Vote Charlie!

February 2016 Archives

First stabs at moving on

Posted at age 27.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with or thinking about my ex these past few months, so perhaps it isn’t so strange I’ve felt myself falling more and more for him, despite having broken up nearly a year and a half ago.

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Sound reactive room lighting using Arduino and LED strips

Posted at age 27.

In a recent journal entry I said I would post more details on the lights I’m using in my apartment. I wanted to spend some more time on the program itself first, but the weekend disappeared too quickly, so that will be an ongoing process. For now, here are some parts lists and information on setting up. I’ll also try to make a similar post for my rainbow spirit hood.

Room lights diagram. Note the NeoPixels image has the data and +5V switched. The data is actually between the ground and voltage.

Room lights diagram. Note the NeoPixels image has the data and +5V switched. The data is actually between the ground and voltage." class="mt-image-none" height="2033

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Back up OSX Messages attachments incrementally

Posted at age 27.

The Apple OS X Messages app stores files sent and received in a folder with a structure that doesn’t lend well to browsing. If you want to separately back up the family photos and videos received via iMessage on your computer, you can use some ideas here to help.

OSX Messages attachments folder

OSX Messages attachments folder" class="mt-image-none" height="602

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The Political Compass: I’m sort of like Gandhi

Posted at age 27.

Yesterday I watched the last Democratic and GOP debates, the first such viewing on my part this cycle. It was quite interesting, but I’m not going to go into all that now. This post is just to say, after watching the final GOP debate today, I remembered The Political Compass, a cool website with a tool that graphs you not just on an economic left-right scale, but a social authoritarian-libertarian scale.

Yesterday I watched the last Democratic and GOP debates, the first such viewing on my part this cycle. It was quite interesting, but I'm not going to go into all that now. This post is just to say, after watching the final GOP debate today, I remembered The Political Compass, a cool website with a tool that graphs you not just on an economic left-right scale, but a social authoritarian-libertarian scale.

My political orientation as of January 2016

My political orientation as of January 2016


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Handwriting font service automates what took me hours 10 years ago

Posted at age 27.

While I was looking for some old political test results in my files, I stumbled across a font I made of my handwriting in high school. The filename is charlie2006.ttf, though I seem to remember making the font earlier than that. Perhaps I made two. Making that font using some program I don’t remember took many hours of painstaking curve plotting and adjustments, but I figured there might be an easier way now. And sure enough, Google showed me myscriptfont.com.

FCNG6438.jpg

The automated handwriting font creator from myscriptfont.com is slick, but I needed to redo my scans a few times to make corrections for thickness and more.

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Distributed representation: phenotypes and genes as inputs and features

Posted at age 27.

In reading the introduction to the Deep Learning book by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, I came across the concept “distributed representation.” This idea struck me as parallel to the depiction of genetics in Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Figure 2 from: Asgari E, Mofrad MRK (2015) ContinuousDistributed Representation of Biological Sequencesfor Deep Proteomics and Genomics. PLoS ONE 10 (11): e0141287.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141287

Figure 2 from: Asgari E, Mofrad MRK (2015) ContinuousDistributed Representation of Biological Sequencesfor Deep Proteomics and Genomics. PLoS ONE 10 (11): e0141287.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141287" class="mt-image-none" height="602

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Birds measure San Francisco radiation today

Posted at age 27.

After an hourlong run and finishing my leftover tostada salad from The Little Chihuahua this afternoon, I noticed out the kitchen window a helicopter flying fairly low over the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco. I didn’t think much of it till I heard it again, and again.

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A twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter, operated by the Remote Sensing Laboratory Aerial Measuring System from Nellis Air Force Base, heads west over San Francisco Monday, February 1, at 3:37 p.m.

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