After years of planning, months of basic electronics and programming exercises he’s finally completed a project by himself with little help (but with a ton of pestering) from me. He came up with the idea during one of our idea sessions where he needs to write down and draw how his idea would work. This…
Category: Kidsplained
New DAC: $10. Learning to Strip a Wire Next to a Hot Soldering Iron: Priceless
Had to repair a broken usb power port on a DAC this morning. Turned it into an opportunity to teach my son how to strip a wire with pliers. After half an hour of work he was able to successfully strip a mm of insulator out of a foot of wire 😂 I constantly remind…
Are We in a Computer Simulation?
This was written by my 11 year old son and I had absolutely no input or edits on this piece. Proud Mad Computer Scientist Dad In some movies, it is depicted that humans live in computer simulation that is indistinguishable from ours. Some movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky follow this setting. It astonished…
Kidsplained: Wi-Fi
A very interesting dinner conversation happened tonight about how the internet works at home. My 11 year old son was curious why he can’t watch youtube outside of the house. I told him that the wifi network we have at home is not able to reach the outdoors and that is why he can’t watch…
Kidsplained: How Code Runs in Volatile Memory
The year is 2018. Ask any tech savvy 10 year old to restart a computer and they will look at you like you we’re a crazy person. My own child, someone who has a parent that took apart and put back together computers at his age, does not know how to restart a computer. I…
Kidsplained: How Digital Displays Work
Spent all night working on this so I can show my son how digital displays work. I explained how the led matrix works and how it makes graphics using 256 dots (8×32). I then explained that it’s the exact same concept that powers an iPhone’s display but that has 2 million more dots. 10 year…
Technical Insanities of a Mad Computer Scientist 