1 Pixel, Air Lab, Monkey Project & Weird Hobbies

#65 of 10+1 Things | Abu Dhabi

⚡ Welcome to #65 of 10+1 Things!

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View from Jebel Jais, the highest point in the UAE - a shot from last weekend’s outing.

Before we start, let's talk about obsessions.

Like most people, I track my finances in a Google Sheet until I hit a wall with India's NPS funds (think 401k). The data was scattered and inconsistent, which bothered me way more than it should have. So I built a free service and made it open-source, thinking maybe someone else would find it useful too.

It caught on and gets steady traffic now, but here's the weird part: maintaining it has become my obsession. I keep adding features, cleaning historical data, chasing perfection nobody asked for. Right now after so many lines of code and combinations, I've brought the data gap down to under 4%, but I badly want to get under 1% and that bothers me more than it should. To be honest, nobody really cares about this stuff, but here I am obsessing over a few missing days of data scattered across a decade that most people will never even look at.

My wife asks why I spend so much time on this for basically no money, and honestly, I don't have a good answer. Sometimes obsessions don't need reasons. You just find your thing and chase it down rabbit holes because it feels right. This is just me, deep in my flow state, having fun.

What's your weird obsession?

Without further ado, here are 10+1 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

🍎 Joining Apple Computer

Bill Atkinson passed away recently and he was one of the key figures behind the original Macintosh that made computers actually usable for regular people. This interesting post from folklore.org tells how Steve Jobs recruited him away from his neuroscience PhD with this amazing analogy about surfing on the front edge of a wave versus dog paddling on the tail edge. His dad was furious at him for wasting ten years of college education, but Atkinson ended up creating QuickDraw which made Mac graphics possible, invented pull-down menus, and built MacPaint plus HyperCard which was basically the precursor to the web. The whole story shows how one weekend visit to a 30-person startup ended up changing his entire life and contributing to the personal computer revolution.

"There is a lag time between when someting is invented, and when it is available to the public. If you want to make a difference in the world, you have to be ahead of that lag time. Come to Apple where you can invent the future and change millions of people's lives."

⛺ The Homelessness Experiment

I read this very interesting story of this guy who decided to try homelessness as a financial strategy while studying in Hong Kong back in 2016. He started with a friend's small tent to test the waters but realized he needed something bigger where he could actually stand up, so he bought this $410 dream tent and spent days scouting locations by the coast surrounded by jungle vegetation. Instead of waking up to random 5:30 AM alarms from roommates, he'd wake up to waves breaking on rocks, and even brushing his teeth became enjoyable because of the ocean views. He had to set strict ground rules though like no food inside to avoid wild animals and no artificial light because it would turn the tent into a glowing beacon that could get him caught by police. The experiment saved him $2k over 4.5 months, but when he finally told people about it, dozens of classmates invited him to stay at their places and he got to see how wildly different everyone's lives were behind closed doors.

💨Air Lab

I live in UAE and the air quality is shit. I have been looking for a good air quality setup lately and this somehow caught my attention though I haven't bought it yet! It's called Air Lab and it's basically this small portable device that can measure all the important stuff like CO2, temperature, humidity, and air pollutants. What's cool is it has this little e-paper screen with a character called Professor Robin who guides you through everything, which sounds kind of fun actually. The whole thing is open source so you can mess around with the code if you want, and it can record data for weeks without needing to connect to anything. Before buying there's even a cool simulator on the site with which you can play around and see how it works.

💬 Weird Hobbies

This old interesting discussion on Lemmy about obscure hobbies is really fascinating to read through. People have a lot of weird hobbies - there's someone who runs photos through audio editing software to create glitch art, a math teacher who makes entire video games to review skills, people who collect vintage military rations, someone into lockpicking who avoids mentioning it because of the "hacker" stigma, and a person who learns about random hobbies without ever actually doing them. Other gems include someone who collects weed vaporizers, makes pen and paper ciphers for imaginary secret communications, fixes 35-year-old Suzuki Samurais, collects lewd anime figures that live in a closet, creates their own writing systems, and someone who spends hours virtually road-tripping through Google Street View.

What’s your weird hobby?

🐒 The Monkey Project

The Monkey Project is an interesting one! It's a live experiment based on the famous Infinite Monkey Theorem - the idea that infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters will eventually write all the works of Shakespeare. On monkeys.zip, you get your own virtual monkey that types random letters at 10 characters per second and earns points for forming real words. What's clever is that while the typing is random, it follows English letter distribution, so common letters like "a" appear more than rare ones like "z". You can expect your monkey to write short words each minute, some 4-5 letter words within five minutes, and longer words after a day. While it would take about 10^80 years for one to actually write Hamlet, it's a fascinating project. My monkey is a baboon named ‘Minobo Sistead’ and has typed 20 words so far!

🌱 How To Build a Terrarium

╔═════════╗ Jar lid
│         │
│     {0} │ Symbiotic Organisms
│q p   +  │ Plants
│ V ~~ | ~│ Hardscape (wood, rocks)
│@@@@@@@@@│ Substrate/Soil (potting soil, baked outside soil)
│\/\/\/\/\│ Filtration (lump wood charcoal, activated carbon, rinsed bonfire)
│.........│ Barrier (mesh, window screen, sphagnum moss)
│%%%%%%%%%│ Hard material (aquarium gravel, pebbles, marbles)
└─────────┘

I found this interesting short guide on how to easily build a terrarium and honestly it's way more detailed than I expected for something that sounds so simple. Most people probably think you just throw some plants in a jar, but this guide breaks down all these layers you need like the false bottom with gravel, barrier mesh, charcoal filtration, and proper soil ratios to actually make it work. What's cool is it explains why each layer matters, like how the false bottom prevents root rot and the charcoal filters the water as it cycles through the system. It even covers the more advanced stuff like adding springtails to eat mold and how to balance the water so it becomes completely self-sustaining. A cool one!

📚 Drawing on the Right Side

The before/after on the DASB site are crazy!

I'm terrible at drawing and wanted to learn to draw. I tried the Draw a Box lessons earlier, but failed miserably and found it boring at times. I came to know about Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards recently and have started reading it, and the interesting analogy about left-brain versus right-brain thinking really clicked for me. Edwards basically argues that most people can't draw not because they lack talent, but because their analytical left brain keeps interfering with their ability to see what's actually there instead of what they think should be there. The book is designed to get you into this "altered state of awareness" where you stop drawing symbols from memory and start actually observing. I’ve just started and it’s been interesting so far!

I loved this quote from the book:

“As a number of scientists have noted, research on the human brain is complicated by the fact that the brain is struggling to understand itself. This three-pound organ is perhaps the only bit of matter in the universe—at least as far as we know—that is observing itself, wondering about itself, trying to analyze itself, and attempting to gain better control of its own capabilities”

~ As always, resurfaced by Readwise (FREE!).
If you’re interested, read my review of Readwise.

💸 1 Pixel

This is an old visualisation during Covid-19 times but it's quite intriguing! It's called 1 pixel wealth where 1 pixel is equivalent to $1000 and it's insane to see how rich the rich are. The 400 richest Americans control $3 trillion combined - that's more than the bottom 60% of all Americans. What really blows my mind is the breakdown of what tiny fractions of this wealth could accomplish: just 3% could permanently eradicate malaria worldwide, 5% could lift every single American out of poverty, 6% could refund an entire year's taxes for all households earning under $80,000, and 8% could provide clean drinking water and toilets to every human on earth. I'm not against being rich, but I guess at this level of wealth you ought to have some moral responsibility and it's insane to think that these 400 people who could literally fit on a single airplane hold wealth that could solve most of humanity's challenging problems while still being billionaires.

📸 Architecture in Music

Credits: Charles Brooks

This week I had so much fun exploring this incredible photography project called Architecture in Music by Charles Brooks who figured out how to photograph the inside of musical instruments using probe lenses and focus stacking. What started during COVID when repair shops were filled with amazing instruments turned into this mind-blowing series where the interiors look like monumental buildings or city skylines. The technical challenge is insane - he sometimes takes over 1,000 individual shots just to create one final image because the probe can only focus on 2mm at a time. What's fascinating is how he lights everything to look like sunlight streaming down and prints them massive so you genuinely feel like you're standing inside a cathedral rather than looking at the inside of a violin.

⏳ The Hobby I Forgot I Had

So this month's IndieWeb Carnival is on "Take Two." I struggled with the idea for weeks, but finally it clicked. Read my reflections on a forgotten hobby: collecting sand samples from every place I visited during undergrad. I had completely forgotten about this quirky passion until a writing prompt brought it all back. A decade later, living in a different country, I realized how much I missed that simple ritual of truly noticing a place. Maybe it's not too late for a take two on old passions!

🎬 DIY Book Lamp

This video by Volt Paper Scissors was so much fun to watch! While we all know it's just a circuit closing to light up the LEDs, making something beautiful is a different craft. The creator has made some templates which make the process easy by just sticking conductive tapes. I loved the sliding mechanism that helps light up the book and also the bellows design - making normal paper translucent with vegetable oil was such a clever touch. A great project to try out with kids!

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That’s 10+1 Things for the week!

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With Love,
Rishi

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
~ Leo Tolstoy

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