#curiosity

We needed a way to bring the Fab Lab out into the community so I established a model that was low-cost, mobile, scalable and education-oriented that has been seeded in dozens of locations.

Some hack’n’fix projects don’t work out. An intern accidentally dropped one of our camera lenses and I tried to fix it – and discovered bent metal and insanely complex internals make it pretty hard to do!

As a small child I remember the weather in Illinois being quite different. Everyone I know talks about global warming as an accepted reality and something that’s bigger than our individual anecdotal experiences of climate but I can’t help get over being hung up on my personal relationship to the weather, it feels more meaningful than charts and graphs. I decided to see how my memory matches up with data.

Every power adapter is rated in volts and amps but that doesn’t really convey how much electricity it really uses. Is that monitor really 1.5A? Is it a terrible power suck to leave your phone charger in all of the time?

I wanted to see how peacefully I sleep when I’m sick and my partner was complaining about snoring so I decided to collect some data!

Learning how to do time lapse photography around my home! Just a tripod and wide-angle lens to start, eventually adding…

In 2009 the Graduate School of Library and Information Science sent a team of community informatics researchers to São Tomé to digtize maps and help the local government establish a Geographic Information Systems, with the intention of putting it to use for applications related to governance and population studies. As part of this process teams located at UIUC and on the island had to communicate with one another to translate, evaluate and annotate map resources. I built a tool based on Omeka, an open source archival web app, that would aid researchers in these tasks. It also had potential for applications in medical image review or graphic asset analysis.