2025-June-01: A great excerpt from the happiness of dogs (Permalink)

The following is a paraphrased exerpt from Mark Rowland's book "The Happiness of Dogs". I haven't finished it yet, but even from chapter one I would reccomend it.

Okay, so according to Camus, in order to understand life's meaning we must: "imagine Sisyphus Happy". Most reasonable people will respond, "but how" after all, repetition is the practically the definition of boring

"Well let me tell you about my dog" says Mark Rowlands

Every day I take him for a walk along the canals. And every day he runs along the bank, scaring the local iguanas to the other side of the canal, where they will stay until the next morning, and my dog will repeat the task. Not only does my dog accept his iguana herding duties with zeal, it seems to be his favorite part of the day

"Finding meaning in life is difficult for us, but easy for dogs. The consequences of this insight are profound and unsettling" (Actual quote)

2025-May-31: Update on 3D Printing My PhD (Permalink)

As promised, I printed it in transparent PETG.... And it looked terrible. Somehow the internal support is more visible than the holes I was trying to show, which instead got clogged up.

Oh well. I will stick with my Blue PLA one.

2025-May-30: Two Click Obsidian To the Web Automation (Permalink)

Here is a quick write up for method I threw together for getting my writing out of Obsidian and into my website.

The problem statement:

While Eleventy is capable of turning markdown into html, there are a handful of slight differences between my web environment and my obsidian environment that made things tedious.

• I have to manually drag across images: All of my images are thrown in an Assets folder in Obsidian, and embeded into my docs from there. When I want to get an article into my web directory, I had to manually find and copy and paste the files linked in the markdown one-by-one. Which is annoying
• Wikilinks vs Vanilla Md links. In Obsidian I embed image with the follwing syntax ![[Image.jpg]], however in my Web directory, I need to link to my Assets folder with a regular markdown link like this: ![alt text](/Assets/Image.jpg), and eleventy can't figure out what to do with these wiki links
• My Obisidian Front Matter and my Web Front matter are different. I need to strip out all the metadata from my vault. (Tags, parent notes etc), and add the metadata relevant to my web page.

Thankfully thanks to the power of modern computing, this was a task easy to automate.

Step 1 - Obsidian "Markdown Export" Plugin

This plugin is simple. It copies the current note to a new export directory, along with everything else embedded in it. (Including Images).

Step 2 - Obsidian-Import.js

Then I "wrote"* a quick bit of Javascript for use in my Node environment. It

1. Grabs the markdown file from the export file
2. Removes the Obsidian Front Matter
3. Generates and adds the website front matter
4. Does a bit of regex to fix the wikilinks and re-link them to the correct location in my website directory
5. Saves everything where it needs to go.

1 Putting it all together.

Now all I need to do to get a post out of obsidian and into my website is

• 1. Hit the markdown export plugin in Obsidian
• 2. Run node obisian-import --blog within my websites directory
  • 2.5 Verify it looks right
• 3. Commit and push my changes

This very post was generated with this method.

The code is kind of specific to my website, with a bunch of hard-coded paths. (e.g. I differentiate between notes like this and blogposts), but feel free to take a look at the code and make it work for you.

* NOTE: By "I wrote", I mean I gave a list of requirements to Claude and iterated until it passed my requirements. I am not good at JavaScript

2025-May-29: 3D Printing For Better Science Communication (Permalink)

Something I have been dealing with during my PhD, is that it is really hard to describe the 3D geometry of a photonic crystal just using words. Having pictures helps, but doesn't always cut it.

I was mulling over this problem after I was excitedly trying to explain my recent results to friends, family and collegues.... and none of them had any idea what I was talking about... Fair enough.

I saw a video by Dr Fatima a lil while back, where she mentioned a talk she saw where the speaker handed out 3D printed slices of the universe at different point ins time

💡💡💡

So: I 3D printed a scale model of my photonic crysal fiber.

Behlod! A 200:1(ish) representation of a photonic crystal fiber slice

This is only a short section, because I wanted to verify that it will actually work.

I bought some translucent PETG so the next version will look kinda like glass (maybe) and I will print a longer section. I will update with a new post once I have this longer version.

In reality these fibers are less than a quarter milimeter in diameter, and made of glass, so a scaled up version is necessary.

Now in future talks and presentations, I will have hands on props to pass around. Hopefully this will help people understand what the device I am describing actually looks like.

2025-May-28: On Observing Time (Permalink)

Just sharing another neat website out there. On Observing Time. The concept is simple, it is just a collection of live camera feeds from around the world.

The creator Jon wrote an essay on the concept here

2025-May-15: Crystal Lattice Structure of Popcorn (Permalink)

Has anyone ever studied the crystal lattice structure of a box of popcorn? Relevant research questions include:

• Do the crystal defects introduced by Peanut M&Ms increase or reduce crystal strength?
• How do Peanut M&M defects compare with other confectionry based defects (e.g. regular M&Ms, Reeces Pieces)
• Is the traditional square pyramid profile of a popcorn box optimal? or can integrity by improved by alternate geometries?

There may be an igNobel prize in this research. If you have thoughts please email me. I am only kind of joking about this.

2025-May-13: Really Cool Pacemaker Technology (Permalink)

I found this topic from Jodie Ettenburg's Curious About Everything Newsletter, and considering the cool physics involved I had to re-share it here. Researchers at Northwestern University have just broke the record for the smallest pacemaker.

From left, a traditional pacemake, a leadless pacemaker and the new pacemaker.

Here are my two favourite bits about it:

It uses your BODY as the battery!

Okay, so you know how in high-school you did the experiment wher you shoved a bit of copper and zinc into a lemon, and use that as a battery to power a lightbulb or something? Yeah, in this device, YOU are the lemon.

So typically, the way you power small temporary pacemaker is by using an inductive coil, and keeping the power supply outside your body. This is the same way your phones wireless charger works. The problem is that inductive charging coils are bulky.

The solution was to embed two different metal electrodes on the device, and use your body's fluid as the electrolyte. This battery is what powers the device.

It uses light to control it!

If that wasn't cool enough, they had to add cool optics into it as well. There is no compter or anything inside the device, instead it is controlled externally. The device is controlled through a photodiode, and an external heart monitor and infrared LED. When the heartmonitor detects irreglarities in the heartbeat, the LEDs light up, and transmit through the flesh to the device's photodiode control.

It saves babies!

The reason the device is designed to be so small, is that it is designed with newborn babies in mind, to help them if they are born with congenital heart defect.

And it dissolves!

Since the application is typically only temporary, the device simply dissolves into the body when it is no longer required. That way, you don't need surgery to extract it at the end.

2025-May-07: Commands In LLMs (Permalink)

I wanted to share a blogpost by dbreunig which mirrors a desire I have in the develkopment of LLM tech. The Post. In short, we need to introduce more slash commands.

2025-May-05: Minor Reddit RSS Feed Updates (Permalink)

I added an extra feature to the reddit RSS feed generator to allow users to choose what timeframe to extract top posts for.

i.e. Top posts today/this week/this month/all time.

Shout out to Rohit at Rohit Online for emailing me with the feature request.

I am super happy to get comments / guestbook entries or emails. I purposely do not keep any viewership metrics on this site so the only way for me to find out if you like my content is to say hello :)

2025-May-02: Reddit RSS Feed Generator (Permalink)

Yes I am aware of the wild shift in tone. I am angry that I have to use reddit, I still don't like it.

Anyway, I built a widget which builds a URL to the RSS feed for whatever subreddits you might want to subscribe to on your RSS reader. It also lets you select by /new, /top and /hot.

Check it out

2025-Apr-30: Reddit Sucks For Hobbies (Permalink)

It's frustrating that nearly every niche interest and hobby's main online community exists on Reddit, because Reddit is fucking terrible for fostering genuine communities.

If you go into any subreddit - I will pick on /r/3DPrinting for now - at least 50% of the posts are either "Look at my very first print" or "Help me debug this issue" (They absolutely did not google it before asking for help on reddit).

While there is nothing inherently wrong with introducing yourself to the community or asking for help, that's not what keeps experienced members engaged in the community. So you have all these newbie posts polluting the online community frustrating people who want to have deeper discussions about the hobby. And it isn't the newbies fault either, newbies need somewhere to share space with experienced people to get that experience.

Is this some unsolvable fact of life about online communities? NO!

Traditional forums solved this by making separate threads for introductions and help threads and memes / off topic. We didn't just throw everything into one big list and wish you luck.

Anyway, can we go back to forums? I'm so sick of reddit man.

2025-Apr-29: Podcast is the best medium for horror fiction. (Permalink)

Podcast is the best medium for horror fiction

If you ever watch horror movies, you know that the anticipation is scarier than the reveal. The scraping noise against the window beats the monster reveal on the terror factor every time. This is the mistake that bad horror movies make when they reveal their monster too early.

The reason for this is simple. Your imagination will create a monster far more terrifying than the best CGI in the world.

So what if it’s all in your imagination? I truly believe that podcast is the best medium for horror fiction today. There are some extremely talented story writers partnering with equally talented audio mixers to create stories that suck you in and keep you terrified.

The best of these stories embrace the limitations of the medium. They are based around listening to the radio chatter during a crisis, or found audio recordings after the attack’s aftermath.

My favourite horror and thriller podcasts at the moment are:

• The White Vault – Very heavily inspired by The Thing, it follows an Arctic expedition that takes a bad turn. It does a really good job at putting the characters in “no-win” scenarios which force them to make terrifying decisions.

• Fathom and its sequel Derelict – This is the one that got me really into the medium. The audio production is phenomenal. Season 1 is set deep in an undersea base, the sound design—creaking metal, distant water rushing through cracks—builds an auditory environment so immersive, it’s crazy.

2025-Apr-27: Fixed my feeds. Again. (Permalink)

Whoops, thought I fixed my RSS feeds last week, Turns out I just broke it again in a new way. This time, they should be working. I think.

2025-Apr-20: Technofeudalism in 4 comic panels (Permalink)

I tried to compress Yanis Varoufakis "Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism" into 4 poorly drawn comic panels

License:

Treat it like some bathroom graffiti

2025-Apr-17: New Feeds! (Permalink)

Quiet few months. Turns out my RSS feed was broken. Sorry for the spam of todays three posts.

Two Important Updates:

1. I fixed the RSS functionality of my site. If you missed anything from this year, feel free to go back and read my older articles

2. I added multiple feeds to my site. This one (the one you are probably subscribed to if you are reading this in your RSS reader), combines my blogposts, and shorter notes and links. If you are interested in subscribing to JUST my longform blogs, you can grab that link from my page. (Ditto for just my notes).

Thanks!

2025-Apr-16: Open Source Quantum Magnetometers (Permalink)

Its kind of wild that Quantum tech has gotten to the point where folks are sharing Open Source schematics for N-V Quantum Magnetomer's with a total BOM of >$250AUD. The construction seems (relatively) accessible as well.

Read about it on their Site and their github repo.

According to some of the authors on LinkedIn V2 may be sold as a kit to hobbyists.

2025-Apr-16: Learning About Rainbows (Permalink)

One of my favourite sites on thie IndieWeb RainbowSpec focuses entirely on learning everything you could possibly want about the optics of rainbows. From the visible spectrum to double rainbows, and glories. Worth a good read!