Paperspace How-To
Paperspace is a low-cost alternative for running ML algorithms on GPUs in the cloud Being a newer cloud computing platform, some of the documentation ha...
2019
2017
Saving 16-bit TIFF images with Pillow in Python
Pillow has sparse documentation and poor support for saving 16-bit images. Pillow is, however, a ubiquitous python package and simple to install and use...
Bio-Rad *.1sc file format: documentation and python3 package
*.1sc files for Bio-Rad instruments are generated by Bio-Rad Quantity One software. Documentation of 1sc file format I created from my own analysis: htt...
Precision Mass References on the Cheap
US nickels are exactly 5g in mass when they’re made US pennies are exactly 2.5g in mass when they’re made If you can find new coins, they’re super-che...
2015
Dyeing Mercerized Cotton Socks with Rit
Mercerized Cotton dyes differently than regular cotton. The standard Rit recipes will yield different colors with mercerized cotton (different hues and da...
2007
NVIDIA Changed the Name of Their Driver
If you have been happily using the two NVIDIA display driver packages with yast2:
My Super Secret Blog
I have a new blog for my personal stuff. It’s called something designed to not be googleable back to my name. At some point a random headhunter mentioned m...
Killing Processes by Name with pkill
I decided that in the end, even though I’ve neglected my little blog here for so long, I shouldn’t be ashamed if the first post a put in a while is a technic...
How to Braid More Than 3 Strands
At work the other day, one of the engineers in lab mentioned that braiding power wires was a good way to keep them all together and have any interference aff...
2006
Halloween
If you’re a hardcore fan of Matt Clapp, you may know that at one point in the near-distant past of graduate school, I dressed up as a certain Muppet with ora...
Matt’s Online Photos
Hey all, just thought I’d let you know about my new online photo album at http://photos.itsayellow.com.
Making Panorama Photos Out Of Multiple Photos
Recently I’ve become aware of Panorama Tools, which are a collection of programs for putting multiple overlapping photos together into one large composite pi...
Picasa
I love almost everything about Picasa, but there are some drawbacks:
Dear Diary
“Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written, but…”
Bicycling Part II
I finally biked all the way to work, on an exhibition trek on Sunday. It took me roughly 50min., and my bike computer said I biked 14.4mph on average, makin...
I’m Going to Barcelona!
I’m going to Barcelona!
2005
Using Your Computer Desktop Remotely with VNC
I have a linux box at home which I like because it can act as a file server, a web server, and many other things. Having a desktop unix machine means I can ...
I Need Some Exercise
So, almost two months later (after moving to the Bay Area) I decided that I was long overdue for a little physical activity. My preference has always been t...
Need Incan Monkey God
In the final stages of the thesis rough draft…
Stupidity on Video
Very few journal entries have showed up here lately because I’m writing my Ph.D. thesis. This is very adult, very responsible work. But I can’t forget my r...
My Television Picture Was Bouncing
Recently the picture on my television was “bouncing” or jittering up and down. Whacking it on the side or stamping your foot on the floor would make the pict...
Eisenhower and Elmer’s
For some reason, I always thought that the standard portrait of President Eisenhower looked exactly like the guy on the label of Elmer’s glue. Then I looked...
Sysinternals and PageDefrag
If you run a Windows computer and are more ambitious about fixing problems then throwing your hands up in the air and sobbing softly, you should know about h...
Dancing with Hobos
Today I had to deal with the problem that the official channels of buying software at my esteemed university were taking too long. This particular software ...
Simple Encryption of Files
Sometimes I generate a pdf or PostScript receipt of an online purchase which I then save somewhere on my computer. It’s nice to have around a record of my p...
Kids, Don’t Try This at Home
You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I swear to you I am not. These two pictures were imprinted on plastic bags protecting items that came with a D...
Restoring a Tivo Backup Image
This is as much for my reference as for everybody else!
Read ‘em the Riot Act
If you’re like me, you’ve heard the “Riot Act” referred to, as in “He was so mad he read the Riot Act.” I’ve never known exactly what that meant. I assumed...
“Start” is the Batch File version of “bg”
If you want a batch file to spawn another program and then go on with its life (or end, if there’s no other commands) you need to specially ask it to. Normal...
Favorite Iced Tea Commercials
I have always loved the SoBe radio commercials with “Freddy”. They’re just random enough, but also funny enough for me to keep clicking on the website to he...
Backing Up Your Laptop Prevents Needless Nervous Breakdowns
As I’ve been mentioning on and off in the [[Technical]] blog of my website, my laptop has some hard drive connector issues. Gateway finally came through and...
LyX with LaTeX
I really like the program LyX. It’s a front-end to LaTeX. And yes, those capitalizations are intentional. You see, sometimes when nerds write programs, th...
Favorite Minimalist Finland Humor
I was trying to figure out a very odd Finnish mock-documentary about Finland that I saw on Minnesota Public Television in 1990 or 1991. I remember the odd, ...
Favorite “So Sad Because It’s True!” Sitcom Moment That is Strangely Relevant to Grad Student Life
(From “Scrubs”)
Gateway Tech Support and Too Much Honesty
I called Gateway Technical Support because I finally decided to fix my hard drive issues properly instead of with rubber-bands ( Gateway 200X (200ARC) Lame-O...
Make Adobe Reader 7 for Linux Stop Flashing!
I like the fact that Adobe finally has updated its PDF reader for Linux, after possibly a decade of no development whatsoever. Way to go guys! Oh, and by t...
I Actually Fixed a Piece of Consumer Electronics
At some point, my Palm Tungsten E started to develop problems. The “On” button started to feel a little mushy. I figured it was just the actual button devi...
Kaffeine Is Good
I just wanted to give props to Kaffeine, the KDE-optimized audio/video player. It’s a front-end to xine, a free audio/video engine. Together they play just...
XM Radio Rocks My World!
I have to publicly thank my generous roommate for bringing XM Radio into my life this Christmas.
2004
My Dad with Very Infamous People
Not very many people know this, but my dad has had the privilege to meet and hang out with many famous foreign dignitaries. Here he is sharing a laugh with ...
Printing–Mostly Unbroken
It turns out the major problem cups was having with my Windows machines trying to print was not that they were remote, or Windows. It didn’t like the fact t...
Windows File Searching Made Faster, and Monitor Sleep Aids
Windows File Searching Made Faster If you consider yourself fairly knowledgable about Windows, you might think that starting the Indexing Service to index th...
Default Email Program and Hidden Preferences for Firefox
Default email Program from Firefox I use KDE with Fedora Core 3, and it seems that Mozilla Firefox doesn’t know how to respect my choice for default email pr...
Firefox and Thunderbird userChrome.css Tricks
If you’re like me, you have big oafish paws and don’t like to hit very tiny little buttons on your screen. A more genteel way of saying this is that onscree...
Broken Printing
Hmmm. Well printing on cups via IPP from Windows machines broke on Dec. 2 for no apparent reason. My laptops still talk to cups on my linux box, they show ...
Grad Life–Technical Resolution
This isn’t really a personal post, but I thought I would write down the resolution to a technical issue I brought up on my last journal entry.
Grad Life (It’s All Relative)
As Jim Anchower would say, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya.
Boot Processes I Turned Off
I executed /sbin/chkconfig –list | grep on to see all of the things that the system automatically starts on boot at different runlevels. I then went through...
Printing Woes
Courier PostScript Font Problems Part of my printing woes involved printing text files. If I printed text directly to my laser printer, it would always go o...
Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 6
Printing I finally not only got the printer to work for my linux computer, but also convinced it to serve the printer for our windows laptops.
Another Wedding, and Some Philosophizing
I just got back from another wedding. This one was for my good friend Ryan and his lovely bride Kelly. One of my friends remarked that once all of the sing...
Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 5
UPS I have a APC Uninterruptible Power Supply, and so I thought, what better way to run it with linux, than with their native PowerChute Business Edition, fo...
Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 4
dyndns dynds rocks my world! If you have a DSL-type connection like I do, your IP address is going to change once in a while. Dyndns gives you a subdom...
First Personal Blog Entry
Well, here’s the start of my pale-blue-colored online journal. The color of the background is subject to change, but I thought it was more interesting than ...
Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 3
Reformatting old Windows hard drives The tools you need are fdisk and mkfs.ext3. You may also want to use mkswap and swapon to add a swap partition. T...
Installing Fedora Core 3, Part 2
NTFS support I had a bunch of old files that I put on two hard drives in my system that I wasn’t installing Fedora onto. I assumed that read-only acces...
Installing Fedora Core 3
Installed Fedora Core 3, checked the box marked “Install All packages”. With kernel and applications, it only takes about 6GB. Cool.