Blog

• Ear Socks: for windy days

  Jun. 23, 2025

  SF Bay Area is windy. AirPods don't work well in the wind. The solution: Ear Socks!

• 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?