The designs and musings of Michael Caldwell
At the office, we have 12 parking stalls that provide free charging for electric vehicles. This is a nice perk, but unfortunately, there are a lot of EV owners. Finding a parking stall can be very difficult! Someone has thought of this, and very kindly placed cameras looking down on the stalls from the 4th Continue reading EV Charging Stalls Vision Recognition
Where we live, there is an abundance of bakeries that just sell cookies. I don t get it as I d rather just bake my own cookie at home. My wife however likes these oversized cookies and their many novelty flavors. For her birthday, I decided to take her and the family to many of these establishments Continue reading Cookie Crawl
The other day my sister left me a voice mail hoping I could help her identify a tune she had in her head. She sang it and I instantly recognized it. I couldn t remember where it was from, but I had the vivid recollection that it was from a game we played as kids. I Continue reading Finding Old Video Game Music
Have you ever heard of ACME soap? I can t say definitively if the company still exists, but it was a soap brand from the early 1800 s. Growing up, my grandma s bathroom was wallpapered with ACME Soap themed wall paper. It had various advertisements, pictures, logos, etc all representing the ACME Soap brand. I have memories Continue reading Creating a 150 Year Old Soap Box
I had an hour to spare, and decided that I would try challenging myself. I wanted to make a clone of Minesweeper that my kids could play. I thought it would be fun to see if I could make a fully working version of Minesweeper in one hour without any reference. I grew up with Continue reading 1 Hour Coding Challenge
We shall define a square lamina to be a square outline with a square hole so that the shape possesses vertical and horizontal symmetry. Given eight tiles it is possible to form a lamina in only one way: 3 × 3 square with a 1 × 1 hole in the middle. However, using thirty-two tiles Continue reading Project Euler 174
It s been a while since I ve taken the time to solve some Project Euler problems. I thought today would be a good day to pick it up and try solving one I had not been able to solve the last time I tried. I m going to speak generically about the problem because I don t want Continue reading Project Euler 114
I ve been playing a lot of Phasmophobia recently. It s a ghost-hunting game where you, and a team of up-to 3 other investigators explore haunted properties looking for evidence in order to determine what type of ghost is present. At the same time you have to try to not get killed at the hands of said Continue reading Phasmophobia and Bézier Curves
Quite a while back, I wrote about how much fun I was having with Lego Digital Designer (LDD). I was really pleased with that program, and have used it a lot (mostly to put together old sets from my childhood that I no longer have). Unfortunately Lego discontinued support in 2016. This wasn t a huge Continue reading More Thoughts on Lego
Eyes are interesting things. We have color receptors in our eyes tuned for three different wavelengths. Short (blue), medium (green), and long (red). Our brains combine this information and allow us to perceive millions of color, which is really just amazing. These three colors are so important, that we specifically target them when we produce Continue reading Reflected Primary Colors