posts on Michael Ian Lewis

Origin story (from a spur-of-the-moment throwaway comment to a project) Link to heading A few years ago I had the difficult duty of helping clear out the family home.

This is a followup to Today I Learned 2024, Today I Learned 2023, Today I Learned 2022 and Today I Learned 2021. 20 Feb 2025: It is likely that the Battle of Hastings in 1066 had a lunch break Link to heading The battle is likely to have begun around 9am,…

Introduction Link to heading This post summarises the things I learned while I was an Airbnb host between Nov 2021 and Dec 2022.

This is a followup to Today I Learned 2021, Today I Learned 2022 and Today I Learned 2023.

Introduction Link to heading The London LOOP is the London Outer Orbital Path, a 150 mile (242km) walking route which encircles the city, like a hiking equivalent of the M25 (the London Orbital Motorway).

Introduction Link to heading I’ve probably spent way too much time writing about cherry trees already (see Growing a cherry tree on a north-facing balcony 2019-2021).

This is a followup to Today I Learned 2021 and Today I Learned 2022. 6 Jan 2023: September (from septem, the Latin for 7) was originally the 7th month Link to heading And October (from octo), November (from novem) and December (from decem) were originally…

This is an overview of vector search and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in the context of text data, illustrated with worked code examples, and some closing thoughts on their usage in practice.

Introduction Link to heading This is a kind-of followup to London to Orkney, and most of the NC500, in an electric car from August 2020.

Introduction Link to heading The “three peaks” in this context are the three highest peaks in Great Britain1: Scafell Pike, England, 978m Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa in Welsh), Wales, 1085m Ben Nevis (Bheinn Nibheis in Scottish Gaelic), Scotland, 1345m Some people…

The area Link to heading Moving to London in 1998 Link to heading Moving to such a big city was a fairly big deal, given I had spent my early childhood years in a remote valley on a Scottish island, and later childhood years in a small town on the Scottish

This is a followup to Today I Learned 2021. 30 Jan 2022: The Portuguese Man-of-war (the venomous siphonophore) is named after a warship Link to heading A man-of-war is a 16th to 19th century warship.

Introduction Link to heading This post contains information on how I’ve prepared my media files, including multichannel audio from DVD and SACD, for playback on my media server.

Introduction Link to heading This post contains two parts: A brief history of previous media servers I’ve built, to give requirements and expectations some context.

The demijohns Link to heading I had the unfortunate task of clearing the family home last year, and one of the things I found was a couple of dusty old demijohns.

I’m going to start keeping a list of random facts I learn.

2019 Link to heading The origin story Link to heading I like cherries, and for many years I’ve cultivated the notion that I’ll have “made it” when I can sit in my own garden underneath my very own cherry tree.

Introduction Link to heading Photos are pervasive nowadays.

Note: this post is now on blog.searchmysite.net at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-update-seeding-and-scaling/.

Introduction Link to heading A few years back, I was an avid reader of long distance electric vehicle road trip reports.

Note: this post is now on blog.searchmysite.net at https://blog.searchmysite.net/posts/searchmysite.net-building-a-simple-search-for-non-commercial-websites/.

Then and now Link to heading I remember when the internet, or more specifically the web, was new.

Introduction Link to heading This post is about a project to generate wav files with a neural network.

This is a short summary of some of the terminology used in machine learning, with an emphasis on neural networks.

Introduction Link to heading The first 2 sections are from Get Docker Engine - Community for Ubuntu, Post-installation steps for Linux, NVIDIA Container Toolkit and validation steps at TensorFlow Docker, so there’s not really anything new in those section…

Introduction Link to heading I found a manuscript earlier this year (2019), written by my dad about his time in Antarctica between 1958 and 1965.

Introduction Link to heading This site has been built with Hugo and the hugo-coder theme, and is hosted on GitLab Pages.