Mostly complete projects that I stopped working on.
Jun 2022 - Dec 2022
I wanted to try my hand at more hardware projects and thought a weather station would be a good starting point. The idea was that the weather station would collect data like temperature and humidity and report it to a server which would finally display it in some charts on a website.
This was still during the COVID-era Raspberry Pi shortage, so the only thing I could get my hands on at the time were Picos. These did not have Wi-Fi on board, so I also managed to find a guide to link a Pico to an ESP32 Wi-Fi coprocessor. I thought I would also take this as a chance to practice my soldering. I did not do a good job at this, so much so I ended up destroying the Pico and had to buy another one.
Eventually, I did get everything soldered and wired up on a breadboard. I wrote
some code for the Pico to periodically send data to a Cloudflare KV store and a
Worker to list the weather data for the website. Since I wanted the worker to
list all the data in reverse chronological order while only using a single API
call to the KV store, I ended up writing a hacky way to send the weather station
payload as metadata and MAX_INT - currentTime as the key.
After that, the whole thing did manage to work for a little bit. Then I got stuck trying to weather-proof my setup. Shortly after, the Pico stopped communicating with the ESP32 coprocessor again which I'm pretty sure was a result of my less-than-stellar soldering ability (or me frying some part of the Pico by passing more than 5V into it). I tried to debug it with a multimeter, but I did not really know what I was doing due to a severe lack of electronics experience. This was also not helped much by the fact that the multimeter was in Chinese.
At this point, I got very fed up with the whole thing and called it done.
Apr 2020 - May 2020
Early on into the pandemic, I came across a project called avatarify which used the power of ML to let people's facial movements drive static image animation. This would output a video stream that could then be fed via a virtual OBS camera into Zoom, allowing you to show up in meetings with a funny avatar controlled by your face. Live2D Vtubers were also taking off around this time, so I thought to combine these two and try to make a shitty clone of Live2D in the spirit of avatarify.
My version was much simpler and just used perspective transformations to warp images for each facial landmark. I then stitched all the images with some scaling and translation into one and streamed it to an OpenCV window. The window could then be captured in OBS and output as a virtual webcam, same as avatarify. When I tested it out in Zoom, it worked terribly since Python (and my computer) is obscenely slow. I also remember calling my friends with it, and they got extremely confused, watching a video of a dilapidated Miho lag out on Discord.
Disappointed with the results and having much newfound respect for the quality of Live2D, I stopped working on this one.
Sep 2019 - Dec 2019
A native mobile client for my quizbowl platform, Kuiperbowl, and my first foray into mobile apps. Abandoned after I upgraded Kuiperbowl to v3. I also got tired of running into build problems with React Native.
Jun 2019
I used to be really into Reddit. I was also really into learning Japanese. These two interests combined and birthed Shiritori Bot, a bot that would moderate shiritori games. Players could create a post with the starting word and the game would be played in chains in the comments, using Jisho to validate words. I ran it for a while on /r/test but got really bored playing with myself and stopped working on it.
Side note: I got the crazy idea to put shiritori on the blockchain after this but then the crypto bros showed up and made me not want to even think about Ethereum.
Sep 2019 - Oct 2019
Our team's submission to Northrop's 2019 signal challenge. The goal was to accurately classify a wide variety of sounds into 27 classes. We tried to do this by scraping soundbites off Google AudioSet and training ResNet to classify the waveforms via transfer learning. It did not work.
Jul 2019 - Aug 2019
It's Academic (It's Ac) is a local high school quiz show that the REEAALLY good quizbowlers at my high school got the pleasure to be on. As practice, all quizbowl club members were conscripted to transcribe an It's Ac game from CBS Baltimore into packet form (which was a painful process since I didn't know about AdBlock at the time). Later in life, I would imagine an automated process for automatically transcribing and generating packets from those games which culminated into this project. Then much later in life, CBS Baltimore would update their site and break my script which is why this project is now housed here.
Mar 2019 - Apr 2019
I tried to make an RNN to classify text as fortune or not fortune. I never did figure out whether it worked well or not.
Oct 2018
I had found a infographic explaining how to identify different types of acorns on a Japanese subreddit at one point. I also remember learning about expert systems in my last year of high school, so I though it would be the perfect opportunity to try and implement an expert system while trying out my Japanese translation skills. I think I tried doing it in COBOL originally but realized that I don't know anything about the language, and ended up switching to pyknow in Python. At some point, I translated the entire infographic and embedded it in pyknow. Then I realized no one I knew really cared about identifying acorns, so I abandoned the project.
Oct 2018
Bongo cat videos were all the rage back then. I thought it would be cool if I could take songs and automatically generate bongo cat videos for them by detecting the beats. It didn't really work. I don't know much about music or signals, so I gave up.
Sep 2018 - Nov 2018
Our team's submission to Northrop's 2018 image classification challenge. I did not know how to do deep learning at the time, so we used traditional CV with Haar classifiers. It did not work.
Sep 2018
I've already written a blog post about this one on my main site. The gist of it was that the UMD undergrad CS department's calendar was a nightmare to navigate and did not mirror to a Google Calendar. I wrote some really ass Selenium to scrape it into Google Calendar, got murdered in September by DST, lived to tell the tale, and then promptly gave up working on the scraper soon afterwards because I couldn't (and probably still can't) understand Google OAuth.
Aug 2018
I made a physics demo with words that collided into each other a la Monogatari. The hope was to try to do polygonal collision afterwards or maybe break up each character into polygons and try and form a mural. Neither seemed very easy or fulfilling, so I stopped.
Apr 2018 - May 2018
A script I made in high school that would automatically generate Elf on the Shelf memes and tweet them to our school broadcast program's hashtag. I made it to try and impress my then-girlfriend. Now I have many technical and non-technical regrets pertaining to its existence.
Oct 2017 - Nov 2018
This was a pseudo-anonymous chatroom and one of my first web projects. I had learned about WebSockets from a CTF and was also really into Durarara!! at the time. Wanting to make a chatroom like the one from the show, I ended up scrapping together something with Django Channels, made my first domain name purchase, and deployed the app on AWS.
I also entered it into 2017's Congressional App Challenge and lost. Then my hacker friend found out the site was vulnerable to XSS, redirecting everyone to Trump's then-Twitter and teaching me the valuable lesson of input sanitization.
We had a lot of fun goofing off in research class with this until the semester ended. Then the domain name expired and Django Channels went through a major update which broke the app. I eventually sorted out all the dependency issues, but by then we were all busy and in college, so I put the app to rest.
Although long dead, Chattering With Me did provide me with lots of my initial web deployment experience. It also laid down the mental groundwork for what would later become Kuiperbowl.
Aug 2017 - Sep 2018
One of my earliest repos on GitHub. I was a summer intern playing with
researching VR at the time. Halfway through the internship, I got bored of
flying through Google Earth and learned OpenCV. I was also into Mousou Telepathy
at the time. In the manga, there's this character, Mana, who gets teased because
her hair drills look like croissants. Inspired by Mana, I thought it would be
funny if I could have croissant hair drills in real life and ended up modifying
an OpenCV facial recognition tutorial to post-process a picture of croissants on
my head. It actually worked quite well as long as there was enough light. The
project was sort of done at that point, so now it's here. Maybe I'll revive it
someday into a web app or something.
As an aside, during that time, I also got to see the 2017 eclipse. That was cool.
Incomplete projects that I stopped working on.
Jun 2024
I saw a link to the 2024 ICPF Contest on Lobsters and thought I would give it a try. I got as far as making a REPL to talk with the server and en/decode strings before I realized I was severely outclassed in most of the problems. I didn't really want to spend the rest of my weekend trying to solve Traveling Salesman (or discovering that I did not in fact need to solve Traveling Salesman), so I quit.
Sep 2023 - Oct 2023
I wanted to make something with Cedar policies and thought, "Wouldn't be cool if you could compose security policies in a block-based environment?" Then I tried to learn Blockly which fried the last remaining neurons in my brain as I slowly discovered that it is very difficult to define more complicated structures in Blockly. Also I got really tired of the blocks and also extremely unmotivated to work on it after I realized that no one would realistically use it anyways, so I stopped.
Apr 2020 - Apr 2020
I became enamored by Processing GIFs on Twitter at some point. Believing I could make my own amazing GIFs, I thought to start a diary and write a small, fun demo a day. Then I realized that learning Processing was gonna take actual effort. Also my creative output is kinda low, so I made one spinny thing and gave up.
Dec 2019 - Jan 2020
I wanted to make a server to run unit tests and judge code submissions just like
UMD's submit server. The plan was to let users to upload code to a static store
and have workers download submissions and run them against tests in ephemeral
Docker containers. The unit test results could then be parsed and saved into a
database. I had gotten as far as unit testing arbitrary Python code when I ran
into some a lot of security issues. So many that I decided to stop.
Jul 2019 - Sep 2019
I was sad when my mobile Mastodon client disappeared, so I thought I would try to write my own. Similarly to Kuiperbowl Mobile, I got fed up with React Native and stopped.
Apr 2019
I wanted to turn the game Wiki Ladders into an actual web app. Eventually, I grew dissatisfied with the way it looked and stopped. Perhaps I may re-visit the project in the future with some new ideas.
Feb 2019 - Apr 2019
After seeing the disorganized manner by which college students pawn off leftover food from catering and other sources, I wanted to make a web app to connect people with leftovers to hungry students. Development was slow since I decided I would do it in Go without a framework, and the app eventually succumbed to death due to a fatal hurdle: it was impossible to determine how long a given food item would be available for.
Jan 2019 - Feb 2019
After finding out about Mogura Engine, I wanted to make my own 2D game engine in JS. Then I realized how herculean of a task that was and kind of stopped.
Nov 2017 - Jan 2018
A Java API and Android app made with a friend that attempted to interface with Portal, our county's grades system. I ended up reverse-engineering the Portal login system at the time which paved the way for the API, but then we all graduated and lost our school accounts which permanently halted development on the project.
Dec 2016
A Java API for accessing BILL, my high school's one-stop shop forum/directory. Development stopped after losing both interest and my login credentials.