Note
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“I started this” – Noah Glass
When originally creating this site, I planned on using this to track the progress of my life in different areas. I wanted to keep track of the books I read leaving little reviews for the books I read; I also in the past year been working with electronics and wanted to have a deeper understanding of how circuits and smart devices worked so I have been applying those skills and making my own devices. I plan on having more variability in my blog too. I have never been the best cook, I actually never made anything outside of eggs; so with different online resources I have started to make some basic meals, and hopefully, in a couple of months I can be able to (hopefully) cook better meals.
There will be some things here and there that I will also plan on adding in the future (such as some programming in the future, some graphics, etc), maybe some new ideas for design or some type of research, but until then I’ll decide what should be placed on the site.
Book Review – Midnight In Chornobyl by Adam Higginbotham – Personal Rating: 4/5
The book is a really well-written book. Ever since I was young I heard about what happened in Chornobyl back in 1986, but I never knew much more than the basic situation. My knowledge of the subject was very much one-dimensional, and throughout the years I understood more and more, but from a third-person type of viewpoint, there are individuals associated with many stories and outlooks, and the book brought many perspectives. The book is really well researched and well presented. The narrative style makes the book very engaging. The book is a work of history. It isn’t a thriller. It is the story of the people who suffered in Chornobyl and the people who caused it. The reader gets to know the characters who were directly involved in the accident and is left with the impression of it being just a huge accident and nothing more.
As the reader gets to know the characters and learns more and more about the accident itself, the adrenaline-filled excitement of the book slowly dissipates. The accident is, obviously, a disaster, but it was a disaster that could have been avoided. It could have been avoided if authorities had taken proper measures to ensure the reactor’s safety.
Makes
During the summer of 2021, I decided to try to pick up something new. I finished up my track season so I had a lot more free time on my hands. Every summer I try to do something to take time off my hands, so after a while, I found something on YouTube using a Raspberry Pi (not the dessert), it was some little device monitor. I did not know much about it, but I decided to do more research, after finding out that it was not practical to do all of this on a Raspberry Pi, I learned about something called a microcontroller. So I did some research and found a few microcontrollers that were compact, which was great because I also wanted the monitor to be portable. After doing the research I decided to go ahead and purchase the pieces needed to construct it, and when I got it all it was a lot to take in, I did not know where to begin. I did not understand how schematics worked, and my entire knowledge stemmed from high school physics. There was a video tutorial to go along with how to make it, so I started making it, without having much knowledge of where each piece went. My first attempt failed miserably and it took more than six hours to make and assemble. After I assembled it and it did not turn on, I took a break that day and tried again, once again I tried and failed worse than the first attempt, and it took about the same amount of time as the first; I tried a third time with the same results. After the third time, it made my brain kind of numb, so I took a week off and took a step back. I realized that I was not taking enough time, to figure out what was going on, so when I tried to assemble the device, a friend suggested doing a test to see if the circuit is broken or not, and I paid more attention to the design. To make a long story short, I ended up learning how to assemble and program the device. After around thirty combined hours of assembling the device and then figuring out that it does not work, I then figured it out.
Future Plans / Notes
I’m not entirely sure how often I’ll post, but I have a general idea. I’ll shoot for one per month-ish.
- Currently reading: Immune – A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive
- So far it’s very interesting. I may or may not make a review for it; for a book, I have written a good amount of notes in it, on concepts or facts that I was not aware of.
- As for meals and other dishes I decide to make, it depends if I find it worth sharing.
- These publishings take a long time to write up, so if there are typos or mistakes just let me know.
- I do some light programming here and there, mainly Python since I can make useful tools fairly quickly and if I run into any hiccups, I can easily find a solution online. With that being said I have created tools and programs that I may share, but for the general public who are not aware of things like that, it may not be something that would be interesting.
- I have a couple of projects that I plan on completing before 2022 ends, ranging from a simple device that is intended to make my roommates and I live’s easier to some fairly complex and cool little things.
This post was written by Dubem Nwachukwu.