Posts

Climate Change: Using MACs to Quantify Solutions

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A summary of my school project in the form research comparing multiple climate change solutions using MACs. A Pressing Problem Climate change is an important issue taking the toll over the last century. Ever since its discovery in the 20 th century, people have increased awareness about the problem. Credit: IPCC 2018 First some background: This chart shows the Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) - simply the average temperature on Earth's surface - up to the last few years, and several model scenarios. The temperature is measured relative to the 1850-1900 period. As clearly indicated by the chart, surface temperatures have risen dramatically ever since the industrial revolution had begun. Most of the change, as shown by the red line, is caused by human activity, and much less is caused by natural phenomenon. Predictions have not shown considerable slowdowns even in the best case. Even if everything is trying to show a "climate doom", it may be the absolu...

Remotion: Video with React!

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      A frame of the Remotion project written in this post - rendered using npx remotion still Hi there! It has been a while since I've made my last post, and now I will share about an interesting library I found called Remotion - a library promising to "Create real MP4 videos using React". Remotion is very simple to use. To begin learning, I'd recommend setting up and starting off with React (make sure to learn React JS , not React Native: there are two React types!). Setup Assuming you have NodeJS , you can open a terminal (I use PowerShell: it's better than Command Prompt) and type npm init video . Select a template (I use the JavaScript Hello World template) and project name, and wait until the command finishes (NOTE: It may ask to install the "create-video" package - just press enter to confirm the installation and proceed). Once done, open a code editor on the created folder (I use VS Code - a cross-platform lightweight code editor), making sure th...

Word Association Game - Behind the Scenes

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  This is a simple word association game. In this game there are 5 cards. Each card has four words, and two options. The task is simple: pick the word that is the most similar! One of the words is an antonym of the other, so once you know the meanings the difference should be stark. Pick the option by pressing one of the green buttons. A correct option increments the score, and an incorrect option decrements the score.   Note that you can pick both options for one card (so even if you get it wrong, just press the other one to return your lost score). The frontend is based on this video , but I have modified it to use AJAX calls to the API for random questions. The API is relatively simple: it picks randomly 5 questions from a dataset of thousands of questions, and then returns the chosen ones to the caller of the API. It is written in Django and Python. To compute the dataset, and making the API lighter and faster later on rather than computing it on-the-fly – which I’ve...

Flood Warning System using Arduino

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  The sensor system without casing Project Concept Since now it’s entering the raining season, flood risks would increase. Because of this, I want to make a simple system and demonstration to help detect early indications of flooding. This project is about making a simple flood warning system using Arduino Tools   Ultrasonic Sensor   The ultrasonic sensor is a sensor used to determine distance. It uses ultrasonic sound waves, which are sound waves whose frequencies exceed 20000 Hz (the highest frequency humans can hear) and thus we cannot hear the sound waves they produce. These sound waves are transmitted from the sensor's transmitter (in this case it is labelled with T). When the waves reach an object or obstacle, they are reflected, and the sensor's receiver (labelled R in this case) detects the signal. HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor   The sensor has four pins, VCC, TRIG, ECHO, and GND. VCC and GND are commonly used names for power input and ground pin. The VCC pin is ...