Gideon Tong's Latest

Edit 1/3/2018: I'm so sorry this blog post took so long to publish. I forgot to schedule it correctly, and thus it ended up getting pushed back later and later until I remembered to publish it. For reference's sake, I originally wrote this post on 12/4/2017, one day after the hackathon. Edit 1/20/2018: I can’t believe it took me two months to post this. Next time, I’ll make sure to be on top of my own schedule. I have never been to a hackathon before, so when the Ventura County Office of Education started advertising the Hackathon by the Sea , I was quite excited. Although I had my reservations about staying up the entire night (another thing I have never done in my life), I thought overall the hackathon was a great experience. Initially, the plan was find others that also went to Westlake High School in order to develop a winning idea. found included Adam, Inaya, Himani, and Adele (Pictured from left to right is me, Adam, Inaya and Himani.) At the beginning, we s...

As a newcomer to the world of FIRST but already acclimated to the world of robotics through building my own robots, quadcopters and participation in VEX, I find FIRST to be fascinating. I think that the games designed by FIRST seem more fun, engaging, and competitive and bring all aspects of people together much better than VEX, albeit at a more expensive price point. It is not just an efficient robot at stake here, which require talented programmers, designers, and builders in and of itself, but also the ability to strategize and adapt before and during the game. So for those who haven’t read the rule book yet (which you should have at this point, so I don’t know what you are doing if you have not yet, so I will just link it right here for your reading pleasure), or are reading this post in the future as you came across it in a Google search, here is a quick rundown of how the game works: As usual, you are in an alliance with two other teams, with all three alliance stat...

Netflix is expensive. So what if you legally  obtained copies of movies you want to watch, but you don't have enough storage space on your computer to, but have more than enough bandwidth? rclone is a great utility in order to synchronize files between different cloud storage systems, and for the purposes of this analysis, I'm going to use Google Drive because educational Google Drive accounts have unlimited storage. We can take advantage of this storage however we want, so I've gone ahead and uploaded my entire movie library (which, some is DRM protected, and as I found out later, cannot be streamed without DRM protection stripped from the file). For the purposes of this, we will be taking a look at Lion King, which was released in 1994. The file is 4.7GB, in 1080p, so in order to stream the video, we're going to need some serious bandwidth. Luckily... It seems like my download speed is being throttled during peak hours, or the rest of my family is also u...

Have you ever been in a situation where you were typing normal text into a text document in Notepad++ and it gave you that really annoying word completion that would autocomplete words for you, even when you didn't want it to, and would do it regardless of whether you hit enter or space? Or even backspace? Well, it's really easy to disable it... No problem, just open Settings, then Preferences... then Auto-Completion. Change the radio button from "Function and word completion" to "Function completion" and click close. ...and you're done! Wow, that was easy! Gideon Tong

For the purposes of keeping this write up simple, and the fact that while I'm writing this I've only completed the multiple choice section so far, I will be limiting this small analysis to only the 90 multiple choice questions that were required for the extra credit. I was curious to see how much time I would spend working on it, as this was an extra credit assignment where you had to complete 90 multiple choice questions for APUSH with a paragraph explanation for every question. I spent 8 days working on the extra credit assignment, starting from Christmas day and skipping December 29th, and usually spent between 2 and 4 hours per day working on the assignment. In total, I spent 17 hours and 23 minutes working on the assignment, and this is a first draft, which means I still have to check my work, add any additional details that are needed, as well as the final 12 document based questions that I have not yet completed. Overall, it seems I spent about the same amo...

There is a lot of good documentation on how to install Alamofire for iOS Swift development on the internet, and I thought I'd add to the cacophony of articles detailing how to do so, since a lot of terms were not explained to me, as a first time beginner not only to programming in the Swift language, but also the iOS and macOS operating systems. The first thing you'll do is install Cocoapods: it's a manager that allows you to quickly install libraries for Swift. Run sudo gem install cocoapods in a Terminal window and enter your admin password. Cool, now in the root path of your project, run pod init . Some files will automatically be generated for your Xcode project, so navigate to the root directory of the project you selected and open Podfile. You'll find a line that says # Pods for testing . Underneath the line, add pod 'Alamofire' and save and exit. Go back to the Terminal, navigate to the root directory of your project, and run pod insta...