On January 11th, we had the first DIY Bio Toronto Meetup at hacklab. To quote the description of DIY Bio Toronto:
Do-it-yourself biological innovation! We’re inspired by the California group “biocurious”, like them, we believe in the power of open source, open access, and learning in community. We believe this philosophy should be applied to biology! Wouldn’t it be great to have a biology-based maker space here in Toronto? Join us and help make that a reality! Read the rest of this entry »
It’s that time of the year again: I’m making my fractal Holiday cards! I slacked last year and only made a few, but I’m back at it.
Previous years, I’d made up fractals for my cards. This year I just explored the Mandelbrot set and found cool looking regions. Since I obsessed over my choice of pictures, it took me a while to make them — I’ve made about twenty so far, and still need to make more! Read the rest of this entry »
A couple years ago, I wrote a patch for sage, an open source alternative to programs like Mathematica and Matlab, to allow it to export surfaces as STLs for 3D printing. Since then, I’ve seen a few uses of it pop up. Recently, it has been used for something extremely awesome: Project Shellter!
A 3D Printed Hermit Crab Shell (source)
They’re 3D printing hermit crab shells! And the shells are being adopted!
A Hermit Crab in a 3D Printed Shell (source via makerbot)
As someone who kept hermit crabs when I was younger, I think this is awesome!
Makerbot has a more thorough blog post, with a video of the shell being adopted.
Last night I gave a talk, “Open Source 3D Printing: The Printers, Toolchain, & Things”, at the Greater Toronto Area Linux User Group (GTALUG). In addition to being the longest talk I’ve given thus far, at 90 minutes, I think it was the best. I feel more relaxed and in control with every talk I give.
For reference, I’m making the slideshow available.
I finally wrote up my results on producing lenses with 3D printers, which I’ve been working on since September, as a paper which I submitted to the Open Hardware Journal. It was published in their first issue (stand alone PDF of my paper) at the beginning of the month.
A number of people were excited by my paper, and I’ve had several email correspondences about it since publication. NBitWonder had a post about it.
It’s exciting to see such interest in my work.
Most people are familiar with the equation for a circle, 
I prefer to think of it as the curve where 
Over the last few months, I’ve really enjoyed posting about what I’ve been doing in my life. I was looking forward to, several years from now, printing out all my month (or earlier, week) reviews and looking over them — and what people had said in the comments.
Unfortunately, a rather unpleasant person decided to take advantage of my openness and… Well, after what happened, I no longer feel comfortable continuing as I had. I really wish this wasn’t the case.
I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about what I still do feel comfortable posting about, and I’ve concluded that I feel OK positing about most non-personal things. (No, this internal debate wasn’t the only reason you haven’t seen any posts from me — I’ve been super busy! — though it was part of my excuse to myself.)
I still intend to write an October Review, but it won’t be public. Hopefully, at some point, I’ll be able to retroactively publish my monthly reviews.
I was rather nervous about giving my 1 hour SoOnCon talk, 3D Printing Awesome Things, especially after how my NYC Maker Faire talk went. Apparently I’d learned a lot from my NYC Maker Faire talk, and it went awesome! You can see my slide show.
The talk was mostly about interesting tricks I’d seen or come up with for printing awesome things, with examples of applications. I passed around dozens of examples. I actually only spoke for about forty minutes, leaving the last 20 for other people to share things that they’d seen or done themselves.
Many interesting things came out of the ensuing conversation. The ones that come to mind are:
After a talk, a number of people told me that it was good, which was really comforting. I felt like it went well, but hearing people who sat through it agree was great! I was particularly touched by the person who told me that they hadn’t been using their spaces printer because they didn’t like the texture of printed objects, but would now that they’d seen the different post-processing techniques I use.
I feel like the success of this talk was partly due to it being a much easier and less technical topic than the Maker Faire one, me being a little bit less sleep deprived, but also simply that I’ve got better at giving talks having. Having physical examples to pass around was an awesome strategy, as well.
September Started with my final week and a half at Xelerance. It was kind of bitter-sweet: I’ll miss working there, but I was also ready to move on. Alaina got back form Singularity University. It sounds so awesome! She showed us the telepresence robot she’s making:
Alaina, her robot, and me.
In addition to running a booth at Maker Faire this weekend, I gave a talk on programmatic CAD and its future.
My only public speaking experience prior to this was doing was doing workshops at hacklab and presentations to my classmates in high school and while this was a non-trivial amount of practice (in grade 10, I ended up teaching two semesters of the physics course I was taking in the form of seminars every class because the teacher didn’t know anything) it was all small scale (at max 15 people), highly interactive and mostly improvised on the spot. In other words, nothing at all like speaking at NYC Maker Faire.
Another Review!
How many ways are there to arrange “ABC“? ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CBA, CAB. So 6 different ways. But could we have determined it in a way that didn’t involve us listing all the cases? The answer is yes, and welcome to the wonderful world of combinatorics. Read the rest of this entry »
Despite getting almost none of the goals I set out at the beginning of this week done, I had a fairly productive week: Read the rest of this entry »
I failed even more miserably at time tracking this week, but I found the setting goals so useful I’m going to do it again. 
In my previous post in this series, I introduced the idea of a derivative, and we realized a number of rules regarding them. In this post, we’re going to give some thought as to what derivatives are, look at them from from a rather different perspective, and realize several more rules regarding them. Read the rest of this entry »
