Wesley's Tool-Box

As noted by Apple on the iOS8 announcement, using lunar calendar on the device will become easier. I'm sure a lot of the Koreans have been waiting for this. Until now, there hadn't been a system-wide support, so a user would have had to use an app that could display and manage this calendar on its own. This hassle should go away when the new iOS version arrives.

Sadly for the Koreans, this lunar calendar is being called "Chinese Calendar" on the system. Of course, if the user knows how to read basic Chinese glyphs, it isn't much of a practical issue. The dates mostly match, and the names of the year based on the sexagenary cycle are identical as well.

But the reason why this can't simply be generalized as "lunar calendar" is because it's based on measurements at Beijing, not Seoul. Because of the differences in latitude and longitude between the two capital cities, the phase measurements of the Moon slightly differ. In fact, the dates were off by a day for about five four months in 2012. Even with these downsides, Koreans end up benefitting from Apple's eager push into the Chinese market.

To use the lunar calendar, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Calendars and select "Chinese" from the Alternate Calendars. After that, the lunar date will show in Chinese on the Notification Center below the regular date.

Meanwhile, if someone in your contacts keeps the birthday in lunar date, you can select "add birthday" to designate one. After that, the Calendar app will show that person's "Chinese Birthday" on the lunar birthday. I expect that this will be of much use to many Koreans.

Balls running around elaborate loops of rails in museums are quite a sight to see. So why not bring it home? Hence the SpaceRail steel ball roller coaster kit, which is a knock-off of Spacewarp. I got the Level 2 one from a community-driven discount purchase at a price of about US$23. The box said this was a beginner-level kit that's supposed to take up to 2 hours to build. That was rather optimistic, as it turned out.

Read on for the photos of the build process.

It's safe to say at this point that Disney's feature-length animation "Frozen" is a big success. Even my daughters have become big fans - watching both the subtitled and dubbed versions, reading the story book, memorizing the theme song "Let It Go", and so on. So when I was looking around for something to print in 3D, a version of Elsa's tiara crown immediataly caught my eyes. Although short-lived, this was one of the most memorable items in the movie.

Unlike most of the 3D-printed objects I made so far, the printing was only the first step for making the crown. It would have to be worn on the head, needing more work. To find out how it went, read on.

I've been downloading and 3D printing a lot of interesting stuff so far. But eventually, I had to tackle the art of using a 3D modeling program to create custom designs. For my first attempt, I decided to make a coin with a logo on its face. Specifically, the logo was that of KPX, which is where I work. As far as I am aware, the company never issued a commemorative coin before, so it seemed to be a good choice.

A few weeks ago, I had installed Autodesk's 123D Design software to make 3D models. I was originally thinking of TinkerCAD, but that had been bought by Autodesk, so I thought I might as well just use Autodesk's original software. Apart from being slow to load on my Mac, it was thankfully not too difficult to make some shapes and move things around.


After a couple of practice, I started drawing the KPX logo. Sadly, there wasn't a way of importing an image file to trace over. As a workaround, I put a grid over an image of the logo and drew the lines as closely resembling as possible on the grid within 123D Design. It came out fairly well.

My kids wanted bigger cars from the 3D printer because the ones I made were too small. So I wanted a design that maxes out the print dimensions, while being somewhat special. That's why picked this balloon-powered car. I initially tried the design that uses snap-on wheels, but seeing that the wheels may not turn smoothly, I went ahead with the one that needed separate wires that held the wheels. To see how this went, read on.