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Gerry's World

A glimpse into my life

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Blog

This is a collection of mini-projects, thoughts, and ideas that I happen to stumble upon in my everyday life.

Reviving a Dead USB Battery Bank

Nov. 3, 2024

Revive your dead USB battery bank with a hairdryer and 30 seconds!
Online LaTeX table colorizer

Jul. 25, 2024

Quick little tool for colorizing the cells in a latex table like a heatmap.
Simple Practice Quiz SPA

Jun. 12, 2024

My girlfriend was frustrated by the UI of the AMF test prep website, so I scraped the questions and created a simple quiz site.
QR code quick-reference

Apr. 16, 2024

I'm sick of creating throw-away accounts to generate QR codes. Here's a quick, free, no-sign-up generator.
Renting vs Buying (Pt. 2)

Dec. 29, 2023

Financial comparison between buying vs renting.
AI Generated Children's Book

Dec. 24, 2023

I generated a children's book as a Christmas gift using ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, and some generative photo editing tools.
Square-1: A Theoretical Perspective

Nov. 11, 2023

My journey and technique for solving the Square-1 puzzle from scratch, with no prior knowledge of the puzzle.
Custom ASIC

Oct. 29, 2023

A small proof-of-concept custom silicon chip design fabbed through Tiny Tapeout.
Airline Revenues from Tickets vs Fees

Oct. 22, 2023

A breakdown of dis-aggregated airline revenues to see how much they make in fares vs fees.
Add-1 Task Online Demo

Oct. 14, 2023

An implementation of the "Add-1" task described in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.
Biofuel Energy Inputs & ChatGPT

Oct. 12, 2023

Using ChatGPT, we can super-easily generate a pie chart of the energy inputs in producing corn ethanol.
Kelly Criterion

Oct. 3, 2023

Explaining some supposedly obvious facts (but not obvious to me) about diversification and leverage using the Kelly Criterion (for sizing a bet).
Busiest Air Travel Days Calendar

Sept. 23, 2023

TSA publishes a table for the number of air passengers by day in the US. I've converted it to a calendar form for easier reading.
Renting vs Buying (a house)

Jun. 7, 2023

Some random thoughts about renting vs buying from a theoretical perspective.
TEDx talk

May 19, 2023

I gave a talk at TEDxAtlanta sharing some insights from my PhD research building a graffiti robot
Playing with NeRF

May 2, 2023

Procrastinating, I created a NeRF from a video I took about a month ago.
Human flatulence is surprisingly bad for the environment

Dec. 26, 2022

A human's farts and breathing can make up almost 13% of their annual CO2e emissions!
Policy is Hard
ft. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

Dec. 19, 2022

Arrow's Impossibility theorem states that (colloquially): every possible voting system is bad.
Netlify Serverless Functions and AWS DynamoDB

Dec. 7, 2022

For fun and practice, I decided to add a feed of my most recently watched movies/shows using serverless ("lambda") functions.
Measuring Plant Volume Ground-Truth

Nov. 30, 2022

I tried measuring ground-truth plant volume using water displacement but it doesn't work very well.
Fair Dice Tester (Pt. 1)

Nov. 19, 2022

An automated dice rolling machine to test whether a die is fair or not (1-day build).
Food Waste by Category

Nov. 4, 2022

I created a pie chart of food waste in the US by category.
Graffiti Robot–Artist Collaboration 2

Nov. 3, 2022

We created an interactive exhibit where audience members could paint with the graffiti robot.
Graffiti Robot–Artist Collaboration

Sept. 15, 2022

We collaborated with an artist to paint a sign during the opening ceremony of an art exhibit.
Chocolate Making

Jul. 28, 2022

An easy way to create DIY custom etched/engraved glass, applied to shot glasses.
Projector Screen

Jul. 18, 2022

For a one-day build, I made a retractable projector screen using an aluminum tube, a commercial wrinkle-resistant projector sheet, and some misc. items.
Geiger Dice

Jul. 4, 2022

A "truly" random dice RNG based on Radioactive Decay (a quantum process)
Data Scraping

Jun. 23, 2022

A simple data scraping example for the National Geographic Explorers Directory.
Segfault Coredumps

Apr. 21, 2022

Instructions on accessing coredumps from c++ segfaults.
Calculating Cost of Death Risk

Apr. 15, 2022

Cost of travel including costs due to productivity loss and chance of death.
Miller-Rabin Primality Test

Jan. 28, 2022

Cool algorithm for testing if a number is prime.
Chandelier Bulb Changer

Jan. 1, 2022

3D print a tool to change high-up chandelier lights
diffvg+CLIP

Dec. 9, 2021

Generating Painting Trajectories from Text
Break Timer

May 25, 2020

A Chrome extension to remind you to take breaks.
BibTeX-to-HTML Citation Generator

Mar. 27, 2020

An AWS-powered online citation generator.
Hydroponics Robot

Feb. 26, 2020

A robot that monitors and maintains a hydroponic rig
Cheer Me Up

Jan. 13, 2020

An Alexa skill to cheer you up using pre-recorded audio messages from loved ones.
Panoramic Stitching

Oct. 18, 2019

Basic image transformations using homographies
Walking is worse than driving

Oct. 16, 2019

TIL: walking actaully has a higher carbon cost than driving!
More Tutorials

Sept. 28, 2019

My plan to be more useful to the world
Seam Carving

Sept. 12, 2019

Rudimentary implementation of scene carving from Avidan's 2011 paper for my CS6476 project.
Party Lights

Sept. 23, 2018

LED strip syncronized to the music for the ultimate party experience.
DIY Shelf

Feb. 18, 2018

Learn how to make a cheap, easy, portable 5' tall shelf from scratch!
Vacuum Chamber

Jan. 14, 2018

For the Cornea Project, I needed a way to remove bubbles from the silicon molds so I made a cheap, effective vacuum chamber.
Migrating to Netlify

Jan. 8, 2018

After some qualms with Google firebase, I decided to try out my hand with Netlify
Site Comments

Jan. 6, 2018

I thought it would be cool and easy to add a "comments" widget to the bottom select pages on my site.
Saving paper?

Jan. 3, 2018

I have been told my whole life that saving paper saves trees, but recently a professor brought up some interesting points...
Migrating to Google firebase

Dec. 30, 2017

After having had such a pleasant experience hosting my Secret Santa site with firebase, I decided to move the entire site over.
Migrating to Jekyll

Dec. 30, 2017

To clean up code and make site edits faster and more efficient, I switched over to Jekyll - a layout engine
Cost Analysis: Residential Heating

Dec. 28, 2017

During the winter, electric and natural gas heating are two prevalent methods of heating. Which is more cost effective?
Site Analytics

Sept. 27, 2017

I'm curious to see the traffic to this site.
Math Resources Page

Sept. 25, 2017

To aid students who attend my weekly math study group sessions, I decided to upload the worksheets and solutions online as an additional resource.
Restructuring Projects and Blog Pages

Sept. 18, 2017

There are some issues with the current "In Progress" and "Completed" sections of my "Projects" page. There are also some improvements to be made to this blog format.
iPhone Charger Cable Repair

Sept. 16, 2017

I had a few worn/broken iPhone charging cables and I thought it might be interesting to cut them open, see the wires inside, and maybe repair them. I was successful for 2/3 :)
Piano Keyboard Repair

Sept. 6, 2017

I bought a used keyboard last weekend only to find out the USB MIDI socket was broken! I bought a new port and fixed it up today.
Backpack Organizer

Sept. 4, 2017

An accordian-style folder system for my backpack.
Hello World!

Sept. 3, 2017

A test-er to make sure everything is working properly.
The Fold-and-Cut Theorem

Jun. 18, 2017

A fun testing-out of the fold-and-cut theorem: "that every pattern (plane graph) of straight-line cuts can be made by folding and one complete straight cut."
Custom Glass Engraving

May 25, 2017

An easy way to create DIY custom etched/engraved glass, applied to shot glasses.
Airplane Internet Hack?

Can we abuse the "free IP messaging" services of many airlines to get rudimentary internet access?

  Gerry Chen
  412-956-3O47
  gerry [dot] chen2015 [at] gmail [dot] com

  Robotics PhD at Georgia Tech
  Est Graduation: Early 2024