Deconstructing a Laptop To Make A Bunch Of Things - Episode 0: Teardown

I enjoy going to surplus stores. Sometimes you can find something really neat in the endless boxes of stuff. That happened the last time I went to my local store. I got a graphics card for my friend's RGB Windows XP build, a cool PCI audio interface card, and a Samsung NP300V5A-A0GUS laptop. It comes complete with a second generation Intel i7, so I figured I'd take this $10 computer and turn it into something. But what if we could turn it into multiple things? We could deconstruct it and make a bunch of things out of it. Sound cool? I think so. And guess what! It's another multi-part post!

State of the Blog - Year 3

Wow. Already three years. Time flies when you try to keep a cadence of two posts per month. Some of them are pretty good, some of them I'm not super proud of. But, self-awareness is a gift, so let's reflect on what this blog is actually about and what we can do to make it better.

Simulating MapReduce in Mathematica

MapReduce is one of the most important algorithm types in big data. Perhaps its biggest draw is the fact that it can be massively distributed across commodity hardware to crunch massive amounts of data. This puts super computing in the hands of those without specialized parallel hardware. In a very basic example for a Hadoop class I did, I implemented a basic MapReduce simulator in Mathematica in order to illustrate how MapReduce works. I also got some extra credit for it, as well.

My High School Home Lab Is A Mess

I went home this weekend and I got a chance to work with my really janky homelab set up. Since I don't really have a whole lot to write about this month, I figured I'd take a anecdotal trip down memory lane for a blog post and document this this atrocity somewhere and begin to talk about how horrible this set up was.

Super Secret Spy Glasses

I got my hands on a triggered camera assembly that supposedly takes VGA video and 720p still pictures while still being exceptionally small. So, obviously, the next logical step would be to slap them onto a pair of shades, right? Snapchat has made glasses that take pictures so why can't I? Of course it won't be as high quality and it'll save to an SD card, not my phone, but we can only hope for so much, right? So, without further ado, let's get started.

MacOS Screensavers Aren't That Hard

I recently had the chance to play around with a Macbook Pro and XCode 10. I'm not used to using these computers, but I do really like them. I've never been a big fan of the iPhone, but I've always loved Apple's beautiful, if underpowered computers. I wanted to try to make something relatively easy, so I figured I'd start with a screen saver. It wasn't as easy as I thought, but it certainly wasn't hard, either.

Generating Colorful Random Backgrounds in the Browser

This is a short one because I was working on too many things at once and I wasn't able to get any of them done. So i figured I'd talk about a small thing I made a while back for some of my web pages. It's a random blurred color generator that creates random backgrounds every time it's rendered. I'll take you through my process of how I started with a prototype on the server side and slowly made my way to the final client side product.