Hey, Ask Lemmy, we all know that people love to talk about themselves, and I’d love to hear about some of your pleasant experiences. So, please, no matter how big; no matter how small, tell me something that you are proud to have made :)
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Once made a game on my calculator. Not uploaded from my computer, literally typed it in and developed it on the calculator. Had to do some optimization and everything to get it to run reasonably since this wasn’t a very advanced system. It was a pretty simple game about flying a spaceship through an asteroid field, with collectables that blew up all the asteroids onscreen, and your score was how far you flew. It was just nice to actually finish a project for once, and on such limited hardware, and have it actually be fun to play!
My kids. They are incredible people and I am so lucky to have them.
I make music and I’m occasionally pretty happy with some of my guitar playing.
Its actually a picture but if I share it then I no longer truly own it, so no.
Many moons ago I had the good fortune to get a contract job creating an online tournament system for a game company. When I asked if there was a requirements document or a spec they said, “The only spec is: we need a tournament system.” It was totally my kind of project - I had carte blanche to do it however I wanted. What I came up with was way beyond expectations. I got a letter of commendation from a small game company in Utah that produced games for them. We field-tested it in a couple actual game tournaments and it worked great. Sadly, for unrelated business reasons my system ended up never being used, but it’s still the project I’m most proud of because I pulled it off almost singlehandedly.
It’s no longer online in order to minimize data exposure, but during some major wildfires a decade ago, a small city was evacuated with my city being the nearest safe place to be (~4 hours away), so I built a site within a couple of hours to let people with spare rooms offer space to evacuees. For nearly a week I became the place to find vetted information about resources for everything an evacuee needed to know. It took the province and Red Cross 4-5 days to get their systems up and running so I was an important stop gap. I’ve since devised a system for evacuee information that I can deploy in less than an hour (it’s always running, but I confirm data for each deployment to make sure links and phone numbers are still valid).
People like you make the world a better place.
You are a hero.
I don’t know about that. If you see someone that needs help, you help. I do appreciate your kind words though!
Something I’m still proud of was a diorama I made in 5th grade for Halloween. It was called the “Peanut House of Horror” and featured dried peanuts with little googly eyes being disassembled in every conceivable way on cardboard torture devices — think a stretcher rack pulling one in half, a “pit and the pendulum” device slicing into one, etc. with peanut shells all over the floor. My parents supported the creativity and humor. Other parents, not so much. But to paraphrase John Waters, you need to possess good taste to appreciate poor taste.
Mr Peanut? NOOOO!!!
A free mobile game “Wandering Alchemist” I’ve released on both Android and iOS. Free as in offline, no ads, no in-app purchases (Besides a fully optional “support the developer”). It’s a GPS walking game where you gather ingredients, brew potions, sell them to merchants and decorate your neighborhood.
On some days it’s awesome, on other days I ask myself why I do this to myself. But overall it’s fun :)
I’m currently working on a big update that reworks all the visuals, a lot of them are still from early on and look really shoddy. For example before and after:
My name is on a plaque (along with dozens of others) attached to the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that just launched. I don’t think I’ll ever top that. I also had a hand in building the primary mirrors for JWST, seeing images come back from it has been incredibly rewarding! Working in aerospace definitely has its awesome moments, despite being “just a job” most of the time.
Last year I built this cupboard and hutch, along with a matching buffet.
I would kill to have that cabinet, it’s so pretty… Thank you for your contribution :)
Longtime woodworker here, I’ve never built a traditional china cabinet - that’s mighty nice work! Hat tip.
Greetings fellow craftsman! Thank you very much. It was a big but worthy project.
I’m impressed
This was the biggest woodworking project I’ve tackled yet.
I once sanded and (poorly) refinished a nightstand. In my defense, it was my first time and I don’t think it was stain grade wood. It was always meant to be painted. That’s as far as my skills go. Although, where I moved, inherited quite a few very nice wood working tools so, I might be learning once some of the house maintenance is under control!
Finishing is an entire discipline unto itself. The finish on the cabinet above: I took the surfaces to 180 grit with a random orbit sander, then sanded along the grain at 220 by hand, vacuuming and tack clothing between each grit. Popped the grain with water, sanded at 220 again, and a final tack clothing. No stain, and a polyurethane finish, first coat was 2 parts urethane to 1 part thinner, the remaining 3 coats are 50/50. Wiped on with a cotton rag, cut from an old T-shirt, rubbed out with a piece of paper grocery bag between each coat followed by a light tack clothing to remove the whisper of dust. Do that between each, but not after the last coat. The result is a durable shell coat that still has the texture of wood, you get the depth from wetting the surface but not a visibly thick layer of plastic.
Granted, I did start with $9/board foot black walnut that I hand selected from the lumber yard, not some random night stand. But, I’ll assert there’s no such thing as “stain grade” or “paint grade” wood. People take wormy maple and make stuff like this out of it:
I will grant you that some species of wood have open and uneven grain that will absorb stain at different rates across the surface, creating a hideous blotchy appearance, and wouldn’t you know it most of those species are cheaper, easily available species that have bland and boring grain like pine and birch. Most “stains” look terrible on wood like that. My choice is to go with little to no stain, let the wood speak for itself, maybe subtly tint it with the top coat, or use shellac, either as a top coat or as an intermediate layer. If the wood you’re working with is very prone to blotching, start with a coat or two of blonde shellac to fill up the pores, then switch to your darker garnet or whatever. Shellac is compatible with basically all finishes and is sometimes used as a compatibility layer between water and oil based finishes so you can top coat over it if you want something more durable than beetle poo.
Great info, thank you for taking the time to share!
Damn, that looks fine!
Thank you.
Speed the read write speeds of every server and workstation at work by introducing on the fly compression. I hypothised it would work because we had a surprising amount of idle cpu and even where we didn’t a lot of the clock cycles were waiting for IO. Had to design some benchmarks, run on test systems, do a blue field deployment on a few prod servers, etc, but it was really rewarding to go from idea to implementation. It’s was actually noticble to users for start up time too! It lead to a more aggressive compression on some backups that ended up delaying the need for hardware purchases too.
Years ago I was asked to make a website to educate the public and promote a campaign to bring back a formerly-declared-extinct species.
There were scientists, zoologists, researchers and volunteers in the field who did the REAL work. I had the easy part.
But when the website was launched, I received ‘thank you’ emails from all over the world. Reading all of those letters was one of the most rewarding feelings.
And the best part . . . Though it’s still a threatened species (I’m told recovery potential is strong), today there are more than 500 of these animals living in the wild.
What animal? Critter pics please!
Thanks for helping them out. It’s definitely something to be proud of.
What a wonderful lizard!
handsome little fella
Back in the 90s, we bought an 87 year old house that had been neglected for decades, but the neglect was what we liked. That meant that nobody had “upgraded” or modernized it.
We spent the next 7 years renovating it, fixing every wall, repairing plumbing, installing a cast-iron woodburning stove, etc.
When we were done, we had turned the ugliest house on the street into a museum piece, and sold it for far more than any house on the street had ever sold for.
I’ve been making plans to do something like this for a while, if only to build something that satisfies my own eccentricities. I’d love to know how the process was for you.
I build, customize, and paint Gunpla. I finished this one a couple days ago.
How do you customize them?
While technically, anything you do to them outside of building them per the instructions would be customizing them, I was referring to modifications I made to the model itself. For this one in particular, I raised the neck and collar up by 2mm and cut the back of the head back by 1mm to allow for better head movement. Here’s the full list of everything I did:
- made the modifications stated above
- custom paint job
- resin detail up kit (various greebles on feet, legs, front skirts, shoulders, and shield)
- metal detail up kit (verniers, elbow & knee joints, gun barrel, and power pipes around the waist)
- holographic decals
- matte topcoat
Here’s how the model looked prior to any customization:
Sweet!
I sculpted this tiki mask using blender and then milled it out of aluminium using a 3 axis mill.
You can make your own, if you have a 3D printer or a milling machine: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4636877
Woah, That’s Cool! How did you get the wood-like effect on the 3rd image? Or was it a render? Also, What influenced your material choice to be metal?
Thanks. The third image is a render.
After I designed and 3D printed it I brought it to school when I was an apprentice (now I teach there), where a classmate thought it looked cool and wanted to make it out of aluminium that he got from his job. I got jealous that is was so much cooler than the 3D print, so I also got a large piece of aluminium to make my own.
