week1 - 2020.2.4
1.Principles and Practices
Objective: decide my final project
When Neil told us to think over and choose a final project, my head was a blank. I was thinking reviewing others’ works made by students in the previous years. Then I gave up and chose to follow my own interests. In Shanghai where I will study in over four months and the lab is, it’s one of the only places in China which formally imposes garbage classification. And one main problem is dealing with kitchen waste. When I came to Shanghai few days ago, I have to throw all the kitchen waste into a plastic bag, then throw the waste and the bag separately, because they belong to different sorts. It’s inconvenient, not good looking, and stinks. So a kitchen waste crusher will be a proper goal to accomplish that task. I have no idea how to make one of those for my final project right now. But I think it will be fixed under the water tap, so when you wash dishes or peeling fruit on it, you just need to wash the waste away along the water into the sewer. I have seen 2 other kinds, one is separate from the tap, the other one is for commercial use. Many might think making such a product is not a dignified thing to do, but I think it might be a lesson for the Chinese people to learn to be a citizen, and think over about public good. In China, garbage classification is still a fresh thing. I believe we can do more about it.
But, it’s not enough to just be self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency is great, but thinking beyond our basic need or a substitute of what has already been existed in the market is better. I want to create something more important and to make a change. And kitchen waste crusher is not something worth telling when you start a new career, so I may pass the idea for the moment. I start to recall my first impression when I saw the smart speaker, like the google home. I used to have one by the Alibaba’s company when it first came out. I felt unease by it and wanted to do something. Even though I’m not familiar with the idea of surveillance capitalist, that unease came from an intuition which I call it the old Chinese wit. The Chinese has a long history of governing their country. So many wisdom and tactics were developed in a world full of struggle. One of them is that you cannot rely one person over many things. You separate them to do different things so that you don’t need to rely any one of them, and find a replacement very easily whenever they are absent. Similarly, I think it’s not wise to let one thing to control and monitor everything you have done in your home in the future. We can learn from the old Chinese. One way is to switch the mechanics of how a home works. Instead of a direct control from the smart speaker, we make the control comes from elsewhere, like our physical force. The problem is how do you persuade people that doing things your own is a more interesting way, than just commanding the speaker. Take a look at the curtain, for example. If we don’t want it to be reactive to the speaker, one way is to make it a little bit self-reactive, but not too much. Like, when we pull it very hard, it will automatically go to the end, or if we pull it very lightly, it will go back to its original position, like when you are taking a peek. Can we edit the curtain so that it will react in different ways when trying different force from opposite directions? The curtain should run smoothly. Other problems will be how it will be hung up to the wall. And how long should it be. I’m thinking that to separate into components, so that people can make however long they like to fit into their own windows. Finally, the long term goal will be a replacement of a life-style of a master, central coordinated system, like the one that the smart speaker evokes. Even though making curtains may still seem trifle to someone, but I think it might be a good start, and certainly better than the first one : )
2.Project Management
Objective: make a site of my final project; work through a git tutorial;
Most of the time for me, it’s about a good tutorial. If I have a well-written tutorial, it will speed up my work a lot. So first of all, I spent some time finding a good tutorial by mostly looking previous students’ pages and works. Then, I followed their steps. The downside is sometimes I don’t exactly know what all I am doing.
I download gitbash but never use it
I try to run Ubuntu after download it
I use Ubuntu to install git
Set up my user name and email
Try to paste my ssh key but failed
Add my ssh key to the gitlab
Clone my repository
Try to install mkdocs so that I can start working on my website
But I fail to install pip under Ubuntu. So I switch to windows and it finally works
But when I was following the instructions on the mkdocs tutorial page, I wasn’t able to open the page that’s supposedly to be open. So I abandoned mkdocs, and try set up my own page using html. There were some students using html as well, I looked up their documents. At the same time, I have read some mkdocs cheetsheets. I think that mkdocs is efficient in setting up a website, but is retrained in the format of the website. So that’s another reason that I chose html.
So I delete everything
When making my website, I also studied others’ by comparing their codes and the actual results of the appearance of the website, and looked back and forth. And also I used w3school and google.