Isthmus Carshare, sharing a car with the whole block — The story of founding a cooperative carshare, and why collective ownership is so hard to sell
CITY MOTION: Transforming Cities One Game at a Time — A board game that reimagines urban spaces for a walkable future.
Solar Wagon: tandem ebike and solar charging trailer — building a solar powered tandem ebike for my partner and I to go adventuring
Story2Hallucination: converting stories to deep learning GAN hallucinated animations — Using OpenAI CLIP to generate dynamically evolving images as the text of a story is fed in
oneth.club: an online discussion society designed to unite rather than divide — building a website that gathers links and gamifies discussion to promote a common parlance
Financial Modeling for a Foodtruck — writing out the operational details for a hypothetical foodtruck
WORC Foods website animation — building an animation to illustrate the concept behind the WORC Foods foodtruck
Simulating the Braccio robotic arm with ROS and Gazebo — open sourcing a simulation of the Braccio arm in ROS Gazebo
Updating su_chef object detection with custom trained model — building a custom trained yolov3 model for vegetable detection
su_chef prototype 1: My robotic arm that detects apples and picks them up — building an image detection robot
Timeline Streamgraph from Google Sheets Data — I've made a new kind of visualization called a Timeline Streamgraph. It's a modification of a conventional streamgraph, flipped on its side so that time flows from bottom to top. I built it this way ...
Twitter for Hipster — tl;dr; I made a web extension that removes all the really popular tweets from your timeline. You can install it for Firefox, and view the open source code here. As I've been reading Twitter I've ...
Amplifying Yeast — In this time of minimally available yeast, it's important for bakers to extend their yeast supplies a bit. Many have turned to sourdough, but if you don't eat bread every day, feeding a sourdough starter ...
Building a Virtual Black Rock City — When Burning Man announced that they were canceling the party in the desert this year, they hinted that they wanted to try to make an online Black Rock City experience. But as others have mentioned, ...
A GPT2+BERT reddit reply bot in 20 minutes — There's a new subreddit called talkwithgpt2bots that's intended to let people interact with AI based comment bots. I got my tupperware-party bot working again on there, but it would be awesome to have a bunch ...
Getting so-so-social with #bridgy and the #IndieWeb — UPDATE: this no longer works. I shut this down as it wasn't getting much use anyway and I no longer feel sucha strong need to plug into social media for my personal projects. I've avoided ...
Modeling whether an outbreak of COVID-19 virus will hit San Francisco — Epistemic status: To be clear, this is a highly simplified model and should not be used to insight panic or to instill a false sense of security. Please enjoy with a healthy level of skeptical ...
How to build a convincing reddit personality with GPT2 and BERT — Last month, I experimented with building a reddit comment bot that generated natural language replies by combining two pre-trained deep learning models: GPT-2 and BERT. I wrote another post on the motivation and background, but ...
Combining GPT-2 and BERT to make a fake person — GPT-2 is a deep learning model that is able to generate astonishingly coherent English text. It was released last year, and everyone’s mind was blown into histrionic hyperbole, including mine. Its creators at OpenAI were ...
QMB Prototype Demo — Lately, I've been having too much fun, working on quantum randomness generators. One of my goals is to build a minimalist device for producing a quantum binary outcome. I've designed one simple and cost-effective circuit ...
Quantum Multiverse Bifurcator Installation — For the past few months, I've been working on a series of interconnected projects and thought experiments centered around the concept of the quantum multiverse, a theoretical interpretation of quantum mechanics that implies that many ...
Green Wall Irrigation — Last winter, my friend and I set out to build a sort of "green wall" in his back yard. It was a very fun project, and the building and planting turned out to be quite ...
Quantum Coin Flip Device — Over the past few months, I've been working on building tools to connect human decisions with the outcomes of quantum measurements. The goal is to allow people to let their decisions be chosen using the ...
Quantum Multiverse Bifurcator — Update: by some mind-blowing coincidence the theme of next year's Burning Man happens to be the Multiverse! Note that what follows was all written before the theme was announced. My partner and I went to ...
Creating Immediacy — I'm filled with a constant sense of urgency right now. Each day I feel a little more of my time burning away from me. There is no guaranteed tomorrow so I want to do what ...
Gmail Auto-Responder for AI Robot Party Game — I'm a big fan of immersive social games! Last fall, I built an escape room for the engineering social at my company. For the three prior organizations I've worked for, I've also run a social ...
Woodworking, Motor Work, and Head Replacement on Ioni — Claire and I have been refurbishing our sailboat this summer. Our top priorities were to replace our defunct head, and to reseal and treat our wood and recaulk the topside. Motor Repair Soooo, I hate ...
Google Analytics for Scrolling on a Static Website (or Google Analytics is Creepy) — A couple of months ago, I helped one of my friends set up Scroll Tracking with Google Analytics on an experimental website. While working on this I discovered that I could do really cool/creepy stuff ...
Solar Electrical System on Ioni — Daughters of Nereus, resident in caves, merged deep in sea, sporting through the waves;whose forms half wide are nourished by the deep, leaping and wandering through the liquid sea.Bright, watery dolphins, sonorous and gay, well-pleased ...
Visualizing shared budgets and dividing up household expenses fairly — My partner and I have been tracking our finances ever since we moved in together back in 2014. Originally, we started just tracking our shared expenses like rent and groceries in order to make it ...
Redwood Planter Cabinet — My friend had really been wanting to build his own green wall in his back yard in the Mission in SF. So this winter, we took a weekend, planned it out, and built it. Here's ...
Human Ivory Earrings — Ever since working on my partner's engagement ring last year, I've become more and more interested in making custom jewelry for people. Recently, I happened upon another interesting raw material, and I decided to see ...
@rtifice Website Revamp — A few months ago, a non-profit I volunteer for @rtifice tech education, needed to get its digital face revamped. I spent a few weeks working on a full website and blog revamping. Page loads and ...
Experiential Puzzle Narrative — I recently completed a long-time dream of building my own experiential puzzle narrative, also known as an escape room. I ran it as an engineering social (not this) at my current place of employment, Color. ...
Introducing Ioni — I recently purchased a beautiful Dolphin 24 sailboat. The boat was manufactured in 1968 and has a great history compiled by Ron at dolphin24.org. I'm honored to be a part of her story, and I ...
Skylight Chapters 3 & 4 — Another two chapters from my novel. Click here to read the first two chapters. ...
Notes on Bike Fixes — I've been hanging out at Bike Kitchen in SF for the past couple of weeks. I previously wrote a little something about replacing a bottom bracket. Below are my notes on a few more key ...
Replacing a Bottom Bracket — The bottom bracket is one of the most fundamental parts of the bike. Like many highly important things, it's also one that gets totally overlooked. That is until it starts to break. For several months ...
Sailboat Light Covers — Starting in November 2017, I began renting a boat at Coyote Point Marina in Burlingame, CA. I'm using it as a crashpad near my work so that I don't have to commute from SF every ...
hope you dance (alone) — For the past couple of months, I've been obsessed with Neil Cicierega's amazing mashups. Basically, he does an unbelievably amazing job of squeezing tons of irony and kitsch out of a bunch of 90s and ...
Indiana Jones and the Elusive Promo Code — In a lot of ways, my brother and I share a lot of the same opinions, but there are a few subjects where we disagree vehemently. One of the places where our difference of opinion ...
Theseus and the Cell (a PhD dissertation story) — Epistemic status: High confidence in technical validity of model, low confidence in biological applications. The main reason I haven't been very active on this blog for the past year is that I've been finishing up ...
Analyzing Edge.org forum data - Experiences with Crowdsourcing Analysis — Epistemic status: First foray into this type of analysis, expecting a 33% chance of at least 1 major technical error. I recently signed up to take part in an experiment on crowdsourcing data analysis run ...
Engagement Ring from Found Smoky Quartz — Sometimes you try something that you're just sure will never work, yet somehow, even though you almost can't believe it, things work out just perfectly. When my fiancee, Claire, and I talked about getting engaged, ...
Text Mining and Natural Language Processing on Health Forums — As part of the Insight Health Data Science Fellowship, I just got to spend the last 3 weeks working on a pretty fun project applying natural language processing to medical health forums. The goal is ...
Git Versioned PDF Visualizer — jump to the code I've been writing a very long document over the past couple of years. Because I love tracking my own behavior and Open science, I decided to version control the whole editing ...
Parallel IPython with Jupyter Notebooks on a SLURM cluster — I figured it would be such a piece of cake to get my Jupyter IPython notebooks to run parallel on my work cluster, but in the end, I had so much trouble trying to find ...
Bluetooth controlled Redbot construction — For part of the Ray elementary after school electronics and robotics club (R-ASER), I'm prototyping a robot that can be remotely controlled via a serial connection through bluetooth. The following is the rough draft of ...
Connecting the Artifice Center with a Shared NAS Drive — These are some quick instructions for anybody interested in connecting a NAS to Linux computers on a closed local network. In particular, this guide will help to reconnect the NAS drive to the computers at ...
Star Wars Themed Settlers of Catan — I have been wanting to get a Settlers of Catan game for ourselves ever since I played it for the first time a few months ago. It looked like an incredibly simple game setup so ...
The Plexi+Rock Boot Tray Accident — Over the holidays, I always end up with new projects to make for gifts for my friends and family. This time for Christmas my gf's mom asked me to make a boot tray for her ...
Q&A on the Route Crime Calculator — I've recently built a cool little web app that helps evaluate the number of crimes occurring along a person's travel route in the City of Chicago. To elaborate a little on the rationale and methodology, ...
ARFI: A Robotic Dog — Over the past couple of months, me and my friends at Artifice Tech Education have been building our very own robot dog mascot, ARFI. He's been a lot of fun to build, and although we ...
Paper Chess Set — I've recently started playing chess with the students at the after-school program where I volunteer. It's fun, but we only have one chess set so only two students get to play at a time. Since ...
Power Analysis of an Indoor Water Fountain — Craving tranquil water splashing in your tiny apartment? You can have a relaxing fountain for under $10 if you have an old phone charger lying around. Simple setup The majority of the work is done ...
The Barbie Hadoop Cluster (Multi-Node Cluster) — I've finally finished the Barbie Hadoop Cluster! It's been several months since I started the project, but after the hiatus I was ready to come back and get it finished. Due to space limitations in ...
RASER Week 9: Laser activated trip wire — After last week's success with the physical trip wires, it's time to move on to some serious spy trip wire technology: LASERS! This project combines some of the tricks we've already learned as well as ...
RASER Week 8: Arduino trip wire — Today's project is a challenge to build a trip wire. The challenge builds on the Arduino input and output skills we put into practice last week. All we have to do is slightly adapt last ...
Procrastinating with a Time Optimization Game — I've got to admit, I'm majorly busy at this time of year. But today, I'm deciding to procrastinate by writing a post on—ironically enough—a game about optimizing your use of time! The Background If you've ...
RASER Week 5 - Review Game — We've learned a lot so far in the RASER program by now. So to remind us about all of the things we've learned, we want to have a competition and see who remembers the most. ...
RASER Week 6: Arduino LED Passcode Pad - Part 2 — Two weeks ago, we started learning about one of the most important things Arduinos can do: read input voltages. We want to continue working on reading input this week and connect our input back to ...
RASER Week 4: Arduino LED Passcode Pad - Part 1 — This will be the first lesson where we really get into programming the Arduino to do something cool. The Arduino is an amazing tool for making devices that react to external inputs. In this lesson, ...
tweet_note: An unfakeable timestamp notebook — I have a confession. I don't like tweeting that much. I always feel like I sound like an idiot. And with tweets, I run into the possibility of sounding like an idiot at a much ...
The Barbie Hadoop Cluster - Stage 1 — Ever since I took Coursera's Intro to Data Science course, I've been dreaming of getting my own MapReduce system up and running. It just seems so much more rewarding to have my own data framework ...
RASER Week 3: Arduino LED blinker — Electronics engineers can build really complicated devices by controlling when and where simple circuits turn on and off. For example, check out this flat screen monitor that I've opened up to see the inside. The ...
RASER Week 2: LED dimmers and switches — This lesson will extend our knowledge of electricity and resistance by adding variable resistors and switches. To start I want to show a Variac autotransformer. The dial controls the amount of electricity getting to the ...
Four Humours Collage — Claire and I had these fairly cheesy Monet reprints from the Art Institute that I didn't like. But they had nice stainless steel frames that I wanted to use to fill in our kitchen wall. ...
#ActsOfSuperness Twitter Game — Three days ago at about 3 a.m. I woke up with an idea to make people be nicer to each other. I know it might sound kind of corny, but I wanted to build a ...
RASER Week 1: LED circuits — In this lesson we'll learn how the electricity lighting up our gadgets flows through wires from batteries. My friend Pete built this amazing Jacob's ladder that we'll use to start off the lesson. The arc ...
A Better LinkedIn — I've been wanting to fix my old paper resumé's abhorrent lack of data visualization with an interactive web version. And since I'm about to hit the job market anyway, I figured now is the perfect ...
Wire Network — For the past 10 years or so, I've been saving up my broken metal guitar strings. (For the record, I know I'm a packrat.) A couple of weeks ago, I finally put them to use ...
Graph Theory of Wall Decor — This is just a short post about a hallway wall decoration I made over the weekend. It's supposed to resemble a network graph, linking the different pieces together. Basically I had a lot of unrelated ...
RASER Curriculum — I'm running the Ray After School Electronics and Robotics (RASER) Program at Ray Elementary this Winter. The program is going to culminate with a competition on building an Arduino based security system. And each week ...
Quantum Gambling Game — Have you ever heard of quantum computing? Know what makes it so special? Well, many scientists (and their funding agencies) are hoping that quantum computing's secrets just might help get them rich. I can't promise ...
PVC Easel — One of my gifts to my girlfriend this year was a set of paints and brushes that I found on craigslist. She'd been holding on to some canvases, but it didn't look like she'd ever ...
Solar battery charger & flower pot (first try) — This is my first attempt at attaching a solar battery charger like this one to a flower pot. The style of the pot isn't exactly what I was looking for. I was hoping to have ...
Mo's Tool Pouch — So in keeping with the holiday spirit I'm now showing off the little bag I made for my girlfriend's mom. She's an avid ceramicist so I made this bag to keep her tools. Over the ...
Modernizing my computer case — I had an old laptop case from the 90s that I wanted to update for use. Mostly I just wanted to shrink it down to a reasonable size for a modern laptop. Here's the result. ...
Introducing Dave's Grill-It-All — My girlfriend's dad (Dave) is really into grilling (as are all dads). So for Christmas we figured we'd go in together to get him one of these grill attachments that he had been talking about. ...
Predicting Bike Share Usage — I recently worked on a Kaggle competition while I was taking Coursera's Introduction to Data Science. Here's a quick summary of what I came up with. The goal of this project was to come up ...
A Simple Anagrammer — A while back, I wrote a little python code that takes in a word and spits out a list of anagram words. It kind of takes the fun out of generating anagrams, but it puts ...
will stedden
