Approximating pi using Apples
In this post I will look at a new variant of an old way of approximating pi using random numbers, a so-called “Monte Carlo” method. Yes, Monte Carlo as in the casino. There is another…
Look and Say Sequence (Conway’s constant)
I just took a look at John Conway’s video at Numberphile about the “look-and-say” sequence or as Conway called it “The Weird and Wonderful Chemistry of Audioactive Decay”. He did a lot of research on…
123d Catch – 3D Reconstruction Using Photos
In late May of 2013 I came to think about 3D printing and its cousin: 3D reconstruction. 3D printing has been popularized by countless interesting projects on the web. Instructibles, YouTube channels dedicated to 3D…
CSV Parsing in Matlab
A couple of weeks ago I needed to parse the gmail contacts of my local magician’s club (GMK – Göteborgs Magiska Klubb) of which I belong to. My task was to create a neat list…
Copy Files to Multiple USB Drives
The other day I had to copy a couple of HTML and PDF files to 30 USB thumb drives. To make this as efficient as possible, I found a way to do this using (Perl…
My Hard Drive Crashed!
The other day I was awaken thanks to my computer making the weirdest noises. It was like a very faint beeping, almost like it was a time bomb, counting down. I had no idea what…
Finding the Taxi Cab Numbers
This post is about “Taxi cab numbers” specifically the “Ramanujan-Hardy number”, 1729. This specific taxi cab number is so-called because it is the smallest positive number that can be written as a sum of two…
Realistic Fire Simulation using Cellular Automata
In this post I will explain how you can create an interesting fire effect using simple “game of life”-like rules and some post processing and why it is not a good idea to do this…
Prezi vs Sozi
Sozi is an Inkscape extension enabling the user to create Prezi-like presentations with the rotating and zooming animations and bells and whistles that we all love. The great thing with Sozi is that it creates…
Faster Linear Convolution Using Careful Zero Padding
When computing a linear convolution between an image I and a kernel K, the convention is to use FFT, pad with zeroes (also called zero filling) and use the convolution theorem to do this efficiently.…
WordPress Blanked Me!
This post title should have read “Help, my wordpress returns blank pages and I cannot log in to my admin page!”. I just thought it was fitting to say that WordPress f****d me over. It…
Double-Slit Experiment Simulation
This post is about simulating the double-slit experiment using a water tank simulation in Matlab. The simulation is really used to create a rain drop animation, but I modified it slightly to do the double-slit…
Beveled Cube from a Sphere
This post is about how one can map a sphere to a “rounded”, “smoothed” or as I prefer to call it a “beveled” cube. We will as a bonus also see how to make a…
How to create Valentine Bunnies in Game of Life
Game of Life is a very interesting and a surprisingly simple algorithm invented by John Horton Conway in the seventies. The game is for 0 players, because it is really not a game in the…
Fast Fourier Transform of a zero vector
This is a short post about FFT of zero vectors and as a result show why FFTW does not check if the argument is a zero vector. I could argue that zero vectors are a…
Taxi Company Dispatch Simulation
As a part of the course in “Simulation of Complex Systems” I suggested a project. The project was to simulate the dispatch system of a taxi cab company. The goal was to essentially simulate where…
Reverse Engineering the 3D Wire Turtle Puzzle
I love art and puzzles and this mini-project combines these two concepts into one, the “3D Wire turtle puzzle”. In this post I will “reverse engineer” the design of a wire puzzle that is seen…
Hybrid images: Adolf Chaplin and Miley Einstein
I recently attended a course in Image Processing and in one lecture my teacher showed me an image of Marilyn Monroe depicted in a newspaper. My teacher then took the newspaper and walked towards the…
Wave propagation using vertical springs
This is a simple MATLAB code I created which simulates the way a wave propagates through a medium. I wanted to simulate the wave machine created by John N. Shive at Bell Telephone laboratories. The…
Block Chromatic Noise
I love photography and image processing and this little project, that I wish to share with you, I finished way back in April 2012. I recently found this in my old dropbox account and thought…
Faro Shuffle retention
This post is about faro shuffles. A Faro shuffle is a perfect riffle shuffle of two halves of a deck of cards so that each card from each half is interlaced perfectly. There are two…
