Creativity has always been interesting to me, because I don’t see myself as a creative person at all. In building games, I always tended towards making the most efficient rather than the most beautiful structures. Professionally, my greatest strength is reducing the complexity of problems to more solveable issues and helping to guide others to move towards solving them. Artistically, I’ve never been able to do much at all, though I’ve tried calligraphy, playing the violin, drawing, and so on. Language seems to be my best creative skill, though not for fiction but rather for communicating clearly. All in all, I’d describe myself as quite uncreative.
One of my main issues would always be the difficulty of thinking of new ideas out of nowhere. It’s so impressive to me how somebody could look at a blank canvas and just decide what to do there. However, now with electronics, it took me just the one big project to learn the basics of electronics, and I’m starting to get more ideas. I’d run into tiny inconveniences and thought: surely, I can spend way more time solving this miniscule issue than I’d gain by just working through it? And so projects were born. Currently, I have the following ideas clunking around, with no specific timeline for when I’ll actually be working on them:
Hamstercage Lights
My current main project is to install RGB lights in all three levels of our hamstercage build. It’d both simulate a circadian rhythm for whenever we get our new hamster, and would have a manual override for when we need light. My main posts on electronics are all about this, so there’s not much new to report there.
Countdown Timer
This was inspired by the Pomodoro timer, as it’s somewhat related but for a completely different purpose. The Pomodoro timer just counts down in small half-hourish increments, to organize working time and to help remind me to take regular breaks. The Countdown Timer was born because there’d be several moments where Tracy and I are working towards a larger goal with a set deadline, such as when we originally moved over here; conversely, there’s also smaller deadlines, like deciding how much time we have until our groceries get delivered. Again, why use just a mobile phone timer when you can massively overengineer a large LED display or 7-Seg display and program it to display days, hours, minutes, and seconds?
Binary, Hexadecimal, Decimal Converter
While I was programming the Pomodoro Timer in C rather than Arduino, I started using binary and hexadecimal numbers more often to directly address memory. In particular, I’d want to set a whole register to specific bits in one go, and using hexadecimal just seems cleaner to me for some reason. What I’d end up doing is going through a datasheet, checking all the right pins for an 8-bit register, and then using a converter online to figure out what the hexademical is for that binary number. Why accept anybody else’s very convenient solution to a self-created problem when I can make it entirely more complex by spending more time? I could just make a small device that shows the same number in decimal, binary, and hexadecimal, and have several knobs or buttons so that I could change each number and the others would automatically change with it.
Bonus: Taglines For the Blog
As I was writing this, I just kept coming up with additional taglines for the blog (huh, additional task: figure out if I can have rotating taglines). Here’s a selection of my favorites:
- Answering questions nobody asked;
- Solving problems I created myself;
- Solving problems nobody has;
- Creating problems, then solving them by creating two new problems;
- Breaking things by fixing them;
- Fixing things by breaking them;
- Finding out things nobody cares about;
- Championing pointless causes;
- Finding a problem to every solution;
- Putting the “me” in “meaningless”.