vxlabs

A few days ago I switched my main development machine from a 2017 15" MacBook Pro with a 4-core 2.9GHz 7820HQ i7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme with a 6-core 8750H i7, 32GB of RAM and 1.5TB of Really Fast SSD.

One of the great new F# tools in .NET Core 3 Preview 3 is F# interactive as pure .NET Core application.

On Wednesday April 3, 2019, I finished migrating this site from Wordpress to Hugo.

There are at least two ways to be kept up to date of any new content on this blog: Daily email update If you would like to receive an email update at 11:00 AM South African time only when a new post has been published, enter your email address in the box…

TL;DR: For best results with mixed precision training, use NVIDIA’s Automatic Mixed Precision together with fastai, and remember to set any epsilons, for example in the optimizer, correctly.

I have prepared a simple Ansible script which will enable you to convert a clean Ubuntu 18.04 image (as supplied by Google Compute Engine or PaperSpace) into a CUDA 10, PyTorch 1.0 preview, fastai 1.0.x, miniconda3 powerhouse, ready to live the (mixed-pre…

In a previous post I showed how to get Palantir’s Python Language Server working together with Emacs and lsp-mode.

(The wheel has now been updated to the latest PyTorch 1.0 preview as of December 6, 2018.)

Over the years, I’ve built up quite a collection of notes as Org mode text files.

The language server protocol was proposed by Microsoft as a way for different editors and development environments to share language analysis backends This post describes how to configure Emacs, lsp-mode and the palantir python-language-server for improved

Phil Hagelberg recently won the Lisp Game Jam 2018 with his entry EXO_encounter 667.

tmtxt-dired-async by Trần Xuân Trường is an unfortunately lesser known Emacs package which extends dired, the Emacs file manager, to be able to run rsync and other commands (zip, unzip, downloading) asynchronously.

The official Arduino Desktop IDE is fantastic at what it was made for.

I had to use the ITEAD Studio XBee shield v1.1 with an Arduino m0 (SAMD21) board, which is a 3.3V board, whereas the most common Arduinos are 5V.

As I was listening to the December 21 episode of the CPPCast, together with TWiML&AI my two most favourite podcasts, I couldn’t help but be a little bewildered by the number of times the guest used the word “like” during their interview.

In order to add a GiST index on a Postgres database that could be used to accelerate trigram matches using the pg_trgm module and the special gist_trgm_ops operator, I had to code up a special Django Index Django will hopefully soon support custom index o…

I have recently become fascinated with (Variational) Autoencoders and with PyTorch.

TL;DR When debugging DLL load errors on Windows, use lucasg’s open source and more modern rewrite of the old Dependency Walker software.

As is briefly documented on the ob-ipython github, one can run code on remote ipython kernels.

TL;DR: Parallels Desktop 13 only supports OpenGL 3.2 on an extremely limited subset of mostly games.

ob-ipython is an Emacs package that enables org-babel to talk to a running ipython kernel.

RobotDyn offers a well-manufactured Joystick and XBee shield for the Arduino Uno which I am currently using for some IEEE 802.15.4-related experiments.

In a post from 2014, I showed how to drive the sub-standard HDMI input of the Dell U2713HM 27″ UltraSharp at a resolution of 2560×1440 from the HDMI 1.3 output of a Linux-running laptop.

Updates Because this matter is still ongoing (Jaxx does not seem to want to fix this vulnerability), I have moved the updates here to the front.

The WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme was exactly what I needed to update the look and feel of the Visible Orbit project website, except for one thing: No sidebar on pages, only posts.

For the high-resolution orbital slice viewer on the Visible Orbit website, I had to setup wlziipsrv, a fork of the iipsrv large tiled image server.

In this post, I’ll show you how you can use Emacs and orgmode to query live data from any RESTful webservice, and then use that data in orgmode tables, a really great way to get live table-based calculation and display functionality in your rich orgmode-b…

(This post is an extract from another post written a year ago on my other, more personal blog.)

The crux package for Emacs contains, amongst a list of useful functions (crux does stand for A Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs after all), the function crux-open-with.

Google recently announced the availability of GPUs on Google Compute Engine instances.

If you’re not using projectile, but you would like to be able to perform interactive, search-as-you-type, recursive searches through the current project, this is pretty easy to do if you have counsel and find-file-in-project installed.

Screenshot of orgmode source, PDF preview on the right, interactive citation selection in the minibuffer.

In this post I talk about three great new features in the latest release of mu4e, an email programme that runs in Emacs.

A core part of my note-taking strategy is a growing collection of Emacs Org mode files containing my monthly lab journals, project summaries and various technical documents.

If you want C++ completion and navigation (jump to definition, jump to declaration, and so forth), there are several good options for Emacs.

Stats for Huawei LTE Routers is a simple Android app to check the signal stats on the Huawei E5186 LTE router.

When developing a mobile app using Cordova or PhoneGap, the browser target platform can really speed up your development.

ECL is of course Embeddable Common Lisp, a small but quite complete Common Lisp implementation that can be easily embedded in your C applications to act as dynamic extension language, but it is also a fine stand-alone implementation.

Usually when I’m working on a Django project, I use the built-in runserver command.

Just in case you were wondering how one could go about having any child widget of a Kivy Scatter widget that would stick in a single window-relative position whilst the scatter itself was being translated and rotated, I thought I’d post this solution.

Ever since I dropped Dropbox in September of 2013 due to mounting privacy concerns, I’ve been searching for and testing various filesystem syncing solutions to take its place.

(This post has been updated since initial publication, see last section for details.)

For a project that I’m currently helping with, we needed recent OpenGL features that are only available on NVIDIA drivers with version 340 and later.

Org mode is great for authoring rich documents with syntax highlighted source code, LaTeX math and images.

With Emacs, org mode and org-babel, it’s possible to evaluate source code samples embedded in your org files and have the output of said evaluation appear inline.

The Django REST Framework is awesome, for a whole bunch of reasons, one of them being the browsable HTML version of your API that it automatically generates for you.

Last night I had to backup 2760 photos and videos, about 6.3G worth, from my Nexus 4 Android phone to my Linux laptop.

I’m helping someone process a collection of research data that has been entered by a third party using Excel.

I’ve just activated CloudFlare (the free tier) for vxlabs.com, hoping to do even faster page loads.

(TL;DR See the last paragraph for how to get the Dell U2713HM working on the HDMI output of the Acer V3-571G at 2560×1440 @ 50Hz.)