BlogDB

$656,000 of Frugal Things I Still Love Doing

“I used to read Mr. Money Mustache”,  some people say these days,  “Until he got all rich and fancy so that he no longer understands the common person’s plight. Stash probably doesn’t even practice...

Getting Started With a Private LoRaWAN Network Using ChirpStack v4 (Updated)

I have recently started experimenting with LoRa radios, and the LoRaWAN network protocol. Interestingly it seems that the LoRa ecosystem is simultaneously surprisingly open (both in specifications ...

Musing about a secure computer for sensitive data

How about splitting the usage and storage of sensitive documents and data? Plus a few ideas on how to implement a small custom "secure" computer for the storage part.

Metropolis Hastings for a Univariate Posterior

Using Bayesian statistics at work, sometimes there is a bias towards conjugate priors. Conjugate priors are great due to their computational easiness and pedagogical utility. Specifically, you don’...

Speedgoat 50K 2024 Race Report

The energy at the beginning of any race is exhilarating. Tapering for weeks after intense training leaves me with tons of pent up energy. My third time completing the Speedgoat 50K has been the mos...

On a more selective Google

Reply to Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content by Vincent Schmalbach Selectivity is long overdue. Marginalia, Stract, and Teclis feel like a breath of fresh air for broad short-tail quer...

Caveats to Ungoogled Chromium recommendations

In the wake of a certain ad-funded browser company bundling adtech into its browser yet again, some people have been recommending Ungoogled-Chromium (UGC). I think it’s fine to recommend UGC with c...

I turned my 10 year old tablet into a digital photo frame, displaying google photos album. 🌴

Custom PyTorch Collate Function

If your Dataset class looks something like class MyDataset(Dataset): # ... boilerplate ... def __getitem__(self, idx): item = self.data[idx] return item['anchor'], item['positive'], item['negative'...

Robots.txt Won't Save You

The AI vacuum hard at work Is it too late? The ever hungry AI titans demand more and more data that is vacuuming up the entirety of the internet. You just got off a boring Zoom call? Chomp.1 Checke...

“Extracting wisdom” from conference videos

PyCon US happened in May, this month, the 154 videos gradually started being published on YouTube. Between now and then many other interesting conferences took place. That’s a lot of talks, present...

Website Evolution: Q2 2024

There weren’t quite as many changes in Q2 2024 as there were in Q1, but I managed to do lots of cool things nevertheless. Part of the website #evolution series. This post covers versions 3.14 to 3....

Freedom of the Last Minute

Leaving logistical plans until the last minute leaves you with fewer decisions to make, fewer options to compare, and more importantly, more time to enjoy yourself. If you accept that the future is...

Hosting Firefish on a Raspberry Pi

Self-hosting the firefish fediverse microblogging app isn't as hard as you might think. Using Gentoo Linux and Podman on a Raspberry Pi, initial setup is almost entirely straightforward

An ontology of political decisions

Not all political decisions are the same. Some are easier to make but potentially less effective while others harder to make and effective yet potentially dangerous. It’s important that we understa...

🗳️ RESULTS: Sandboxels Census June 2024

A census was performed for players of Sandboxels from June 26th to July 5th.

Making Your Own Tools

Growing up with computers and the internet, my idea of a tool became equivalent to software at a rather early age. Actual tools, in terms of hammers, power tools or screwdrivers, certainly existed ...

Introducing Shoshin College

Have you ever thought that universities are boring and we might be able to make one that's not? Well, my friends and I went ahead and started one. We call it Shoshin College and it’s here, in Londo...

Ways to have an atomic counter in Django

This week, I’m back at my tremendously irregular Django tips series, where I share small pieces of code and approaches to common themes that developers face when working on their web applications. ...

Sarkic Tropes: the Horror of Flesh

The phrase “Sarkic” is a Greek word, meaning flesh. It’s a phrase used by the Gnostics to refer to carnal urges: those urges that are instinctual, animalistic, and fleshy. The term now, from my kno...