Potato Cannon

My Freshman year of high school, I built a potato cannon. It wasn’t great. The biggest issues were: the lack of a solenoid valve, and the tiny air chamber. I affectionately referred to it as “The doohicky.”

For my Sophomore year, I had to rebuild it for a friend’s final project. I gave it a better air chamber using PVC and a Schrader valve from a bike.

Finally, for my Junior year of high school, I was lucky enough to find a GIANT piece of PVC pipe at the dump that I turned into a bigger air chamber. Now, when I shoot it the recoil feels pretty impressive.

I expect for my senior year, I will be building something capable of accelerating a projectile to escape velocity ;)

Vero Beach Florida

For January, I decided to leave the oppressive cold of New England for Florida! The last time I visited Florida was during July, and it was a truly miserable experience. The air was so humid and hot I could wring it out like a wet towel. I was told that I was visiting during an “unusually cold.” To my utter surprise, I stepped off the plane to a balmy 70 degrees! I’m sure the Floridians were wearing parkas, but to me: that’s tropical!

Once I explored a bit, I was amazed at the amount of greenery. New England winters are very depressing to me. There’s a definite beauty to the snow, but I get hay fever staying inside all day after watching my plants die. Here, everything is still green and flowers are blooming. I was, and still am, utterly dumbfounded by the natural beauty here.

I hope to be able to visit again, because it’s really heaven on earth to me. It will be an unfortunate culture shock when I have to go back to Boston!

Infrared Conversion

A long time ago, I decided to buy a Lumix GH1 Mirrorless DSLR camera. For all its many…. many…. faults, it’s a pretty great camera for the price.

I recently became interested in Infrared photography, so I decided it was a good time to rip apart my beloved camera, gut it’s innards, and replace them with Quartz I ordered from Shenzhen!

I posted the process of this conversion on my YouTube channel, but it turned out to have worked really well. Not only is there (so far) any lasting damage to the camera, but I can now take infrared photos. I also bought an external Ir cut filter for taking normal photos and video, which should allow the camera to be dual purpose.

Goodbye Apple Music

Recently, Apple Music has been disappointing me… so I replaced it! I originally looked at Lyrion music server, but it didn’t have iOS support. So instead, I went with Navidrome. I partitioned my hard drive to have space for all my music files and spun up Navidrome, beet (which manages the library), and Deemix. Within about an hour, I had all the albums I actually listen downloaded. I also found a cool python script called re-command. It basically gives you weekly recommendations using the listenbrainz algorithm and downloads them, then deletes them if you rate them poorly. Cool system. Only issue is the original script just fully did not work. I rewrote it to use streamrip and it works fairly okay for my purposes. I set it up to run on a schedule using windows scheduler and a quick batch script. Very happy with how it’s been working thus far! I listen to a lot of weird music, so It’s nice to be able to just drag a folder into my music directory and have it just work.

There’s a little bit of jank here and there, like, for example, radio doesn’t work with feishn for… some reason? Navidrome can’t delete songs from your library either, which is a weird limitation.

With that being said, I’m going to keep exploring different things to use with Navidrome, because it seems pretty powerful. 


Navidrome is really fun, but I have since shut off the container. The usefulness of having specific versions of songs didn’t outweigh the convenience of a streaming service. I might come back to this idea though. As I said, if someone made a subsonic client that you could drag and drop files into, delete files, aggregate information from musicbrainz, download with slskd, and intergrated with listenbrainz for reccomendations, you’d be golden!

Tv Head

Hey!! 
I got locked out of my admin panel for a while. My laptop crapped the bed and I lost a lot of files (and passwords). 

But i’m back!

In that time I decided to finally build a tv head. I’ve wanted one for quite a while, but haven’t had a good chance to build one. I found a nice big CRT at the dump and took the tube out of its case. Then I just cut some Plexiglas to size and glued it in. I put some window tint on the plastic to make it look dark. I haven’t quite gotten all the bubbles out yet, but it works. 

I’m planning to use this for either a music video or maybe as a prop for a videogame. 

DIY Occiliscope

A while back, I was perusing the local dump and found a small CRT display. I’ve also needed an oscilloscope for diagnostics purposes for a long time, so I decided to take it home and convert it into an oscilloscope. The whole process was surprisingly painless. I essentially just took the cover off (very carefully, don’t go messing around with CRTs kids!), snipped the wires that controlled the Y axis deflection, then spliced them with an amplifier, which then connected to what I’m trying to monitor.

While not especially useful for diagnostics, it’s still an interesting project, and a cool desk piece. 

I think if I were to do it again, I would somehow increase the frequency of the flyback. The CRT appears to even out the edges of square waves, which I believe means that it’s not scanning fast enough. 

Old cathode ray tube monitors have a lot of cool stuff inside. A lot of fun high voltage experiements can be done with just broken TVs and microwaves.