5/24/2023
This is an old one. Probably from around 2017-2018. Note: It didn't work.
I am colourblind. It's terrible. The government should give me money for my troubles.
In reality, the only burden is remembering the order of traffic lights and fielding questions about those glasses that are supposed to fix colourblindess. No, they don't work like in the videos.
My condition is caused by a reduction in my ability to perceive short wavelength light. There are three types of colour-sensing cone cells in the human eye giving the following absorption graph.
The eye absorbs light, the three cones produce an electrical signal according to the wavelength, the brain compares the signals, and colour is perceived. Sick. My brain takes in the data normally, but the signal coming in is wrong! So colour gets perceived incorrectly.
This initial idea was that if I could build some contraption that could measure the amount of light reflecting off an object roughly along the same ranges as our cones, it could identify colours better than I. The eyes of Talos- unhindered by my genes.
An element employed in many of my projects is a photoresistor; a component that decreases in resistance according to the amount of light it absorbs. With a series of coloured filters, I could use one photoresistor to simulate the different colour responses of the different cones. An Arduino was then used to turn the different resistances into usable data. Apart from those two pieces, the rest of the project was trash. Like, from the garbage can.
I've had this problem with projects in the past where I'm not entirely willing to sink material resources into my ideas. This leads the project to be made of scraps and refuse. While I still learn, it is not conducive to having end products that actually work. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think this applies to other realms of life as well. The idea that if you BUILD something out of garbage it's probably going to end up being… garbage. If you cut every corner, you get a circle. Are the kind of people who want to be politicians actually the kind of people I want in charge? Should one expect to feel loved if they surround themselves with unloving people?
I will no longer buy my copper from Ea-Nasir.
The container for the device was made from a Capt'n Crunch box (garbage), the filters were made using disks cut from polystyrene packaging (refuse), the wires came from off cuts around a telephone junction box (litter), (trash), etc. All of it was scrounged. There's absolutely a place for recycled materials in my projects but only as far as they are actually beneficial.
This is what I came up with. An object would be placed in the box with the door latched. Light from white LEDs would then reflect off the object, through a filter and into the photoresistor. There was a mechanism inside to change the active filter so that another measurement may be taken.
I would like to touch on the filters. Every first grader knows the three primary colours. Those are the three ADDITIVE primary colours. If the filters I used were red, blue and green, they would remove those wavelengths of light before they reached the sensor. Therefore, I needed to use the SUBTRACTIVE primary colours. Like a printer. They would leave the frequencies of light that I was looking for. HyperPhysics has a great explanation here.
Sadly. There was a fatal flaw- a hamartia. The small tube wasn't angled correctly so there was no path for the light to take that would be registered by the sensor. After wrestling with substandard materials for the entirety of the project, I did not have the motivation to rebuild. The device has sat on my shelf since.
5/19/2023
The first project I will document here in the website itself. Starting last November(?), I endeavoured to host a website on a server located in my home. This project has revealed to me the world on internet networking and made me unsure of its future.
For years I've had a spare Raspberry Pi sitting around collecting dust. Only ever used to flash Arduinos. I had remembered from hunting for project ideas years prior that you could use it as a primitive web server! Only a few sleepless nights later I had a website that I could connect to from outside my home network based on a little black box plugged into my router. It still took months to find the motivation to actually learn html and use it for anything.
I started with a fresh install of the OS. I chose to forgo the versions with a desktop interface because I wanted the server to have as much ability as possible- not because I expect the site to become incredibly popular, but instead because I have little faith in the reliability of my home internet. No hate to Telus (read: a little hate to Telus).
I then ran into the most interesting problem I encountered while working on this project. I wanted the server to run on Apache, a massively popular open-source server software. Now, software is downloaded to the Raspbian OS via repositories hosted around the world by a variety of generous people and institutions that have devoted time and bandwidth to providing a source to the software for the OS. The default mirror on my Pi was bunk. Could not download Apache. I went to the list of Raspbian mirrors and found that many of the others couldn't either! After about seven million attempts, I found one from Australia that worked. It took an hour to download, but it worked.
This reminded me of the warning from my childhood I always heard about the internet being forever. The idea that once you uploaded something, it was stuck up there, with no internet lumberjack strong enough to cut it down. This is inaccurate. Information on the public internet only lasts as long as someone is willing to pay to keep it up. Your MySpace pages are gone. The Webkinz I owned have all been euthanized. My Club Penguin clubhouse is long since condemned. There are archival efforts out there, but they are ever vulnerable to problems like link rot. One of the goals of the Internet Archive is to prevent a digital dark age, the idea that our reliance on digital file keeping will result in a lack of historical information. Ever since we moved from paper to tape, vinyl to... also tape, the technology we use evolves so fast that it is effectively decomposing from the moment that it is adopted. That is not to say that I am against computers. I spend most of my day on them. I luv computers. Beep Boop.
Even for the personal information still publicly available, who's looking for it? Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I don't think anybody is going to be digging up the embarrassing Instagram meme page I ran in sixth grade. Does anyone remember Bagel Boss? I don't. Who's that?
Anyway
When you go to KieranJ.ca, this is what now happens:
1. Your computer talks to the local Domain Network Server (DNS). It holds a list of websites and their IP addresses. Through the org that provided me with my domain name, I can update DNS banks around the world! This is useful because google dot com is easier to remember than a bunch of numbers. The DNS tells your computer to talk to my home router.
2. Your computer calls my house on port 82 letting it know that you're looking for a webpage. It then pulls data from my RaspberryPi and serves you the words you're reading right now. Pretty rad.