I discuss the basic analog telephone circuit and some of the old analog switching mechanisms at the telephone office. I also talk about the practice of ‘phone phreaking,’ the precursor to modern computer hacking, in which (mostly) high school and college kids learned how to manipulate the phone system in ways it was never intended to work.
(Read more...) Talks & PublicationsThis project exists to serve a very niche problem. In my classroom, students coming from across my rather large school have trouble making it to my room before passing period ends. Therefore, I give them an extra 45 seconds after the bell rings before I count them tardy. I also don’t allow students to pack up prior to three minutes before the end of the period. So, I wanted a script that would sound an alarm bell 45 seconds after the beginning of each period and 3 minutes prior to the end of the period.
(Read more...) ProjectsA simple custom link shortening app. It’s a bit like a personal bit.ly. I wrote it in php and MySQL.
I have been having students use the free online graphing calculator Desmos (www.desmos.com). It can perform linear and curve fits much more precisely than can be done by hand, but it is much friendlier to new users than Excel.
(Read more...) Talks & PublicationsI use Plain-Text Accounting and the command line tools Ledger and HLedger in order to track family finances. I have written these scripts to help me import data from monthly bank statements into my ledger file and visualize our finances.
I have been teaching physics at Avon High School since 2013.
This website is a collection of projects—some related to my job and many not. Mostly, this website is just a
place for me to play around with html and other programming languages and trick myself into thinking that I
am being productive by doing so.
This website is built using hugo and a custom-coded theme.
Zachary J. Rohrbach
Physics Teacher
Avon High School
zjrohrbach@avon-schools.org