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Timelapse from the Eclipse

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2024-04-13. Tags: I Made a Thing, Photography.

I did a timelapse from the eclipse this past monday (2024-04-08).

A timelapse video from my apartment window during the eclipse

The eclipse started at 14:08pm EDT, was at "maximum eclipseyness" at 15:23, and it ended at 16:35, and I tried to get approxmately 5min before and after. I took one photo approximately every five minutes. Unfortunately, my camera decided to run out of battery for the 15:18 exposure, so that one is actually 15:12 with 15:23 overlayed at 50% transparency.

The brightness, or rather darkness shown is somewhat fake. The camera's sensitivity was set at f/4.5, 1/1000s, and ISO100, and wasn't changed for any of the timelapse exposures. Ordinarily one would adjust one of those settings to the appropriate amount of light, just as our eyeballs do. I took a photo at 15:29, calibrated to the brightness that my eyeballs saw (f/4.5, 1/100s, and ISO100, so 10x more light).

View out of my apartment at 15:29 during the eclipse, with 10x more light than shown in the timelapse
Note that if you open up the exif data from the photo, it's wrong. The clock in my camera is off by 29 min.

First Useful Part

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2024-02-28. Tags: I Made a Thing, bicycle, 3D Print, transportation.

I've had a 3d printer for a while, and printed a few downloaded parts, but I've reached a milestone and printed my first part that I designed myself. It's a quick-release mount for an action camera on my bike.

An action camera attached to a green mount on a bike basket.

I've had the cam for a few months, and used it on a helmet mount. I found the helmet mount to be a bit cumbersome and insecure, also I felt like an idiot with a camera on my head. I thought it would be better and less conspicuous on my bike, so I'd been meaning to work up a bike mount. Anyways, a few close calls and one incident in which someone drove their car full beans through my group ride (nobody was hit, thank the gods), and I finally got around to working something up.

Bontrager Road Lite Build

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2021-11-04, last modified: 2022-05-08. Tags: bicycle, I Made a Thing, transportation.

Back in April I saw a bike frame on craigslist which really caught my eye. It was a 1994 Bontrager road lite.

A matte-purple bicycle with sparkley clear-coat posed on a fence in front of a river. It has drop-bars with purple tape, moderately aero wheels with tan-wall tires, and a large brass bell affixed to the stem.

I, for one, didn't know until then that Bontrager ever manufactured bike frames. Certainly that they made wheels, tires, etc. but I'd never seen a bontrager frame and it really caught my eye. A few days later I borrowed my brother's subaru and drove out to meet the seller. The frame didn't look like it was in great condition, a chipped and fading paint, rust spots in a few places, and it had a quill stem stuck in it. But it was absolutely beautiful. every weld on it was gorgeous, and the extra gussets at some of the joints were absolutely intriguing.

(Fair warning, this post is download intensive)

About PaCSTCL's Grammar

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2019-10-09. Tags: I Made a Thing, Programming Language Development, Computing Thoughts, Computer Science Education.

In September I spent a lot of time with the grammar of PACSTCL. Both in developing the grammar further than I had coming out of the CSforALL Bootcamp, and in preparing the PACSTCL code to parse the grammar. This post is going to start out by defining computer grammar in understandable terms, then it will go into some of the decisions going into and the quirks coming out of PACSTCL's grammar.

My New Blog: A Study in Lightweight Web Frontends

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2019-09-26. Tags: I Made a Thing, Web Development, Computing Thoughts, Home Server.

This past summer, I've put a good deal of effort into updating my blog. Previously I had used Apache Roller, and I decided that I would replace it with a web-application of my own creation. The goals I had when I set out to create this were to build a good looking online space for me to share my thoughts and opinions, and to completely avoid the use of JavaScript while doing so.

Introducing the Pennsylvania Computer Science Teaching Certification Langauge

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2019-09-02, last modified: 2019-09-29. Tags: I Made a Thing, Computer Science Education, Programming Language Development.

This past June I got involved with a project to improve computer science teaching in Pennsylvania. As a teaching assistant at a CSforAllPA Boot Camp, a week long training for teachers to learn computer science, we found a need for an interpreter for the language defined by their certification exam. The creators of this exam defined a new programming language, specifically for displaying questions on their exam, but with little consideration for how teachers would be expected to familiarize themselves with the language or the test. Coming off the success of my senior project, started by a friend of mine to build a programming language pretty much from scratch, I suggested instead of attempting to substitute Java for the exam language, we not-so-simply build our own interpreter for it.

Spread Sheet Converter

Written by: Kimberlee Model, posted: 2018-07-17, last modified: 2019-07-24. Tags: I Made a Thing.

Hello to all of my zero readers, recently I've put together a quick tool to convert rows in a spreadsheet to text in a document. The main principal is that the spreadsheet forms a table which has named columns, and is broken down by row. The innovative portion of this is that each row is then inserted into a document template. A document translator matches "hash tags" in the template document and replaces each tag with the cell from the column which matches it.