201–210 of 694 posts
A few years ago I made a "string art" portrait for my girlfriend at the time. It's made from a continuous† 2 km long black thread, woven around a loom made from a bicycle wheel rim. I'm still very proud of how it turned out. †OK fine, it broke at a few points and I had to knot the ends together, but it's the principle that counts. https://imgur.com/gallery/ljoJeal I really wanted to make something creative for her, b…
Impressive creation, creepy gift.
I think my personal favorite physical thing that I made was a music box that plays of the voyager golden record. I made it as a Christmas present for my girlfriend. It is light actuated so when you open the box it starts playing a track from the record, skipping one track ahead each time it is opened. It mostly uses off the shelf components for the electronics, and found and decorated the box (sanding/staining/varnis…
This one is physical and digital. I personally patented, designed, built, and deployed a novel ultrasonic inspection device that encoded position/orientation using IR (Just like motion capture in movies). Actually used it in the field at a nuclear plant. The value pitch is that is allowed for fast deployment (manual scanning), but could also record coverage ensuring nothing was missed. Fast deployment was important t…
That sounds really fascinating, could you post the patent no. or a link to more information? I bought a cheap NDT ultrasonic 'scope' to play with recently, to see if I can potentially measure specific gravity via it.
This correctly listed the parents. Hard part was linking all the systems together and keeping sync. Did it all in C++ way back when I actually programmed for work. Now I am a PM and code on the side for fun. I'm almost glad I cannot go back and see my code. It produced good data but damn was I a novice.
This may or may not fit into the OP's intention but some of my favorite physical achievements are repairs that might be impressive for a random suburban dad :) 1. Two years ago our basement flooded a week after we bought the house. I ended up tearing out the now-saturated carpet and put in vinyl plank flooring. Mainly straight forward but requires planning and at some points tricky sawing. It's cool when people come…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I understanding this correctly, basically a Colo was acquired by Amazon? It’s pedantic but colo existed for decades before AWS. It’s the software layer from AWS that made it “The Cloud” (quicker access to hardware & billing by the second, not month)
Nope. As I understand it, Amazon doesn’t actually own data centers; similar to how they don’t own warehouses. My understanding later on in my career shift to computer engineering was that Amazon is renting out the whole colo, and just owns their equipment. Amazon isn’t maintaining the datacenter infrastructure such as cooling and power, but instead it’s covered in their bill.
This is like saying “I sell cardboard boxes to Amazon, who uses my cardboard boxes to ship packages” … and then claim you built the logistics and online behemoth of Amazon.com
I’m not trying to be a hater. But this story sounds more like you were a supplier to something Amazon built, not something you built.
Shoes. I've made plenty of clothes, bags, and other more common sewing things. But making shoes is a cut above. And I recorded the process in an attempt to show that it's not even that hard in this 'Shoes from scratch' series on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1gv5yv3DoZNdz-LJFykg6mMf...
Dunno why nobody has said anything like this, but I make some awesome bread (baguettes, mainly) and pizza. What's great is not only that you get to eat the results, but whether it turns out well or badly, you get to repeat it all over again--and again, and again, and again.
I was surprised to learn how easy it is to make truly delicious bread. Of course you can spend years refining your technique, but the barrier to entry is low.
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35961590
No seriously, it was a model suspended above a maglev bed. I then added an Arduino, MP3 player IC, and IR detector so that it played BTTF quotes as you walk past.
I've also repurposed an old 2.1 gaming chair hifi into an all in 1, custom "T" shape 3d printed gun metal/copper case, base speaker underneath, left right on top, controls in middle.
I'd say my son, but really my wife is the one that built him ;)
Turns out it was for a build-your-own MP3 player kit. It had slots for old SDR RAM, an IDE hard drive, and power connections for an ATX PSU. Turns out, I had the parts I needed from some old pcs I had gotten from my uncle. I inserted the RAM, copied some MP3s onto the IDE hard drive, put it all in a shoebox, figured out how to short a connector on the PSU to start it - and it worked!
It wasn't pretty, and the sound was noisy as heck, but it was a fun adventure. :)