HELiXATED.COM v2.0

Posted by HELiX

I sent my blog back into the fine days of ‘Under Construction’ with the new skin. The About page is not yet done, the Photography page is not yet done, but hey, the Lab’s still there!

Banner’s really cool. I myself can’t stop playing with it. And yup, Vista background.

I hope the skin’s an improvement, if not, no point in changing. So, hm!

Ok that was pretty short.
 

Comments(0) 11:16 PM 3 March 2007

First Week

Posted by HELiX

Judging from the exponential growth my street is having on drawahouse.com, I should have been a billionaire by now.

Meh. Stuu-pid, virtual, er, worlds. Can’t it be, like, real??

Ok that was agonisingly lame.

And so today, first day of lessons at ACJC. Pretty cool I guess.

I got into a 4 H2s class, through double appeals. An appeal to get me into ACJC in the first place, and an appeal for 4 H2s. Quite fortunate I s’pose.

When people find out that I appealed into AC, the general question is “You appealed through?”. And instinct causes me to respond a straightforward, “Science.”

Some person: No, not your course, I mean, appealed through what CCA?
Me: Science. Science team- er, club- EH, Council. Yah, Science Council.
*The ’some person’ produces a frowny-rolleye-emotionless face which very well describes my appeal*

I mean, let’s put this into some perspective. Which joker ever appealed through a Science CCA, into sports-oriented ACJC? Performing arts also play big, but science niche is just so… not ACJC.

Whatever, I’m fortunate to be able to make it, although I’m still wondering how unlucky of a 7 pointer I am.

Math lecture, naggy teacher, blah blah blah.

Chem lecture… quite alright.

Physics lecture… pwned. The end of it. DanielKhor (in an attempt to make the term less googleable), he vely leet, pronouce englist like v-ly.

Things like, “Geneler office”, and the “Spyler staircase”, or perhaps even the “Physics Olampeard”. So LOLZ.

Yup, so that’s it. First week damn slack, and I’m so gonna get toasted when tutorials begin.

Comments(0) 8:31 PM 3 March 2007

House

Posted by HELiX

Kok got me to do this.

A personality test using, interestingly, a drawing of a house by you.

Might not have worked for Kok, but I gotta admit, it’s disturbingly accurate to an extent for me.

EDIT: Kok found it accurate as well o_O 

"Your house tells the world that you
ought to be a leader. You are a freedom lover and a strong person. You
love your house and family. You are a gifted artist as well. Once you
have a problem, you need a friend with you. Your life is always full of
changes. You are very tidy person. There’s nothing wrong with that
because you’re pretty popular among friends. Your life is always full
of changes.

When
it comes to love, you shut yourself off. It’s difficult to win your
heart because you have decided to keep your feelings deep inside. You
see the world as it is, not as you believe it should be.

You
are not a romantic person by nature. It also safe to say that others
don’t see you as a flirt. You don’t think much about yourself. "

And, don’t laugh.

Try it!

http://www.drawahouse.com/takethetest/index.asp?street=a34ffe47289725863e762cc52218c1f5

Comments(0) 12:28 AM 3 March 2007

Of Many Stuffs

Posted by HELiX

With today, the March School Holidays is over. D’oh!

As with many other people, I can complain about how long/short they are, how I wasted the entirety of it, how I must start mugging from tomorrow onwards, but you can read all that rant in others’ blogs.

So instead, today, I shall talk about… random stuffs.

…

Let’s see, first, my hair.

Ok. School starts tomorrow, I had to go for a haircut.

So if you happen to see me, don’t go ZOMG. It’s just a haircut to avoid detentions and being sent to AC’s barber.

Did I miss out on the fact that I look stupid and different now? BLAH.

…

Now next, I’m gonna hereby rightfully claim the honour of being the one who coined the term, ‘Muggerpolis’.

AHAHAHA.

With the JAE results out, people sent from one place to another, settling down or transferring out or being neither here nor there, there has been much popularisation of the term. Cool eh?

Definition is as follows:

mug·ger·po·lis /muhg-er-por-lis
noun
– See National Junior College of Singapore
[Origin: 2007, Singaporeanism]

How the term came about is a little weird, or perhaps, very weird. When the guys at Muggerpolis came back to BP for the O Level results, Huaice mentioned something about their library being ‘a vibrant city on its own’. I thought, and I mean THOUGHT, I heard the term muggerpolis somewhere as he said that. So I started using it.

A few days later, Huaice claimed he did not know what’s muggerpolis.

Ah well.

…

Speaking of which, Kok just linked Eng Yian’s blog. Fairly interesting read. Fairly fascinating. Fairly good read. But very cute indeed.

First, he makes a cute statement which I truthfully disagree, but I will agree because it’s only right to do so. It goes like this: "bpians r far superior to ppl from most other schools. there i’ve said
it. u can shoot me if u like, but it’s not gonna change anything."

OHOHOHOHO.

What’s more stunning is this.

"crap. i’m not gonna just sit back. i hereby declare a widening of the
war front btween njc n acjc, from in e chess arena n e science
competitions to include blogs. all blogs by students from either party
r now officially cannon fodder."

Which means to say, including this blog. And what the heck, he’s even aware of the battle coming up in June!

Ok dammit I don’t have a good sense of humour, dammit I don’t have intimidating vocabulary, dammit I don’t blog interesting enough.

But hey, I’ve got a lab section!

Which also mean that we can never win a war against RJC in blogs. Maybe rugby, water polo and swimming only.

…

Now more importantly now, Lab@Home.

Whenever I start talking about a project I wanna do, everyone’s pessimistic, but that’s a good thing because it’s one of the few things that sets me apart from others.

The pessimism I get for the Tesla Coil is incredible as well, and I myself couldn’t see myself doing it a few months back. I’m halfway done and there’s no turning back now.

A device peaking at almost a million volts, boy, just how cool is that?

Which brings me to update you on my progress since the last time I blogged about it. Read more about it here.

Discharge Terminal

At the top of a Tesla Coil is a discharge terminal, which is exactly what it does. One, as the name suggests, is to act as the output terminal for the streamer discharges, and the other is as a capacitive load for the secondary coil.

There can be two shapes: A toroid or a sphere. I’m not aware of the difference and pros and cons between the two, but I have no idea how to go about making a large metal sphere. So a toroidal design is chosen.

A commercial aluminium toroid would come in at a few hundred, if not, thousand of dollars. A homemade one comes in at about $40.

This is how I go about doing my toroid.

3 things. Aluminium air ducts, I got 3m of it. Quite expensive at $30+. Then aluminium tape. These are about $10. And lastly, pie dishes, dirt cheap.

Drill a couple of holes at the center and near the edges of the pie dishes.

Tighten them together with bolts and nuts.

Measure out the required length of the aluminium air duct, and cut it out.

I used the aluminium tape to tape up the ends of the air duct, forming a tight fit around the pie dishes.

(You may see a Sujay sleeping, but that’s just a Wordpress bug. The photo of the toroid has same name as a previous picture of Sujay, so depending on how your browser loads it [from my server or from your temp files], you may see either. Just refresh the pic.)

Secondary Coil

The secondary coil is one hell of a thing.

It is responsible for generating the very high voltages required and must be constructed tediously.

First, a coil form is required. The wires coiling about a thousand turns will completely wrap the coil form, which has to be of an insulating material. Metal pipes are totally out of the question for obvious reasons. Water is a performance killer, so cardboards are avoided as well. Most plastic materials would do fine. Generally, PVC pipes are used because they are easy to find. Some tesla coilers have attempted and succeeded, to coil the wiring around a coil form and remove it altogether, but that’s beyond my capability for now.

Black PVCs must be avoided because they contain carbon, gray works but white does the best job.

I bought a 3-inch PVC pipe, 2 feet of it. When buying the coil form, it is important to choose the correct length for it will heavily affect the height of the coil. Too high, too bulky; Too short, the tesla coil is capable of striking itself. The diameter-to-height ratio comes into play here. I had a calculation error, so I resulted in a weird 1:6.67 ratio. Pretty bad for my coil I guess, considering the recommended is between 1:3 to 1:6 ratio. If it turns out bad, I might have to unwind the wires.

Before we begin, it is advisable to coat the coil form with polyurethane varnish.

A layer or two was applied and after it dried, I went straight to wounding the wires.

A few things to take note. We should be aiming between 800 to 1200 turns, any higher or lower seems to decrease the output (either due to increased resistance or low inductance). I’m aiming for 1000 turns.

I bought 0.5kg of 0.5mm (AWG 24) wire (quite expensive at $30+). 1000 turns should give 20-inches.

The wounding is tedious. I’m looking for a word with similar meaning to tedious, but with a greater degree of suffering. But tedious would do for now. I think it’ll need some perspective.

Ok, to begin, I found a towel hanger… thing lying around.

Tearing it apart, and reconstructing it, I got this little innovative thing.

The winding was incredibly tedious, insofar that I resulted to this.

I spent 5-6 boring hours winding and winding. For entertainment, I had the the thing done in front of my computer as I watch all the remaining episodes of CSI and Lost I’ve left.

Started at 5pm, and about 11pm, it was this:

I calculated, and I figured that I wounded about 240m of copper wiring. Oh the pain!

I started off pretty well actually, with the windings nice and tight. I lost my patience midway and it got sloppy from there. Hopefully, it won’t affect the performance of the coil too much.

I haven’t finalised the design of how the secondary coil is going to be attached to the toroid, but it should look like this.

Well, that’s the end of it, but also, I’m making a proper permanent Jacob’s Ladder, so I begun with the base today…

Basically, an acrylic sheet drilled with hole, and fitted with bolts and nuts.

And the stupidest thing of the day. Call me slow if you already know this, but I had totally no clue that thinner is extremely capable of screwing with plastics.

I poured half a cup of thinner in er- well, a small disposable plastic cup. 3 seconds later…

It’s cool (and maybe, not-so-cool) how the plastic melts down and corrodes, with the thinner spilling out, screwing the paint job of the dish washer machine which I did it over. D’oh!

Comments(0) 11:11 PM 3 March 2007

D’oh!

Posted by HELiX

Ah crap.

Great. Just great. I smashed my left contact into two.

The details of it are embarrassingly stupid, so please spare me.

A-yuuup. $110 just gone like that.

Now, gotta come up with some story to explain to my Mum…

…

The new blogskin’s front page is done, and I can’t be bothered to work on the rest for now.

The front page itself took 4 painful days, 3 days on the tedious coding. But I think the script effects are awesome =D 

So tomorrow, or perhaps sometime over the weekend, skin v2.0b release!

Stay tune!

Comments(0) 1:24 AM 3 March 2007

I’m too lazy to think of a title

Posted by HELiX

It seems like some people are incredibly unimpressed by the content that lies behind the protected entry below. Because, 1) It IS incredibly unimpressive news, extremely insignificant to most people 2) I just wanted to try out Wordpress’ protected entry feature, what the heck.

So, for the sake of not being let down by a piece of unimpressive news, try not to ask me for the password. Not knowing what’s in there is a better feeling than knowing what’s in there, for most people in general.

Also, through this protected entry… thingy, I found out that people whom I never expected to read my blog, actually, well, read my blog.

Mm-Hmm.

Next, blogskin. I wanted to do some short write-ups of the progress of my new blogskin, but I realise it’s painfully difficult. I mean, it seems, to make one, YOU NEED TO VISUALISE IDEAS THAT MAKE IT ZOMG COOL. And I can’t explain how I do that down in words.

Ok. Or perhaps this might work for some. Let’s face the ultimate shameless lie truth that I am talented. You need talent to create a cool skin, and for some reasons that I’m unaware of, I’m born with this… divine blessing to possess superhuman talent in designing skins. It could be from the omnipresent being all around us, or maybe panspermia, or even the jellyfishes, but I have it.

OHOHOHOHOHO.

Alright with the bull-, just some advice to people who aspire to make their own skins one day AND NOT RIPOFF FROM BLOGSKINS.COM. Probably the most painful part of creating a skin is to make it IE and Firefox compatible. You could spend over a few days, creating an awesome skin in Firefox, only to realise that it doesn’t work at all in IE. The two browsers utilises different HTML engines, so always check your skin with the two browsers as you progress. 80% of users use IE (aka. the lazy ones who can’t be bothered to change Microsoft’s domination), while the rest of the 20% use mainly Firefox. And 20% of the visits is a big value mind you.

And also, the skin has to be 1024×768 and 1280×1024 compatible, so don’t be a DW and #$#%@$@%#% at 1280×1024 users (aka. Me) because of he never bothered to check how his skin looked like in 1280×1024.

And also also, you gotta have a skin beta tester ‘cos not everyone has same taste as you. What you like might be what others feel ugly. Yes, UGLY. And I’m proud to proclaim Kok as my new skin beta tester! =__= What a choice. Two geeks with different taste?

Skin’s almost done, just gotta port over every single damn page to the new skin. BLEEEEAAARRRGGHHHHH.

PS. Visual Rich Editors are fun.
 

Comments(0) 2:04 PM 3 March 2007

Protected: Private Entry… Heh. Ask me for password!

Posted by HELiX

Enter your password to view comments 11:10 PM 3 March 2007