I added the programming tag as I suspect a lot of responses will be relevant to that but whether you're writing the next flappy bird or starting a micro-brewery its welcome here.
Would love to hear in particular about side projects that you're hoping could be a job or main source of income in the future (or perhaps success stories...)!
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don't just use a thoughtful web, BE a thoughtful web side effects may include inability to think
I'm figuring out how to convert this drill press I have to run off a VFD, which will give me infinitely-variable speed. The motor is getting switched out too, so that will upgrade me from a washing machine motor to a 3/4 HP motor. Should make quite the drill press for around $200.
I do general shop tinkering, wood, and metalwork as a hobby. Drilling wood requires a pretty high drill bit speed to get a smooth surface finish, but drilling metal requires a very slow speed (and a lot of torque) to avoid melting/dulling the drill bit too fast. I have a $50 benchtop drill press that I bought new a while back, and I have done far more than it was designed to do with it, but it suffers from some design flaws: the motor is too weak, the head casting is too light (and thus not rigid, which is bad for drilling metal), and the quill has too much runout so it is hard to get a good surface finish especially when countersinking weird stuff (like acrylic or steel). I recently picked up a used floor-standing drill press for a good price; it's an old Craftsman so it should be better designed. It had been destined for the scrap heap, but the guy I bought it from bought it from the scrapyard, fixed a couple of issues, and retrofitted a washing machine motor onto it since the original motor and pulley had already been scrapped. Pulleys are ridiculously expensive; a VFD and 3-phase motor is more pricey still but gives me a torque upgrade and even more speed variability (along with the ability to program some more esoteric things, such as a mode for power tapping).
I'm trying to learn how to do some bookbinding and I've started making mixtapes lately.
I've just started my side-career as a Dementia Friends champion. Basically I go around delivering DF information session which give people a better understanding of what dementia is and what it's like to live with. I hope it'll be as rewarding as I expect. I'm also doing what I can to make my local area a dementia friendly community.
http://imgur.com/a/WPZIX Playing with software to make better images. I got a long way to go.
20FPS full frame 16 bit color, 2000 frames in that capture, so 100 seconds. I made a few runs at various levels of focus but this capture was the best of the run. I spent roughly two hours capturing images of Jupiter. Total file size for the 2000 frames was just shy of 5GB. After first run of processing in PIPP Then you run software to figure out which frames are too blurry or smeared etc and reject the worst. Seems like the sweet spot may be reject 1/2 of them. Then you run the final image through a program called Registax and sharpen up the detail and make it look a bit pretty.
The blurriness is purely caused by the atmosphere (mostly) and the equipment. The gear I am using was not holding a correct focus so I had to redneck engineer a fix to keep it in focus. So some of the images are way, way blurry. The biggest factor is the air. Air makes this type of image blurry, and there is nothing we can do other than put a telescope in space, which as the Japanese found out today sadly, has its own set of troubles. The images are very short exposures, the hope being that at least some of them will be sharper than normal and you can use them. In this case, the exposure was, I think, 50 milliseconds. Distortions can come from everything from air pollution, to layers of different temperatures, to where in the sky the object is. On the horizon, you are looking through about 200 miles of air; directly overhead you are looking through 10-15 depending on your latitude. You first idea is kinda, sort, right. Jupiter rotates once in roughly 10 hours. If you take data for an hour, you will notice that the cloud layers have moved. The moons also move fairly quickly and over an hour or so you can watch the dance they do. But for the 2-10 minutes I was capturing frames, this rotation is not that significant.Interesting, would you mind confirming my thinking about the cause of blurriness?
This is a raw video dump of what the camera captures. This was one of the test ones that I ran at the beginning of the evening. The movement of the planet back and forth is me dialing in the tracking. This is not quite what you see with the eye in this scope; the human eye has much, much more dynamic range than the camera I am using so you will see more colours and fine detail, along with the moons off to the side. This video is a stream of 2000 still images taken at 40 frames per second, so it is a bit slower than real time in the video. The blurry is the "shimmy" around the edge of Jupiter in this video. That is what the atmosphere does to things you are trying to look at out in space. That fuzzy has to be fought with software. Note that every few frames everything is sharp and not fuzzy? That is what you use when you 'stack' the images. So running a stack of 50% and then the sharpening tools, you end up with this: This is a bad example, chosen to show a good example of "bad atmosphere" through a telescope. This video is roughly 2 minutes worth of recording. And yes, Jupiter is that small in the eyepiece until you start dialing in the eyepieces to make the image big enough for it to have detail visible to the human eye. Edit: adding a better example. From 2-3 years ago. Hope that helps.
Not really a side, because it's still in lab, but I've been trying to convert my lab to use as much open software as possible. I've been re-writing a lot of old MatLab code in Python, setting up IPython notebooks, and converting or disorganized set of protocols into a git-version-controlled repository of Markdown documents. I came across this talk on a similar workflow being set up in neuroscience imaging, which got me excited: And in the process learned about one of the most futuristic research campuses I've seen: I'm hoping that when I finally go to publish a paper, the analysis will be completely NumPy / IPython / Jyupter / Docker-powered. I'm currently stuck on how to distribute an eventual 50+ GB of data without having to pay extraordinary costs for hosting...
Torrents are a possibility, but I'd prefer a central host with guaranteed uptime. Something akin to the PDB, but for a different kind of data. And the code is for validation and analysis of mass spectrometry data. Basically measuring the levels of many proteins and protein modifications in a sample to get a snapshot of a cell / tissue's signaling network.
There is PRIDE, which may turn out to be more useful than I initially thought. But it's also nowhere near the quality, in terms of regular analysis, more automated metrics of quality, a decent search engine, etc. After writing the above comment, I did go back and write a little wrapper around it, so, if binder and the like don't mind downloading a few hundred megabytes of summarized data, then I should be okay.
I'll probably do a pubski / drunkski post when the project is finally published, but that won't be for at least 1-2 years (we're still applying for funding right now). I wouldn't mind writing a few more general "state of the field" type posts, but I'm not sure how much hard science people want to read through.
My main project at the moment is a Chrome extension: Humble New Tab Page. I'm super lazy about updating it though and don't have any plans to monetize it. I wish I could but the only real options are ads or sleazy stuff. I don't want to piss off my loyal users and I doubt donations would bring in much income.
Yeah I'm pretty much just passively maintaining it when things break at this point. I mainly built it for myself anyway. I do have a few ideas for new projects in the pipeline but with a full-time job and chronic depression it's hard to stay motivated about anything,
There's some really great projects being worked on by some very smart people. I'm not one of them! My current project is to make a system to tag Hubski posts as #spam, the idea being I maintain a list of users and occasionally (manually but automatically would be an option) check for new posts and add the community tag. I was going to build it then clear it with mk, better to ask forgiveness rather than permission ;), but the community has some very strong opinions on that tag and I don't want to step on any toes!
Hmm, interesting. Perhaps use a tag with less connotations... not that I can think of one right now. I was always very intrigued by Wikipedia's scarily accurate ClueBotNG which iirc uses heuristics. Problem is that you need massive datasets, which few sites have - and Hubski definitely doesn't.
Way I figure it, if someone disagrees they can change the community tag. I intend to have the script ignore posts with existing community tags which would allow users to correct any they disagree with, but the spam problem that has manifested itself on Hubski tends towards single post users, or serial posters who do not engage in the site and simply use it for syndication. Have a look at iamyourddy's profile, joined 25 days ago, zero engagement with the site other than to post very click-bait links for a total of three sources. Would it be fair to label all his posts as spam automatically? Some may disagree, and I'm sure I'll be told that it's not necessary due to the way Hubski promotes posts to user feeds. What about desivip? Member for 224 days, zero engagement other than to share links. A wider range of sources, but still some overlap with the first user. I want to discourage low-effort canvassing on Hubski. I'm certainly not against self promotion, aplusb at least made some effort to engage the community when spreading news about his PC case and I wouldn't consider marking that as spam. But then his alternate account esplin2966 was the last we heard of him and would certainly meet my criteria for spam (single post, clickbait title) -- so why is he exempt? I totally get why people would be against this sort of thing, so maybe Hubski needs to have a proper discussion on this issue first.
esplin2966 was an account I made before I decided I wanted to go with the name aplusb instead, so I don't really use it anymore. That account should be deleted. Sorry for any confusion. It's a lot of work to design a PC case and I hope to be able to continue to get feedback from people at hubski.
There are some delays getting the second prototype because of a miscommunication with our manufacturer. As of last wednesday, the issue has been resolved and we are back on track :) Once we get our second prototype out to some reviewers we should be getting close to crowdfunding.
I have a few, including a service for digital artists that I'm working on with my wife. I recently put pen to paper - as it were - on an idea I had for a personal TIL git repo tool.
I'm planning out the vegetable garden this year. It's going to be a mix of raised beds, mounds and cones for beans. I'm kind of most excited for the cones since basically what you do is make a teepee and it will be big enough that my niece can play in it. It won't exactly be a source of income and this year the cost for set up might exceed the savings in groceries however one day it will benefit the wallet. Currently I'm trying to figure out how I can build an irrigation system for the raised beds. I found a very simple design however limited water pressure might crush that dream. The best I've come up with is setting it up so I can just screw the hose into one bed while I work on another and keep switching it until it's done. The other option is setting up a bunch of timers to do the switching for me however that can get pretty expensive fast.
That's something to think about although all the drip irrigation I have seen is above ground and I was leaning towards having everything under the soil to lessen the amount that would just evaporate. So basically I would drill a hole in the side of the box and have pipes running in kind of a U shape to water the whole bed. This also means the animals that will, despite my best efforts, somehow get in can't wreck the system too badly. Edit: It seems like what I'm getting at is essentially a drip irrigation system just without the actual dripping since it's underground. "sub-surface drip"
Look into drip tape. You can cover it and it still works fine. You will have to have some sort of hole in your box but it could be as small as 1/4 in for the small drip tape. The 1/2 in stuff can only be run in straight lines but the 1/4 in stuff can be looped. It works a lot better than the cheap soaker hoses you buy at Walmart. Drip irrigation doesn't care if you burry it since you aren't relying on water pressure for dispersal
After finally realizing that an epic fantasy piece I had been working on for years was really going no where I scrapped all of the work I had (I still have it, it's just packed away with a few other story concepts). I took quite a few months off from big overarching writing pieces, but recently I have been throwing around concepts mostly character concepts for an epic fantasy piece. I learned a lot from my earlier attempts and I'm ready to go again. My goal this time is scope. Last time I went completely unhinged and ended up with literally 100's of characters, spaces, moments, and small texts that were so unbelievably trivial that it bogged me down mentally and emotionally. This time I'm going into this to tell the story of a character in a cool world. After that is done I figure I can unhinge myself after I've told my story.
Well, the music stuff. I sing in a choir, play guitar and ukulele. Music gives me the opportunity to meet a lot of really great people and experience a lot of really amazing things. I've been plugging away at French for a while to improve my fluency. Right now I'd say I'm very close to conversational, as long as nobody is talking super quick. I think once I get past 50% fluency on Duolingo I'm going to start Italian then pick another language once I've made more headway on those. I think that being multilingual is important, and it's something I wish I had taken more seriously as a kid, though I'm thankful for having taken Latin. Maybe it will pay off in a dollar value way some day.
I'm writing a TV series that is a historical dramatization based on the founding of Seattle. The last year has been intensive research with my writing partner, as we delved into the people who founded and built Seattle for the first 10 years or so (pre Yukon Gold Rush, Seattle), the geography, the tribes, the environment, the interesting episodes and characters, etc. I have an utterly insane timeline in Aeon Timeline of every relevant event and person, from birth to death. We have visited all kinds of archives, museums, original locations, etc. We've talked through what would happen if persons X, Y, Z, and W were all in room together, and what they'd talk about. And we have a really nice Episode 1 written, a first season storyline, individual storylines for the key characters, and a full two season story arc. Now I need to nail down two more episodes (for possible production as a miniseries), so we can figure out our next steps... self-production turns out to be a very real possibility, but I'm not sure I want to go that route. I like being one of the two Writers... not so sure about the Producer role. We shall see...
I'm working on a remote job aggregation site. I might try to sell it on Flippa one day, I'd like to at least make it break even by selling job posts on it (hopefully I'll never resort to ads). My motivation was that I 1) wanted such a thing when I was doing my own job hunt several months ago, and none of the existing ones did everything I wanted, and 2) many of the companies I was interviewing with wanted code samples, and all my code was tied up w/ current and previous employers.
Right now I have none, I would like to write an userscript for instant markdown preview on hubski but my job doesn't leave me with any desires to program anything outside it. I usually come back late and tired and I just want to rest and chat.