cmwslw :: a tech sandbox

How a simple experiment reveals that colleges could care less about personal curiosity, and why they should care more.

I've been working on a new site on and off for the past month and the fruit of my labor has finally surfaced: hotsteeze.com. It's an action sports site for logging (and sharing, if you want) tricks that you have learned. Skateboarding and other action sports, ever since they began, have been very disorganized. The best collection of tricks up to now has been all the videos scattered throughout YouTube. I've been working on cataloging as many tricks as possible.

I've been looking at "Code" again, and I decided to design functioning CPUs from what I learned in it. Normally CPUs are designed in HDLs such as VHDL and Verilog, but these languages take transistors out of the equation. Since it would be my first CPU, I decided to use Logisim because it had more of a simulation interface and let design with individual transistors. I put the fruits of my labor on my Github. The last design still needs a little of work, but all the other designs are fully functioning.

Have an old black and white TV sitting around? I got mine after winning a raffle and it sat around for about a year unused until I decided to hack it up.

Perhaps my favorite project I've ever worked on is my hydrogen rocket. The craze started when I stumbled upon an article by Dean Wheeler about launching bottle rockets that used hydrogen combustion rather than a bicycle pump for power. I had already finished a reliable hydrogen generator, so I figured this was a good project to put it to use. I didn't have access to some tools and materials that he did, but I found some other solutions that made it work.

It took me many many tries to design a reliable and cheap way to produce the hydrogen I needed. There are literally tons of videos of other people's designs on YouTube (just search for 'HHO generator', 'electrolysis', or 'hydrogen generator'), but some of the parts and processes were just out of reach for my budget. Some used custom-cut steel that was expensive to order. I finally found an interesting method that used off-the-shelf wall plates that were stainless steel. This video was the one that really gave me the idea.

Over the past couple of months, I've been using what little free time I have to code a website called Clustur. It is located at http://clustur.com. The main page pretty much says it all, but it's basically a site for creating, learning, and sharing study material. I've recently used it to study for all of my exams this semester. Because it passed the test of exams for me, I can say it's helped me a ton during the process.

I decided to upload many of my favorite programming projects I worked on years ago back in my Windows days. Yes, almost 1GB of code. The size of my old code directory totals almost 4GB, but I'm only including the most developed projects here. I'm releasing this code in the hopes that someone will find it useful. But please keep in mind that this is unsupported, undocumented, and (largely) uncommented code. Keep in mind that this code was written when I was about 12 or 13 so please don't use this as a measure of my current programming skills.

I thought it might be cool to upload some pictures of the places I do my electronics and computer work. Without wasting any time, here they are! Enjoy.

Many people are aware that they can SSH into their iPod or iPhone from their computers. The fact that the iPhone can be an SSH client is often overlooked, though. It can even authenticate with RSA keys. In this guide I will demonstrate how to set up an iPhone or iPod to SSH into a computer with an RSA key.