Life – Page 3 – The Beth Project

Arguably pointless things that I have made

An app for counting rows while you knit

I find counting rows annoying - I have to put down a needle and pick up a pencil to mark a tally, or to twirl something on a row gadget. What I really want is to be able to increment without having to put anything down. This app means that I can just touch my phone's screen to keep track.

It's a simple interface - touch the blue circle to add one to the number, or touch the arrow to reset the count to zero. It started out as a webpage, but I wanted it for offline use so I used the MIT App Inventor (which is AMAZING, by the way) to quickly make it into an app. You can download it here. To install it, copy it to your phone and open it in file explorer. You'll need to approve installation of apps from unknown sources, which can be a security risk if you go installing things willy-nilly, but in this case is safe to do. Knit strong and prosper!

2D glasses for the cinema

OK, so a few years ago if you went to the cinema to see a 3D film, sometimes the 3D would be terrible. It would totally take away from the experience because it looked like flat cardboard layers placed a little apart rather than real life. A little while ago I had the idea of making special 2D glasses so that I could watch a 3D film as if it were an old-fashioned, honest to goodness 2D film.

To do this, you take the left lens from one pair of 3D glasses and swap it with the right lens from another pair of glasses. If you flip it backwards, you can wriggle the thin plastic back into the slots in the glasses - if that's too difficult, you can stick it on using glue or rubber cement. That way, both of the eyes of the glasses see the same picture, so you don't get a 3D effect. If you had old fashioned red-blue 3D glasses, this would be the same as having two blue or two red lenses.

A very large number of cardboard cat toys

Anyone who follows me on Instagram, or Facebook, or who has met me IRL, will probably have noticed that I have a new kitten. It's been a great excuse to make stupid things out of cardboard, including a very effective scratching pad, lots of mangled toilet roll tubes, and this little puzzle box.

A photo posted by Beth McMillan (@teraspawn) on Oct 22, 2015 at 3:08pm PDT

I cut a series of holes in the top of a cereal box, each a little smaller than a ping pong ball could fit through, and then put a ping pong ball into the box and taped it up. Sometimes I drop kibbles and smaller toys in there, as well. It can keep her occupied for a very long time.

On a similar note...

An SVG of my cat's face

I don't know why.

The soy protein tour of Berlin

We spent the last week on holiday in Berlin. I'm going to tell you about some of the awesome things we found there.

Signposts in East Berlin

We were staying in the east side of Berlin, north of the Berlin Wall. The street names and architecture are still very reminiscent of the area's communist past. We went to see the East Side Gallery on our way to take this boat tour, which gave us a really leisurely amble around Berlin's history. (John: "We have to go on this tour! It takes us through the canal that Rosa Luxemburg's body was thrown into." John has weird holiday goals.) Other highlights included:

Super awesome museums

The Computerspielemuseum was an unexpected pleasure. It was just down the road from our hotel, so we decided to pop in for a quiet afternoon. It chronicles the history of computer games from Pong all the way up to a crazy fun 3d racer from a couple of years ago. Practically everything is interactive - you could spend a whole day there playing with the exhibits.

Berlin has an ENTIRE ISLAND of museums, which is just way too exciting for words. We spent a day there and managed to do two of them thoroughly; the Pergamonmuseum, which houses lots of Islamic history, and the Neuesmuseum, which has a huge section on ancient Egypt and one on early German history. Lots of beautiful things in both, and both will be interesting to anyone who likes old systems of writing - cuneiform and heiroglyphics are everywhere.

Finally, we headed to the Jewish museum, which was very different than I expected. Naturally, it had a large area devoted to the holocaust, but it covered the history of Jewish people in Germany from the very earliest settlers. This was the museum we spent the most time in, and it was well worth it.

Useful apps

To navigate without internet, I downloaded a map of the city on Google Maps to use offline. You can't get navigation or business names that way, but if you star the locations you wan to visit, it's easy enough to find your way to walk there. I also had a try of Google Translate for the first time, which I was very impressed by. It can use your camera to translate signs and menus. Before I went on holiday, I used Duolingo to refresh my German, which I absolutely loved and found really useful. My vocabulary was still lacking, but I felt like I could sit and chat to people quite comfortably.

The aforementioned soy protein

I've always been of the opinion that it's easy to find vegetarian food anywhere, as long as you don't mind having only chips for dinner. We did make sure to look up some good veggie places, however, so we had a huge range of options. Sometimes I go through phases of loving tofu, soy mince, and all things protein-ey. We found Dolores, a "Californian-Mexican" restaurant, which did some great burritos with all the trimmings. There was a place called AsiaGourmet next to the Alexanderplatz U-bahn station, which did a tofu stir fry which was pretty bland and unexciting. The Lidl near our hotel also had vegetarian schnitzel, which was a bizarre experience.

Our absolute favourite place was a Vietnamese/Thai restaurant called Samadhi, which is run by possibly the most adorable man on the planet. There was a huge menu of vegetarian things to choose from, plates of starters, curries, stir fries and soups. We filled our bellies, drank some nice wine, and were entertained by the antics of the proprietor.

A baby colada

We finished off a few of our nights by heading to Acapulco for a drink. Their mocktails are so lovely, and the cocktails aren't bad either.

The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Omg, right? We went to see one of the best orchestras in the world on their home turf. It was AMAZING. The building has to be seen to be believed, it's a crazy multi-level pentagonal... thing. They played a bizarre Schoenberg piece called the Hand of Fate, which involved a small choir laughing at the orchestra, and finished up with some Carl Nielsen, in which two timpani players (timpanists?) played a call and response, and the double basses had a fiddly bit to do, which made them all look very pleased (I worry that double bass players get bored sometimes). Oh, and they played this:

Crowdfunding to get us a boat!

Update: we did it, you guys! Thanks so much to all of our sponsors.

Photo of Somerville College women's first boat — I am not in this photograph, but don't let that stop you from imagining me in lycra.

In 1921, humankind came to the momentous understanding that rowing would not permanently damage the fragile reproductive system of the human female, and thus the Somerville College Women's Boat Club began. In 1927 a Somerville rower participated in the first ever Women's Boat Race against Cambridge, and we've turned out several blues rowers and coxes since then.

Fast-forward nearly a century, and the women's rowing team at Somerville College has been badly in need of a new boat for quite a while. This year our first team are in the first division, and we need a boat as good as our rowers to go the whole way!

We're trying to raise money for our new boat through gifts from our friends and family (unlike some colleges *cough* Green Templeton *cough* we don't have a lot of funding). Even five or ten pounds would go a long way towards helping us to reach our goal. Go to our crowdfunding page to find out more and to give your contribution.

If you can't spare money towards our boat, we'd be really grateful if you could spread the word to anyone who might be interested (particularly old rowing buddies and people who have opinions about the Boat Race).

Smash and dominate!