast or repeatable. You could just twist the wires together, but just because you can…
This is the disassembly of a Yale Assure Smart Lock. The outside part (called, according to Yale, the “Touchscreen Escutcheon”) basically consists of a touchscreen interface and a traditional cylinder lock. A metal plate with a keyhole mounting hole (that’s the hole shaped like a keyhole; it has nothing to do with keys), which is…