In this second installment of the wild adventures in setting up an aquarium, I’ll go through what I did to install a 30 gallon sump into the stand of my 125 gallon aquarium.

I won’t go into the details of what a sump is and how it works because there are lots of places that explain it better than I could. I decided to go with a sump because it is incredibly cost-effective, simple to maintain, and very flexible in its implementation compared to a canister filter.

The tank I’d bought was not plumbed for a sump, which meant that I had to install my own overflows and returns. Keep in mind that a 125 gallon tank has 1/2″ thick glass through which I had to drill four holes. Several hours of YouTube videos later, I felt ready to have a go at it. Here’s the videos I made of the process:

The overflow kit I used came from glass-holes.com and it has performed well for years now.

A similar procedure was followed for the two return lines, which I also ordered from glass-holes.com.

The maintenance of the sump is incredibly easy. I simply pull out the filter socks and filter pads and throw them in the washer with some bleach for 20 minutes. I have a second set of socks that I swap in and I reinstall the pads when they’re done in the washer. That is literally all the maintenance it requires. Every so often, I replace the pads with new ones and the socks get replaced every year or two. I’ve been doing that for years now without issues.

That concludes the filtration section of this series. Check out the next section for even more information about this aquarium.

I get a lot of questions about how I set up my 125 gallon aquarium shown above, so you’ll find everything you ever wanted to know about it here. I’ve broken the process down into parts and this first part will focus on the building of the stand. I regularly post update videos on YouTube, so you should also check those out. A link to my channel is on the menu to the left.

I built the stand in January, 2010 and the whole process took a few months. The frame is based on a blueprint that is commonly used by others. This was the first piece of furniture I’d ever built and fortunately I had a lot of help from my friend Adam. We used his basement and many of his tools and I used the skills I acquired on this project to build a lot of other stuff afterwards, including another aquarium stand.

I got the 125 gallon tank itself at Petsmart for 300 bucks. The dimensions of the tank are 72″L x 18″W x 20″H and a filled tank of this size holds 1043 pounds of water. Including the tank itself and the 30 gallon sump tank, this stand had to be able to support over 1500 pounds. So, I massively over-engineered the stand. It could probably hold a couple of 125 gallon tanks the way I built it. Anyway, let’s get into the nitty gritty of building an aquarium stand.

I learned many things while painting this thing. First, I regret using high gloss paint. I painted another stand I built afterwards satin black and it looks a lot better in my opinion. Second, I used white primer under this black paint and so you can imagine how many coats of paint it took. Tinting the primer gray is highly recommended. Lastly, the particular paint I used was pretty crappy and didn’t take well to the amount of tint I added. So, it stayed sticky for literally months. Fortunately for you, they no longer make the paint I used, so no worries there if you follow in my footsteps. Just use good paint, it’s worth the money. I sold paint professionally for five years and I now exclusively use Valspar Signature series.

The total cost of materials to build the stand was around 150 dollars. That is incredibly cheap for such an indestructible, furniture-quality aquarium stand. Definitely no regrets on building it as opposed to buying the stuff they sell at pet stores. You’d pay 2-3 times what I paid for far less quality.

This concludes the first part in my quest to put together a gigantic aquarium in my living room. In the rest of the articles, I’ll explain how I built my sump filtration, picked the fish, and all the other stuff that goes into this. As I said, this is my first major carpentry project and it turned out great. Here’s a video I made in March, 2010 that shows some more of this stage of the process.

I wrote it in Java and it uses a sort of artificial intelligence to play a reverse game of hangman. The player gives it a word and it will use a supplied dictionary.txt file to try to figure out the word in a specified number of attempts.

Download Reverse Hangman

The AI it uses for this is four-fold. First, it will prune the dictionary file down to only the words that are the same length as the given word. Next, it will calculate the most common letters in the entire dictionary and guess those. If that becomes impossible due to the word not being in the dictionary or there being no valid letters to satisfy a dictionary word, the AI will begin randomly guessing letters. It keeps track of every letter it has ever guessed and will not guess these again. Lastly, once the application sees that there are only a few possible dictionary words left, it will attempt to guess the entire word instead of individual letters. This tactic has a high probability of success for words that are actually in the dictionary.

The game is written in such a way that it gets more efficient at guessing with each turn. So, as it guesses correct letters, it has to do less and less computation to figure out its next choice. One can exploit this and create a worst-case scenario by giving it a gibberish word made of the least common letters and of the most common length. So, inputting “zxqjkvbp” as the guessing word will cause it to have a very hard time figuring it out and can take several minutes to do so, depending on how many turns it is given. It is effectively doing all computations on a 28 thousand word dictionary until it eventually loses. Needless to say, this is an unrealistic scenario in regular use. It is possible to account for it, but there is little point in doing so. Given enough turns, the game will figure out the word 100% of the time. The default number of tries is 6.

The game is over when either the application has figured out the word or it has failed and the hang man is hung.

The zip folder contains the executable and the texture images that are applied to the objects in the world. Simply unzip it all into a folder and run the executable. I know the texture images are very nerdy, but I think it looks good. =)

Download the amusement park program

Download RakGame

Version 1.2 – Dec 05, 2011
In this version, I’ve added text communication capabilities. Basically, the clients and the server can enter text messages, which are then sent to every one else through the server. There have also been several large bug fixes and some improvements to the general layout.

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Version 1.1 alpha
This version is much more playable and relatively free of bugs, though there are some I’m still working on. Also, it’s got a fancy new title screen. Yay.

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Version 1.0 alpha – Oct 26, 2011
I decided to make this the first release because I’ve got the movements of characters to spread across all clients in this version. Some of the text flashes during refresh and there are other bugs, such as a lack of input-checking. This is very much a development build. There are many other features I would like to implement as well, but this will never be a full game. This one is just practice.

I’ve created a Starcraft2 custom map which has become relatively popular. It is a take on the classic SC1 map named Evolves, which I’ve named Evolves Classic. Read all about it here.


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8/16/2010 UPDATE:
I’ve been interviewed about Evolves Classic on the popular site StarCraft2Mods.com. Check it out here:
StarCraft2Mods.com interview with breakspirit

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I am constantly updating and tweaking it, but I made a video awhile ago showing what it looked like at the time. Check it out below:

Also, someone on Youtube let me know that he had reviewed my map. That review can be found here:

If you have any comments or feedback, let me know. You can contact me directly via this page.

 
I recently became an amateur aquarist and began consuming all the knowledge I could about aquariums. Well, I came across a very cool animal called the crayfish and have been keeping one as a pet. I find that many people don’t know what crayfish are. Through my studies of astacology, I have learned much. Basically, they are little freshwater lobster monsters born in burning hell waters.

To be honest, this is not my first crayfish. I had another one that tragically died about a month ago. He was a blue crayfish named Snappy. Well, Snappy decided it would be a good idea to climb out of his aquarium(apparently he used claws to climb a glass heating cylinder) and he fell out of the aquarium onto the floor, where he walked across the room and died, not to be found until the next day. I had him for a few months and I learned much about crayfish, so I decided I should try again and use my experience to raise a crayfish the way God intended.

I was at a local fish emporium and they had a white crayfish for 40 god damn dollars. Well, if this had been my first crayfish experience, I’d have passed, but I knew I could raise this guy right, so I bought him. Evidently white crayfish are pretty rare, and I’ve never seen another one before or since. Clearly that’s why he was so expensive. He’s not a pure white, though; he has a very soft blue coloration to him, which is pretty cool looking. Also, interestingly, there was a blue crayfish in the tank next to his and he was missing a claw and several legs. I find it highly likely that the white one fucked that dude up.

Naturally, being a white crayfish, I named him Whitey.

All of this happened on April 4th, 2009. That same day, I made a quick video of my girlfriend dumping him into the aquarium, check it out.

Now, today is 4/15, so Whitey’s been in the aquarium for a little while. But, nothing too interesting has happened until the last couple of days. A few days ago, my girlfriend, Sandy, and I were casually hanging out and decided to feed the fish. So, I dropped some sinking shrimp pellets in there and all the fish started feasting. Well apparently one of my danios got a bit too close to Whitey, because he jumped out like lightning, grabbed the tiny danio with his claws, and carried it into his little cave under the decorations. I said, “WHOOOAAAA!” and looked at Sandy, who had a really sad look on her face from seeing one of her pet fishies get killed. We then watched as Whitey ate the fish FACE FIRST.

My old crayfish, Snappy, never did anything violent the whole time he was alive, so clearly Whitey is some kind of blood thirsty killer.

I like to make these journals both entertaining and educational, so I’ll go ahead and list all of Whitey’s aquarium mates. As of 4/15, this 30ish gallon aquarium holds…
2 glow-fish danios
4 scissor tails
1 bristlenose plecostomus
1 cory cat
1 sword tail
3 zebra danios
1 white crayfish

That seems like a good number of inhabitants for this size tank. Here’s a shot of the whole tank

Whitey’s aquarium

If you squint, you can see Whitey down in his little self-made cave under the fake rock thing. Like Snappy before him, Whitey has made that his home and has actually dug it out by literally moving rocks around. Here’s a shot of him guarding his burrow from a nosy pleco.

Whitey guarding his cave

As I said, a couple of interesting things have happened that prompted me to start writing about this guy. The other thing is that he molted. For those of you who may not be too familiar with biology, molting is when an animal, in this case a crustacean, sheds his damn skin and grows a new one. In the case of crayfish, they usually end up larger and sometimes a different color. Whitey is a tad larger and turned a bit more blue, but is still nowhere near as blue as a regular blue crayfish. So, there is literally a full-size replica of Whitey in this aquarium right now made of rotting crayfish shell. Of course, he just had to molt in his cave and so if I want to get his skin out of there, I have to tear the whole god damn aquarium apart. That’s exactly what I did with Snappy. However, someone told me that crayfish will actually EAT their shell if you leave it in there, so that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Whitey next to his shell after molting

Well, I think that’s about all there is to say about this guy for now. Like the ant farm journal, I’ll keep you guys posted on any new happenings. If you have any questions about crayfish or think I should know anything, feel free to contact me. For now, here’s some more pictures I took of him. Enjoy.

5/20/09 – 12:09 PM

Just thought I’d update you guys on Whitey. He molted again last week and he actually became whiter. Last time the opposite happened and he became more blue. Now he’s almost entirely white with very little blue at all. He also got a bit bigger, which is hard to tell in pictures.

I told my girlfriend that I want to get a turtle and last night she brought home this:

Whitey’s turtle friend

What’s interesting is that Whitey appears extremely interested in that thing. He spends all of his time inspecting it and apparently trying to climb it or something. This morning I caught him basically hugging the turtle’s face. It was adorable and weird. I think what he’s trying to do is dig out the rocks under the turtle to create a den. I’ve seen him digging a few times today, so that’s probably it. I’ll keep you posted of any more strange happenings.

3/18/10 – 12:37 PM

Whitey died today. I’ve known he was probably not doing too well for awhile. He hasn’t molted in like six months and he barely moved at all, except to occasionally get something to eat. He was just sitting in his little cave all day every day. Strangely, he had wandered out to the front of the tank and died there, instead of in his cave. He’s been living with a bunch of mollies for months and hasn’t killed anything in a really long time, not even the baby mollies in the tank. I suppose this could be because he was too weak. It’s hard to know when a crayfish is doing badly, but I guess he showed every sign I’d expect of him. I had him just less than a year, but he was fully grown when I got him and so his age is unknown. I remember reading that a crayfish should live around five years, though, so I’m wondering if maybe white ones live shorter lives for some reason.

Well, he was a good crayfish and was very interesting to watch. RIP Whitey.

In 2003, NASA needed to find a way to create ant colonies in space. I don’t know why, I guess they were bored. However, dirt wouldn’t work correctly in near-zero gravity and they didn’t want the astronauts to have to bother with feeding the little guys, so they invented this gel that holds all the nutrients the ants need to live. The gel is translucent so that they could allow the ants to make 3 dimensional colonies like they would in nature while still being able to observe them. Thus was born the AntWorks Gel Ant Colony system.

So I decided I was up to the enormous task of caring for ants and I bought such a system. They’re on Amazon for like 30 bucks including the lighted base. They don’t include ants, but they give you an order form with which to order them in the mail. This sounded absolutely insane to me that they would mail you ants in the mail, but it’s December right now and there’s no other way for me to get ants. I have received the ants today in the mail and decided to keep a journal of their lives here. It will be interesting to anyone interested in ants or biology in general and might make some of you get ants or something similar yourselves. So, let’s get this show on the road.

 

12/22/08 – 11:30 PM

The ants arrived today in a regular shipping envelope. They were encased in a small vial and they looked pissed.

Ants in shipping tube

There were 24 ants and they appeared to all be alive. The label on the vial reads, “Caution: Ants can sting! Adult supervision required.” I took this warning as more of a challenge, but I have to admit that these ants looked scary as hell. They’re Harvester ants and they’re large and fast. Honestly, I was afraid to open the vial. It also contained what was either ant poo or severed ant limbs. The vial came with instructions that recommended I refrigerate the ants for 10 minutes before trying to get them into my ant farm. This would slow them down enough to be manageable. So, I threw them in my mini fridge and rounded that time up to 12 minutes just to be sure these maniacs couldn’t attack me.

After 12 minutes, the ants all looked dead and one of them actually was dead, so it was time to put them in the ant farm. They were all lumped together and fell into the gel in a clump. I quickly shut the lid, fearing for my life. After about 10 seconds, they were back to full speed and they wanted the hell out of there. They were climbing all over each other and up the walls trying to escape, but there was nowhere for the little bastards to run.

Ants in the gel

There appears to be a gap between the glass and the gel, creating an abyss into which the ants are falling.

Ant in the abyss

At first only one ant was in there and he seems to be perfectly content just hanging out there. I figured he would be ok, since one of three things would happen. He could stay there forever, eating the gel all around him, or he could dig his way out, or he could find a way back up to the surface. But, after about 30 minutes, the problem became worse.

Many ants in the abyss

I had 12 ants in the abyss, 11 ants on the surface, and 1 dead ant. So, I turned the thing upside down and started shaking it to get the ants back to the top. This proved to be completely hilarious because the ants acted like they were under attack and started running all over the place. If I weren’t such a dedicated scientist, I would have continued shaking them as long as it was still funny, but I knew that I was doing this for the betterment of mankind, not for mere entertainment.

After about 2 hours, I began getting frustrated that none of the ants were actually digging. Several of them were still trying to escape to the lid, some appeared to be sleeping, some were trapped in the abyss, and some looked like they were tasting the gel but clearly weren’t digging into it. So, I used an included stick to poke some holes into the gel to make starter holes and learned an interesting fact. The ants know when the lid is open and they want OUT. They all dropped what they were doing and made a run for the surface, trying to climb on top of each other, forming a tower. I quickly shut the lid and swore never to be so foolish again. I’m pretty sure I almost died.

Another strange thing is that the dead ant moves every so often. He doesn’t walk around or anything, but his front legs move a little sometimes. I guess dead ants still move for awhile or something, I have no idea. The other ants mostly leave him alone, except for one ant that has been licking him for like half an hour. I don’t know what he’s actually doing, but the dead ant isn’t getting any better.

Well, it’s now been about 3 hours since I put the ants in the farm and they’ve calmed down a lot. Only a couple of them are still running around, the rest are either not moving, appear to be cleaning themselves, or are strangely interested in poking the dead ant. I’ll update this page when they do anything interesting. Thanks for reading.

 

12/23/08 – 10:41 PM

The ants were all clumped together in a group when I got home tonight. They have apparently decided that tunneling is for losers and have opted to instead all live in that abyss between the glass and the gel. They have excavated out a large space and are all living in there now.

Excavated abyss

Another view

You can see in the pictures the piles of goo at the surface. That’s all stuff they tore out and carried up within 1 day. It is clearly hundreds of ant-hand fulls of junk. There’s now a second dead ant in the colony, who has died of unknown causes. When I got home, his corpse was shoved in the abyss, which you can see in the picture as the ant that is shaped like a ball. After about an hour, though, one of his comrades carried him to the surface near the first dead ant and I guess they’re starting a collection of rotting ant carcasses up there. Little do they realize that they will all eventually be dead in a pile at the top. Such is the life of an ant.

Over the last hour, they’ve all become much more active and they’re now spread out across the farm, mostly just walking around mindlessly or cleaning themselves. I guess they were asleep when I got home or something. I have no idea how long ants sleep or what the hell they’re doing in there, but it’s interesting to watch none the less. I’ll keep you guys posted on any developments.

 

12/26/08 – 3:22 PM

Nothing has happened in the last couple days until this morning. The ants finally dug a tunnel.

The ants finally build a tunnel

A view from the side

As you can see, it’s a half-assed tunnel because it doesn’t even start until near the bottom because the stupid idiots have been digging out all along the glass for some retarded reason. I swear, it figures that I’d get mentally handicapped ants. See that glob of ants in the first picture? That’s like their hangout all day long. I don’t know why, but there is always a pile of ants in the one spot. I don’t know if they’re eating or sleeping there or what, but those lazy assholes need to dig more.

 

12/28/08 – 10:00 PM

Finally, they’re building real tunnels. In fact, they’re apparently all taking speed because they’ve dug a load of tunnels.

Many ant tunnels

That’s a view from the back, where it’s a little easier to see the tunnels. It’s a little unclear there, but the tunnels all hook together at the bottom, where there’s a long horizontal tunnel. There’s one area at the bottom where the ants apparently sleep or something. They always seem to have some location as their hangout and now it’s at the very bottom in a specific tunnel location.

The top of the ant farm is littered with dug up gel junk. In fact, they buried the two dead ants in their excavated gel. I still have 22 living ants and they all appear to be doing fine. My girlfriend noticed that when you turn the lights off, the ants actually have a significant red color that I had kinda noticed before. They really appear to be MORE red now, though. I think that is more reason to never ever let these bastards out of there. One of my favorite things to do is to shake the whole thing and watch them all go crazy. They’ll all rush out of the tunnels and swarm along the top of the colony. I assume that if I were to put my finger in there, they’d try to rip it right off.

While I’ve been writing this, they’ve been digging another tunnel. Here’s a shot of them working on it.

Ants digging a new tunnel

I really want to put something interesting in the ant farm and see how the ants react. For example, it would be really interesting to put a spider in there. I’m thinking they’d have an epic battle. If you have any ideas for crazy nonsense I should do to these ants, send me a message on the comment form.

 

1/5/09 – 2:34 PM

A fellow named Rush suggested that I should put some type of neon food coloring into the farm and see if they glow under a black light. I looked on amazon and didn’t see anything like that, but if you guys know where one might find such a thing, let me know.

Anyway, a few interesting things have happened since last I wrote, but for the most part the ants seem to be getting lazier by the day. One interesting occurrence was when I accidentally dropped the whole damn thing from 3 feet in the air and it (thankfully) landed upside down. The loose excavated gel all got scattered around, but the tunnels are just fine. However, the ants were definitely more pissed than I’ve ever seen them get. Every single one of them swarmed to the top. One of them was buried in gel, but he was able to eat his way out apparently. Amazingly, there are still only 2 dead ants and they’ve been buried by the living ants in excavated gel.

View of the tunnels from the front

View of the tunnels from the back

You might notice that every ant is huddled into a cluster at the bottom. This is still their favorite hang out. I still have no idea what they’re doing down there, but apparently it’s comfortable.

Ants clustered at the bottom in their living room

That is a picture of all 22 living ants. It’s really interesting looking at the old ant farm pics compared to the new ones. They’ve made much progress in just a few weeks. But, like I said, they appear to be getting lazier. They probably don’t see a need for any more tunnels and are happy with what they’ve got. But, I won’t tolerate any slackers in my ant farm, so now I’m going to keep an eye out for spiders and I’ll try to trap one and throw it in there.

Before I end this post, I thought I’d show you a video I made shortly after I dropped the ant farm. I thought it was funny, so I threw it on youtube. Enjoy.

3/16/09 – 12:00 AM

I was told when I started this whole ant farm experiment that ants have a life span of between zero and 90 days. Well, this is now day 84. Frankly, it’s a depressing mess in there. Check it out.

Tape = anti-cat technology

More old ants

It’s hard to tell in those pictures, but basically all of the ants are either dead or seriously sick looking. I’m not sure how many ants exactly are alive right now, but I tried shaking the thing like the good old days and only 5 ants gave a damn. They lazily wandered around at the top, but clearly lacked their youthful energy. Apparently, they also gave up on carrying the dead to the surface at some point.

Dead ants

The tunnels contain exactly 6 dead ant corpses and zero live ants. The ants that are still alive are all at the top and there are less than ten of them left. There appears to be 7, which means that there should be 11 ant corpses, but I can’t find that many. However, there are two balls of gel in there that appear to have dead ants inside. It’s hard to explain, but it really seems like some of the dead ants got rolled up into balls of gel. It’s both gross looking and kind of cool.

I’m not evil enough to throw a spider into a farm of geriatric ants, so that experiment will have to wait until Ant Farm Version 2. Yes, I already have plans for round 2 and this time, it’s personal. Or something. Basically, I’m building the next ant farm out of wood, glass, glue, and LOVE. It’s half built already, I just have to stop being lazy about it.

I find myself fondly reading through this ant farm journal. It was a fun experiment and I learned a lot. But, these ants are old and not really doing a whole lot, so this is likely to be the last entry for this journal. If anything else happens, I will of course update this page. Now I’m going to let these ants live the rest of their lives in peace. They’ve earned it.