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Showing posts from August, 2022

Coding on the beach

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  I have for a long time wanted to make a system that would allow me to code on a beach. In recent years I’ve had two approaches to this, one has been to try and produce some sort of virtual reality desert island with a beautiful break . The other has been to try and produce a screen that I can see in direct sunshine. But modern screens are far better at being seen in the sunshine you might say. Just get an anti-reflective coating you might say. Both of these are good solutions but as you can see from the picture below both pale in comparison with my creation. The screen I present here is the culmination of 5 attempts and over £100. The device has 80w of led draw producing a lighting power for which a back panel full of heat sinks cannot dissipate in high ambient temperatures.   So far I haven’t been able to test the device outside of my flat and I know from previous experiments that ended up in the prototypes being smashed that the power pack I have cannot support both the sc...
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A world of joins

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 I often get confused with joins so I looked over the many cheat sheets on google images. The problem I have with the classic cheat sheets is that they all display the joins in terms of Venn diagrams and I've never really understood if the Venn diagram represented the columns or something to do with the data. I've been working to move some code from R in which joins are heavily used to python where pandas has some join functionality but not everything I wanted. To bring across that join functionality I had to understand the nature of the joins at a depth that I just never had before. The following image is what I came up with.
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Structural engineering with cardboard

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Moving into a new flat I have ended up with a lot of cardboard and have actually struggled to get it to all be taken away. I then saw this Kickstarter on hacker news which introduced me to the idea that I could perhaps use the cardboard I had been throwing away the whole time. I have been toying with some ideas for building myself a robot, or at least a robot arm but they seem to be just ludicrously expensive and still not able to lift much weight. One of the problems with the advancement of robotics is that although processing power has come down in price at a rate that no other product ever has, the cost of actuators (The motion inducing components like motors) has remained largely the same. I want to explore an idea I have for using cheaper motors in a robotic arm in another post though. The problem I want to look at here is the possibility of being able to use cardboard, a material which can almost be considered to have a negative price, as the structure to the robot. I love the ...
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The twelve fold way

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I really struggle to remember the combinatorial rules. Do I need to use choose or do I need to use permute? How do I calculate each of them? Is this a case of stars and bars or is this something else? One of the things I want to add to my chatbot program is a way to ask which of the many systems should I be using? I did once try to build a javascript tool although I don’t think it ever really made itself into a useful state. I recently found a paper called “The twelvefold way” which explains all the different ways you put balls in boxes (or urns as is used in the paper). It really helped me to understand, at least a little better, how to calculate the different permutations of the problem. With this newfound understanding, I once again had a go at producing a program to calculate each, with a simple form-based input. One of the things that I wanted to extend this to doing was informing me of what the calculation method was. I really like the way google now lends a hand when you a...
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