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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Introduction There is a medicinal ointment popular in Hong Kong called 白花油 (“White Flower Oil”) that produces a cool, minty feeling when rubbed on the skin and is used as a pain and itch reliever. (A similar product called 风油精 (“Wind Oil Essence”) is used in Mainland China.) Interestingly, one of its main ingredients, which makes up 40% of it, is methyl salicylate, a chemical often used to soften rubber. The specific use case I had in mind was restoring some grip to the time-stiffened rubber feet of an old typewriter. They had deteriorated to the point where the …
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Introduction and Rules 24 is a card game in which players try to use the basic arithmetic operations and each of four numbers exactly once to get the number 24. I play the game with my friends as follows: in each round, 4 cards are dealt face-up, and the first person to yell out a solution for how to get 24 wins those cards. J is 11, Q is 12, K is 13, and A is 1. Since it is occasionally impossible to find a solution, the first player to declare the round “impossible” receives the cards after the rest…
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Introduction I have some dirt,I have some sand.Uh! Green sand. I poured zinc,into the green sand,Uh! Sand casting. (The PPAP song went viral when I was in elementary school and the funny lyrics made an impression on me. So here we are.) My previous attempt at casting focused on casting a detailed model with no draft, necessitating the time-consuming investment casting process. However, for simpler and properly drafted models, more rapid castings can be obtained with sand casting, though with a poorer surface quality. Materials and Tools One of the great benefits of sand casting is …
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The other day, as a result of playing with gasoline, I got some second-degree burns. Eight years ago, in preparation for a backpacking trip to Sword Lake, my dad bought a 1-gallon can of Coleman Fuel (a petroleum distillate similar to gasoline but without the engine-performance-enhancing additives), to fuel his Coleman 442 pressure stove. After using it for a few camping trips and to melt zinc, the fuel was finally finished as I continued my metal-casting project over this summer break. Of course, the fuel can wasn’t exactly empty. I did my best to pour out the …
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Introduction For no reason at all, I decided one day to make one of those top-lit updraft (TLUD) wood gasifier stoves that are a common design for DIY small biomass-fueled stove projects. The design has been researched pretty extensively and is viewed as a promising stove design to replace dirty and smoky biomass stoves commonly used in developing countries. It has the advantage of simplicity, versatility, efficiency, and being very clean-burning. The TLUD operates by creating and burning wood gas efficiently. This is accomplished by limiting the amount of air a lit batch of biomass (usually small sticks) receives, producing…
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The concept of an oil lamp made out of a sardine tin is nothing new. The idea has been explored by others as a sort of survival lamp, which can be made with very simple materials. However, my design is different in that it’s meant to be used regularly and provide a brighter flame than most DIY oil lamps. Why use a sardine tin for an oil lamp? Firstly, its shape: vegetable/animal oils are rather thick, which means that they can’t wick up very far and that the oil level must be kept within a narrow range for the lamp…
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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 shortcuts as text:After looking for a list of the shortcuts online and failing to find one, I took screenshots of them and sent them to a text identifier. Then I manually copy-pasted the output into a table. shortcuts.pdfDownload shortcuts.odtDownload…
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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, I simply mixed dirt with enough sand to prevent cracking and formed it into very simple molds that by virtue of their porosity were really temperature-resistant. (Seriously. I used this sand-dirt to make a tiny blowtorch-powered furnace and used it to melt copper. You …
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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 didn’t use it. Going back yesterday, I saw that the map was partially crowdsourced, so anybody could contribute, and I decided to add the tree map there. You can see it here. Going back to the original map I created, I noticed many …
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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 plastic, cracks when drying, and has low wet strength. Because of this, I’ve tried a few things to improve its working properties, with some success and some failure. I started by creating a light slurry of dirt and water to separate the clay, which …
