Category: Random Projects
Random projects that I do to improve my life, try out an interesting new technology, learn a new skill, etc.
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Finding no other similar resources online, I created this printable list of the keyboard shortcuts in Ubuntu. There’s only one change from the default shortcuts: I’ve set Ctrl+Space to be the shortcut for playing/pausing media playback. If you like you can edit the provided .odt file. Here’s the infinitely low-tech way I got all these…
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Introduction Where I live, the soil has a very high clay content, so I’ve tried a few times in the past to turn it into some usable clay-like material. Clay is easier to work with than metal and wood, can endure high temperatures unlike plastic, and is more durable. In my attempt to cast zinc,…
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I created a tree map of Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School for my Broadcast Media class in 8th grade, but it was never published. As I was doing research for that project, I stumbled upon the Canopy Tree Plotter, a tree map of Palo Alto, though since it didn’t list the trees at JLS, I…
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Introduction I’ve been trying to refine my backyard soil into some workable clay in order to further my metal casting project. As you can imagine, this comes with some challenges as not all clay, even when purified, is suitable for making stuff. In the case of the clay in my area, it’s very sticky and…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Some time ago, a lighter in my house ran out of fuel and I decided to take it apart despite “common sense” (i.e. a blind and baseless fear of fire) telling me not to. To be fair, the last time I took apart a lighter, there were hair-singeing consequences, but this time, I verified that…
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Introduction Last summer in Hong Kong I bought a steelyard scale from Lee Wo Steelyard on Shanghai street. When asked how to use the scale, the store owner told me to “ask my mom, she knows”, but she didn’t. I then consulted my grandfather, who gave a partial explanation of how to use the scale…
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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…
