From a developer point of view, WIX is NOT amazing. With its questionable connections it makes it even less attractive. This post documents my first use of WIX ever in 2021 and my first attempts to utilize the WIX API as well. The goal is to create a publications page that requires users to register before they can access these articles.

It can be tough to find detailed information about electromagnetic simulations online – at least as things stand in the present internet. Where information is present it is provided in some standard form as outlined by textbooks and it is not always immediately apparent how this textbook knowledge can be translated into implementations. In this article, I build a very simple and maybe inaccurate PID control system that very superficially pretends to run on a microcontroller. To support this, since I don’t have a real system to test on, I outline a very quick and dirty approach to modeling electromagnetic levitation of a set of coils above a track using python and a recently developed package: Magpylib.

Recently, I encountered a problem. The problem is that of time. I have been trying to read an English translation of a book published in 1377 AD by Ibn Khaldun entitled the Muqaddimah. Muqaddimah however has no audio book.and the book sits at roughly a thousand pages of text. I, being one of those lazy folks, like to multi-task somewhat in order to get my reading done. So while I walk to and from work, I’d like to be able to read without the requisite dangers of being run over by a car.

In an earlier article I made the case that it doesn’t really make financial sense to both register your domain and host your website with a provider such as GoDaddy. The method presented in this article assumes that your home modem’s IP address is a dynamically assigned public IP address. This kind of dynamic IP address has a habit of changing on a regular basis – on a daily to monthly basis – based on some set of rules implemented by your ISP. This is the case for which this article presents a solution.

The goal of this article is to make the case for hosting your own website. This article is the first part of a multi-part series of articles to fill in the missing gaps for people who are reasonably technical that will allow them to host their website and shopping platform on their own personal NAS or computer. It turns out that in two years you can basically payback the costs associated for setting this up yourself

The internet is full of people and companies who make tall claims about therapies. Those who claim the efficacy of magic pills, magic diets, magic touch, magic magnets and magic light. My goal in this article is to briefly review the scientific literature and do an initial sanity check to see if light therapies are legitimate and then to understand under what conditions they are effective and to what degree and under what basic conditions.

I have this little problem. You see. I’m a cheapskate when it comes to spending money on WordPress plugins. There! I said it. Sooo … I’ve decided its time to just learn how to program Javascript and PHP directly into my existing WordPress theme. The goal: To create a nice looking blog page where I can filter the posts by categories with a drop down list. So come on in and learn how to develop for your own WordPress website rather than shell out the cash to some random dudes and dudettes. Don’t be sad, dudes and dudettes, you’re not bad people. I’m just one of those people who can code as well.

last three years or so I’ve gone through a ton of injuries. This might be because I’m getting older. Or that I’m taking more athletic risks. Here I want to discuss one such injury and document some of the damage and how it happened so that you, dear reader, can be smarter and learn from my mistakes. Or if you don’t learn, that you can see what these injuries look like and how to deal with them. This will be more of a show and tell and i will discuss my wrist ligament injury and how I localized and addressed it with and without a doctor’s help.

I find myself in a conundrum. I don’t like going to the doctors. And often, I find myself lacking trust in doctors as well. The reason for this lack of trust, isn’t because doctors are lacking in knowledge or that medicines and treatments aren’t effective. Rather its because a health system has been created that limits their efficacy.

I recently came across a problem. I wanted to install some windows software on Ubuntu 20.04 and so decided to install WINEHQ, a windows emulator. To do so, i had to add the repository for WINEHQ to my package manager apt-get. So I followed the instructions provided by WINEHQ and came up with an error.

I have decided that its time to take a deep dive into electrochemistry. I’d like to return to research with the angle of supplementing my electrical, software and computer engineering background and my amateurish physics and mechanics background with chemistry. However, I’d like to follow the non-traditional route of experimentally motivated learning.

I recently came across a problem in my daily experiences in Taiwan.. Me and a friend had discovered a swimming pool here in Taipei. Having gone swimming at another location, I had discovered that Taiwanese swimming pools require people to buy goggles and swimming caps. And that these are requirements for swimming. So I had availed myself the opportunity, bought myself a set of these and gone ahead with swimming at my old pool without incident or complaint.

Designing electric machines sometimes requires an understanding of the physical properties of the materials we’re working with. In this article, I’ll be exploring the magnetic properties of materials. I’m particularly interested in a diamagnetic material called pyrolytic graphite – the strongest room temperature diamagnet in existence today. My goal is to understand how magnetic and diamagnetic materials interacts with an externally applied magnetic field.

Maxwell? Who is he? Why should we even care who he is? And ohhh … god! What is the insanity behind his equations?! … these my friends are the questions that run chills down the spines of us normal folks. We are like fish out of water, thrashing about in an insane desperate struggle to comprehend the great questions of the universe. Well, lets try diving back into the ocean … and gaze upon the incredible deliciousness of physics at work.

Have you ever wandered the streets wondering, ‘Boy o boy! I wish I had more control over my life!’? Well! Wander no more and come into my parlour as I take you through the exciting world of power control. In this article, you’ll learn to take control of your life by designing a simple PWM control circuit that drives a MOSFET. Underlying this little circuit is a 555 timer. Adjust the frequency using the capacitors, add a variable resistor – and voila! Power control! I designed this controller for use with a simple hot wire foam cutter.

You know that fancy looking motor with the three or four funny looking wires sticking out of it? Yeah, you know the one I’m talking about! Yup, that’s a 3 phase motor! Well wouldn’t it be fun to get that thing working through your normal single phase household supply … or better yet, from a DC power supply 🙂 Well come on in and have a look at my design for a 3 phase power supply. The supply generates a low voltage (<18 Volt) low current 3 phase sinosoidal waveform. This waveform is used to switch high power MOSFETs on and off producing a 3 phase high current square wave output. Yes ... yes you'll get all sorts of harmonics and noise driving the motor from a square wave ... but, hey - at least it'll work. Note that this design hasn't been tested in real life yet! Only, good ol' spice simulations.

Earnshaw’s theorem demonstrates that stable levitation isn’t possible using static magnetic or electric fields. His proof relies on the idea that the potential energy surface at all points in space in any static system has no local minima. In this article, I’ll discuss potential energy and its relationship to Earnshaw’s theorem and verify that the theorem is, in-fact, correct.

In the world of electrical machines, we stuffy engineers like to wax intellectual and spout all sorts of age old wisdom from all sorts of dusty old books. Today I’m going to dust off some books and talk about the Newton-Raphson Numerical Method for estimating equation roots. This is a key method that many Finite Element Analysis (FEA) tools use to calculate magnetic fields. The truth is, as engineers, we use FEA all the time, but very few of us really understand the theory or how it all works. This is my first attempt to remedy that particular situation. But be patient! I’m only a beginner too! 🙂

My goal today is to try and do some data-scraping using google to grab some basic weather data. Though of-course this could also be applicable to any webpage and expanded quite easily beyond weather data. I’ll show two different approaches using a direct approach and another approach that controls a browser (via Selenium) to get access to the data after all dynamic HTML data has been rendered.

The images included capture the visual elements of the various extracurricular CAD projects I’ve undertaken over the years (excluding those under NDA). Its hopelessly incomplete. If you are an employer, investor, want to take one of my courses, join me for a project or collaboration or if you are just one of those random people interested in finding out a bit more about me, Enjoy.

Welcome to my daily guitar practice page. Here you can see my progress through daily recordings. Am I getting better? Have a listen and let me know!

So here we go. Those of you just tuning in, clearly you were not impressed with my previous months of guitar blogs. Sooooo… Pshht. Don’t be expecting me to go over it all again. ‘ve been practising very little. So not much to talk about. In truth, talking to my teacher, he suggested that at absolute minimum I need 1 hour of practice per day – which I’m not getting. And in-fact, to start becoming good something in the order of 4 hours per day – probably more. Lets get started.

I realized I was over eating. And decided to count calories for a month and see the results. At the end I’ve got some simple statistics of how my calorie intake changed day to day. Next time around I’ll do something more scientific like measuring my weight and shit.

So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, come join me and follow along with my next month of guitar learning. Thats a total of 2 months. Probably close to 3 months. Wow… Just wow! Let me show you what I’ve learnt and how you too can learn the guitar like the genius talent that I am. Yep. GENIUS. Thats what i am. Yes indeed. Indoubatably. I’ll cover some new chords, scales and some more complex rhythm and strumming patterns.

The previous weeks I had begun the process of learning the basics of strumming and chords. This week, follow me on the next two weeks of my journey to not sucking at music. Crack open a cool can of your favourite drink, a pop corn and watch me fail. .. Damn those internet skeptics. Always ready to mock a poor innocent engineer venturing out into the cruel cruel world. Sighhhhhh.

Welcome to the wonderful world of guitar. Are you one of those sassy people who learned some music basics when you were young? Huh? You lucky devils …. Alas, there are some among us that still need a bit of learning to do. I’ve found that some people trying to teach music in the great outdoors make basic assumptions that make it challenging for a complete beginner. This blog outlines my first week of the guitar learning process as a real ‘complete’ beginner. Ladies and gents, enter and enjoy my terrible guitar playing. …. what …. you want me to stop? Well, all you have to do is throw money at me and I promise I’ll stop playing … No ….. no. I’m lying. Did you forget. I’m from the internet.

Are you one of those paranoid people who is terrified that an insane calamity is just around the corner? Are you obsessively checking the world news waiting for the moment that you can spring into action? Well, why not harness that obsessiveness, be productive at the same time and check out if your country’s power […]

A few years ago, when I was but a weee little lad, ready to face the world and enter the world of engineering, I got the rummy idea that university was the way to go. And so, full of optimism and passion, I popped in the application form, went through the ‘do you have the highest grade’ rat race, got out a substantial loan and made my way into the University (the University in question shall remain unnamed). I was excited! Thrilled! I was in the exciting and riveting field of the then massively popular and over inflated subject of … computer engineering … yes, you heard it right computer engineering … yes yes .. I know, you’re probably asking: “What were you THINKING?!” … hey, didn’t I mention that I was just a weee little lad? … me liked computer games.

Ahhh … university … your halls smell so sweet. Well folks. This story is about one of those strange idiosyncrasies of life. About how people get worked up over little things. My tale begins with a simple desire. The desire to live a sustainable life and explore the multifaceted world of sustainable engineering. And so, […]

If you’ve ever pushed past the daily grind of your undergraduate education into the beautiful world of the graduate student, this article is for you! Today, I expound to you, dearest reader, the virtues of open access research. “What?!”, you say. “That’s utter madness”, you say. “Academic suicide!” and “What about quality control?!”, I hear. Well … pish posh! And how will I convince you that open access research is the way to go? I shall employ that somewhat archaic notion of logical arguments my friends! That’s right, you heard it here first! Logic CAN be used for useful things! 🙂

Did you just print out a picture? Are you feeling that two dimensional soul sucking bleakness? Yup. That’s what I call the 2D printer blues. A two dimensional image simply can’t capture your genius and inspired view of the world, can it? Well, no more! NOOO more, I say! Welcome to the world of 3D printing my friends. No money? No problem! In this article I’ll take you through the plethera of low cost 3D printing options available to you. Yes sir-eee-ooo! Yes I will. … Ummm … you may still need to beg for those few extra bits of change every now and then to afford it all. But, hey life’s hard, what can you do? – Don’t answer that – it’s a rhetorical question!

Hello internet people. This site is perpetually under construction. Until the perpetual under construction sign is removed, you will have to satisfy yourselves with twiddling your thumbs and hoping that the world doesn’t end and come crashing down on you. Don’t ask me how it will come crashing down on you when the world is under you. It just will damn it!