All My Posts

Continuing on the spirit of DIY Projects, here finally is Part 2 for how my HAG Capisco Chair came to fruition. This project has been done since April but there’s been many many things that have happened during this COVID19 Lockdown. As you could see in the previous posts’ “completed” picture, some of the hardware was grey and with the final finished product, the colors look more overall consistent/neutral. This project was another play with colors, but it was more a morph from the previous existing worn-looking grey into a cleaner black.

In my continued curiosity for more DIY projects, one of the things I’ve been meaning to do was to make my office chair fit with the general aesthetic of my home. Previously purchasing it used from Kaiyo, the HAG Capisco came at a 75% discount compared to the original price of $800. It’s a very ergonimic and weird chair to sit in, but a fun one because of all the positions you can rest your body with. In attempting to make the Capisco more of my own, I did a couple of things to it since it’s planned to be my end-game (unless I buy a brand new or updated version of the chair):

• Thoroughly cleaning the fabric by throwing it in the washing machine
• Buying new (roller blade) wheel casters so the floor wouldn't get torn
• Dyeing the fabric a darker shade to better fit my home.

This little task for the last bullet point above (of darkening the chairfabric) was a bit tedious but still a fun experiment nonetheless. Because replacing the Fabric in a traditional way would require a roundabout method of contact HAG, and then potentially working with some international shipping, I wanted to resolve this without jumping through contact-ping-pong. As a result, I decided to try dyeing the eco-polyester fabric to better suit my tastes. Some details for the process:
Total Time: 6 Hours (more if you include letting the fabric line dry)
Total Cost: ~$13
Tools Used:

• A Big Pot
• A Stove for High Heat
• A Metal Ladle
• 2x of Rit 02226 DYE More, 7-Ounce, Graphite
• 1x of Rit Dye RIT COLORSTAY, Dye Fixative

Overall, I had to dye it twice for better color retention to get something close to what I wanted. Following advice from a more experienced friend, I also soaked it overnight in the dark-gray-dye-soup. Unfortunately, I had underestimated the amount of dye needed for the chair fabric to darken to the color as I desired, so I needed to order more alongside a fixative so that the dye wouldn’t rub off into my clothes as I sit in my office chair.


Though tedious because the instructions require you to continuously stir the mix, it is all relatively straightforward to do. Stirring the mixture both times for about an hour, and then using the Dye Fixative which took about 20 minutes per the instructions. The night after the fabric was soaked, I had also rinsed out the excess dye until the water turned more clear, which was about 10 times of wringing it out until I couldn’t see any more dye leaking out of the fabric.


In regards to the color change via the dyeing, I didn’t notice too many changes until about 20 minutes of stirring until I noticed a difference. And then it progressively got darker until the fabric turned more of a maroon and then darker brown color. With the first line-drying, it was a good test which showed the fabric in a consistent gradient. Though there was some color runoff because of liquids flowing downwards from the line-drying, it wasn’t noticable enough to bother me.


For using the Fixative, it was a final stretch, though surprising because I could also see more excess dye bleeding out of the fabric. Since the fixative was a yellowish color in the clear water of the pot, the heat must have drawn out more of the leftovers. After that was done, it was more final cold-water-washing until there was no more dye run-off, and then additional line drying once again.

Would I do I again? I likely would, but I would follow with additional dye next time and better preparation due to the process taking at least a whole day for everything to cure. Sitting on my disassembled chair with foam and a missing back support is not as fun. Especially if there’s less-than-ideal weather with lots of humidity in the air, it’ll take even longer for the fabric to dry. But looking forward, it will stand out much less because of the darker color to the rest of the room (since a lot of the house is black, white, gray, and occasional shades of blue). It was a fun experiment and something that I can do now if there aren’t easy options for getting a replacement.

Note, there is a part 2 coming soon. With the re-availability of the Footring and a new Caster on Fully, I’m also doing a second upgrade until I can get my hands on the headrest from a supplier!

Credits to karmickoala in the Hacker News comments section plus the XDA Developers posts regarding the LG Behaviour. Due to Pokemon Go being unnecessarily wary of rooted phones and manually doing checks against certain filenames and directories, it isn’t viable for me to root my LG V35 (and risk other things). The interim to prevent additional battery drain/space from being taken up was discovered on random January Wednesday by looking at the discussions on Hacker News.

Oh man has it been awhile since I’ve last published a blog post. This one is going to be writing in praise of my AKG K271 headphones. And also one that exposes some of my thought process before any large item purchase.

Of slow fading dreams,  
is a piano which gleams.
The disappearance of each desire,  
further down into the mire.

Time is only passing,
with little care for others,
the continuous aging.

My year in review. One year is a surprisingly long time with the mundane and the repetitive. Commuting to work, exercising at the same place, eating the same food for days in a row, all done towards a long term goal. Yet the year could also pass by in the blink of an eye if you keep yourself busy, hanging with friends, hours of exercise, general passion projects, etc! Last year around a similar time, I was preparing to go to Fullstack Academy, which would only continue to change my life for the better. On this specific day, just hanging out with friends at Taco Bell and killing time for whatever the future would bring. I’m thankful and glad to have accomplished all sorts of fun things this last year.

過去がない、
未来が欲しい
今作る。

いつも物
直すみたいだ。
偉いだね？

Creating content is hard. Liking, sharing, and rating content is easy. With the click of a button, it has become easy to “respond” to the content in front of us but what about creating the content ourselves? Capturing a state of mind, painting the vision that you had, words that you want to say, or the dream that you want to transcribe is always difficult. It’s easy for us to criticize and rag on the content that others make but what if we were in their position?

Based on the amount of stuff I have at home, I could definitely consider myself an enthusiast. For all kind of things, audio, music, computers, and a continuing list, one thing that stood out to me for awhile was the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that created a huge amount of attention on Kickstarter. Formed of an all-star team of people from Valve, id-Software, Electronic Arts and other amazing companies, Oculus has been working hard to bring virtual reality to the real world.

夜遅く
プログラムする。
もっといい？

“The world is your oyster.” a proverb from ancient times, also present in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. At a random occurrence, this thought came to mind with all the possibilities in our world. Despite all the possible odds, we’ve come to a point where we can accomplish more than our predecessors ever have, growing more each day.

Making a music player is much harder than I thought. During my personal hackathon at Fullstack Academy, I decided to build a music player because I was tired of trying out different players when switching between operating systems. I’ve been lucky that the W3 updated their support for audio within the last few months. With the use of audio tags and the Web Audio API, one can make a fully featured music player like iTunes or foobar2000!

It’s been awhile since I’ve last written a post about something. Having my original Airy Musings website go down — after becoming unable to pay for Amazon’s AWS services within the micro-instance trial — has left me ways away from blogging. After meaning to restore my web presence for the past weeks, I decided to build up a new blog using Github pages on jekyll within my free time. Now that I’m halfway into my time at Fullstack Academy, this is a good opportunitiy to get back in and report on my progress!

Words are my chore.

まだ、きめた。
ポストをだすは
むずかしい

I’ve finally made it to the court. Eyes still foggy from 4 hours of sleep after a fun night of Payday 2, it’s the first time I’ve woken up at 9 am to do something scheduled in weeks. It was 9:46 am as I sat down in the back of the Juror waiting room. Sitting near another dude who was dressed in more casual clothes, he explained that he’d been waiting for half an hour since they opened at 9. Good thing the court allowed [a surprisingly large amount of] time for tardiness.

For awhile, I’ve been interested and eventually invested in the communities of cryptocurrency. A different experience from how we normally use a payment system, cryptocurrency has risen up to try and change how we pay for things on the internet. Seeing a few threads on /g/ about cryptocoins in the past, it wasn’t until a similar time last year that I actually got interested in the world of cryptocurrency. I started out with Bitcoin but eventually went into Litecoin as it provided more opportunity for late adopters according to various miners. I played around with various other altcoins, however, something felt missing while hanging around forms and subreddits related to respective cryptocoins. The explosion of clone altcoins (basically Litecoin) and motivations behind were interesting to trade around.

Due to taking IT Auditing class in Baruch on Saturday, I started swimming to get healthier and expend more energy (which I may write up in a future post)! On a nice March day, after I finished swimming at the Flushing Recreational Center, I accidentally dropped my water bottle and broke the latch that kept the cap from leaking water everywhere. In the crowded locker room, I hastily stuffed most of my belongings into my bag and went down to the lobby to fix myself up. With my bottle at the top of my bag, water spilled throughout my bag and onto my belongings at the bottom. For someone who has owned random electrical devices, the first thing on mind to do was to turn everything off immediately to prevent the insides from short-circuiting!

It’s funny how different it is blogging for myself or maybe-my-audience; having to think about the readers of the content and of a way to keep interest. It’s almost like doing a homework assignment for a professor or one of my teachers, but this time, making sure that my assignment is relevant and consistent with its own quirks. However, now, instead of one or a few peers that look at my essay, it’s anyone on the open internet that is able to access this post. I’ve always found essays to be interesting to create, compared to having to analyze a specific part of a text, these posts I can make now allow for more creativity and enjoyment.

Here’s to a future blog of various helpful and interesting content! Please stay tuned as I’ll be posting various experiences and thoughts to this blog. Special thanks to Bitnami, Amazon AWS, and Namecheap. For now, this will be a little test post to make sure the layout looks clear and navigable and the content will be interesting!