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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Rin @beehaw.org

Is there anything creative you've made that you're particularly proud of?

Can be any form of creativity, whether that be drawing/painting, music, photography, writing, game design, video making, ect.

29 comments

  • Volunteered at an international school in the IT dept. and at the time I noticed that the students had to type out a long address in order to connect to their personal drives. This was only necessary when using MacOS.

    The head person who brought me on never had time to simplify the process. He said it was like that when he got there. So, I decided to look into it and try to simplify things. Prior to this I never had any experience with macs at all. It took me a while to learn the basics of how to write a script for Mac and how to navigate the OS.

    After a bunch of research and videos, I was finally able to write something where all you had to do was click on an icon and you were automatically connected to your drives. This was roughly 10 years ago and about 5 years ago I learned that they were still using what I wrote!

  • I've made an app for Lemmy and I'm quite proud of how it turned out :)

    In a more artistic way, few photos that are worthy to be on my wall, but I still can't find time to print them. Always envy fancy photographers who make photobooks with their stuff

  • Ach, I build a lot of things. It's been a busy couple of years. I sort of had a lot of free time during Covid. It's a little embarrassing, I'm not specifically proud of anything, but here goes in the hopes you find some of it amusing.

    I made a music box out of cut, etched, and painted brass inside a wooden box. It has a bit of custom clockwork, and I designed a sort of magnetic-friction drive so that the dancing figures on top are hot-swappable risk of damage to the mechanism. It plays traditional Vietnamese music (MP3), and the porcelain dancers have costumes from the different ethnic groups.

    I've also designed and manufactured a sort of night-light for children that activates by turning it upside-down for a few seconds. The electronics are rated for 100 years, and a CR2032 coin cell can power it for 6 months of normal use. I got power consumption low enough that it does not need an off switch. I hate e-waste and thought maybe electronics could last long enough to be heirlooms, if we made different design choices. I also had autism in mind, where maybe it's comforting to have things that always work according to the same rules, never break, and will last from childhood into adult life (although maybe it is just comforting to me, when things work this way).

    I also wrote an algorithm that plays (4,6) Mastermind that beat the record in the primary literature by 0.5% with a slight modification to the MaxParts strategy. So I might or might not have the world record on that one -- I never got around to publishing it except as a school assignment. Which oddly enough I received a rather poor grade on, which I thought was really funny.

    Oh also I made a quantum hardware random number generator that lets you conveniently make various other electronics into a Schrödinger's Cat paradox. It takes one signal input, then presents one of two outputs to control the other electronics. This was part of an elaborate practical joke -- the nature of the device makes it impossible to accurately simulate, so it presents an unusual problem for whatever poor grad student gets tasked with running a simulated Universe.

    I also made a device for recording tiny variations in the 50Hz (60Hz in North America) signal in main power lines. The original idea was to correlate the microsecond timing variations to space weather and use the power lines as a sort of radio telescope for space weather. It didn't work. I was able to track what was going on in the power plants though, like when they are turning on and off turbines.

    Finally (and most recently), I wrote a Lemmy bot! If you message @kong_ming on my instance, an early prototype of my quantum random number generator will generate an I-Ching reading for you (the Book of Changes, sort of an ancient choose-your-own-misadventure fortune-telling book). It's literally a thing sitting on my desk in Vietnam held together mostly by my irrepressible optimism, so sometimes it takes a minute to get to your request or ah, takes a break from functioning correctly.

    I guess there were a few robots and whatnot too. Those were pretty standard rover builds though. Not sure what I'll do next. There's a particle detector I've been meaning to get to. Also someone on Lemmy suggested a way to progress in my experiments making a CPU clocked by chicken bone (bone is piezoelectric) for Halloween.

  • I've made a few mods for games over the years that always make me feel a little happy when I remember they exist. Usually its the ones that I made for my own personal tastes that turned out to be things other people really liked, too.

  • For me, maybe this even if I made one of the characters a little too big. And an Artfight attack I thought came out alright for more recent stuff.

  • The one I am probably most proud of is when in an art course at the local community college we had a bunch of white foam shapes on a short table that took up the middle of the room.

    We had to cover the paper we used in black charcoal and had to use an eraser to fill in the shapes, shading, contour, etcetera. It was my favorite project we did in that course since I had never done something like it before.

  • When I was in college I was taking trigonometry and structural engineering. In structures we were studying trusses. In trig we were solving for angles and distances using systems of equations.

    At the same time I was living in a little studio apartment with old fixtures, a creaky hardwood floor, a view over the street below. It had those multi-pane windows with white paint just slathered onto the muntins, and streaking the edges of the panes.

    The kitchen lacked counter space, but also lacked space overall. So I built myself a folding countertop.

    It’s a piece of plywood about two feet by three feet. Grain showing, stained with polyurethane. When it’s unfolded and ready to be used, there’s a straight wood bar with a hinged connection near the end of the plywood piece, attached underneath, and the other end is a hinged connection at the wall.

    That would be a static truss if the counter were always extended open. Those hinges would never rotate because it’s a triangle.

    The hinges made it a truss by offering no resistance to turning. The fact that it was a truss allowed me to calculate how much load it could hold. At the end of the countertop, I should have been able to apply 700 lbs of force straight down before it broke. (But the actual number was probably less; that’s what my gut says. I sat on it but I never wanted to bounce on it)

    The trick was getting it to fold. See, to make it fold I had to put a hinge in the middle of that diagonal member (this structure was double, one on each side of the plywood, but I’ll just describe one).

    I tried to set it up with angle hinges, like you’d see on a door. Two flat pieces connected by a line about which they rotate. But that didn’t work. I can’t recall why.

    Instead I had to use an axle based hinge. The member coming from the plywood down was made of three pieces glued together, with the middle piece shorter to present a forked pair of layers. Those were circular at the end. In the center of that circle was a hold passing horizontally through the room. I built the hinge out of various washers and a big bolt. I had to keep the connection from being tight, like a bolted connection normally would be, because I didn’t want the upper wood squeezing the lower wood.

    I can’t remember the exact sequence of the metal parts of that hinge, but it allowed the whole thing to loosely rotate without any part of it being in danger of eventually coming lose and unscrewing. The bolt extended into space after leaving the joint toward the inside, and that’s where the stabilizing bar comes down to hold that joint in place.

    The stabilizing bar is quite thin. It doesn’t need to carry much load at all; it just keeps the long diagonal truss member from starting to buckle at the hinge I just described.

    The exact position of that hinge along the main member was precisely constrained by this:

    When extended, the sum of the two sub-members had to be the distance from the bottom of the wall attachment point, to the point where it met the plywood.

    When folded, the difference between the two member lengths had to equal the distance between the lower wall attachment point and the connection with of the now-hanging plywood.

    It was fun to make, and even if it was tiny I got to solve a system of equations to figure out the dimensions, and it expanded my ability to cook in that little kitchen, making my life better.

    I baked cookies, hosted dinners, perfectly inoculated like 100 shroom cakes with one infection.

    I think they made me remove it when I moved out. Went against code somehow.

29 comments