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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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 …
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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 containing different ratios of iron and oxygen with distinct properties) as an impurity, which gives them their color. Depending on whether the kiln’s atmosphere is oxidizing or reducing, these oxides can be transformed into one form or another during firing, changing the surface color of…
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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 to discover an “ideal” periodic table that has all the information you need, yet is easily readable and printable, I took the one from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and edited it. The IUPAC’s periodic table is available here. Americans: note …
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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 inside as it’s forced through. Although it’s usually possible to un-bend a bent sleeve by pushing it on the edge of a table, a particularly violent impact can cause an unfixable dent. (Based on my experience, drafting pencils are a poor choice for emotionally volatile…
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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 the lighter was completely empty of fuel to avoid this risk. The lighter is disassembled by removing a single screw towards the back, a press-fit collar towards the front, and prying the two halves of the glued-together case apart. Inside, there are two levers: a…
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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 and read the weight. Aside from him though, nobody else (even among my Hong Kong relatives) knew exactly how to use it and read the weight. What would have helped me at the time is a specific English guide on Chinese steelyards, but since I…
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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 forked the plugin and changed some code so that if anything is highlighted, it instead displays the word count of the selection. In addition, the definition of a word was changed so that words with apostrophes were counted as one and not two …
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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 mimetype STL files are — they are of type “model/stl”, so I created a new theme (instructions here), named the icon “model-stl”, and put the icon there. Here is the LibreOffice Draw file if you want to edit the icon or make a similar …
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My room’s door doesn’t have a lock. It doesn’t need one. But cars probably don’t need to go above 130km/h either, yet they can, for… reasons. So for… reasons, I made a lock for my door that is very simple and requires no modification of the door’s current hardware. My door swings inward, so to prevent someone from coming in, I have to prevent them from pushing the door into the room. This is accomplished by bolting the door to the doorframe, using the strike plate (the little hole that the latch goes into) as a point to latch onto,…
