If you have had the opportunity to be added to the Github Copilot preview, you may have seen the great new extension of auto complete they advertise – but is it all it claims to be?
Continue reading “Github Copilot Technical Preview Edition Review”Hacktoberfest 2021 is here!
It’s been one year since the spammageddon of Hacktoberfest requests and issues with contributing to only accepted opted-in repositories – but this year there are some good changes:
You can now use Gitlab for PRs.
Monetary donations are also encouraged for open source projects.
You can either get a shirt or plant a tree, for completing 4 PRs with improvements to participating open source projects.
Also, of course if you have a project yourself you maintain, you can add “Hacktoberfest” tag to get participants to find your repo. 🙂 What are some of the projects you might consider helping?
Continue reading “Hacktoberfest 2021 is here!”Book review – The Most Human Human
In Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human, he first explains some of the early experiments in human-like chatbots – Eliza the therapist and the more recent attempts to “understand” language through the vast equivalent documents the UN keeps record of.
He also goes in to the question that plagued early industrialism, will robots be getting our jobs with AI? Well, if something is a repetitive and arduous task, as he puts it, you are the robot. In the art world an actor may do a play for a weekend or two… and no more – is that a waste? In his words:
Continue reading “Book review – The Most Human Human”Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history
In the chapter The Long Tail of the Law, in Alex Bellos’ book The Grapes of Math, he shows some different statistical patterns that share the same properties:
Continue reading “Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history”Building a Linux app part 8: Adding an options screen
As you may have noticed, the repeater-START app doesn’t currently have an option to change that internal km/mile calculation. It also does not have any option to filter the repeaters of VHF, UHF or your preferred band.
Let’s see how to add a new dialog, then store the options, and load them on your program’s start:
Continue reading “Building a Linux app part 8: Adding an options screen”Fixing Ubuntu Python-Pip
After you’ve upgraded your Ubuntu machine a few times, you might find that free disk space is low and some Python commands have issues. Programs like Bleachbit can help you clear old packages or cache that you don’t need, but sometimes you need a minor manual fix as documented here. As you may know, Pip is the main package management you’ll use to install packages you use, so this can be problematic.
After upgrading 16.04 to 18.04, I got an error on command line “pip”:
Continue reading “Fixing Ubuntu Python-Pip”Hacktoberfest is coming up!
Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:
- Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
- Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
- Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
- Tunesviewer
- iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
- Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.
There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events
MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround
For this weekend’s hackathon I worked on a hackathon project I had thought about for awhile… an anti auto correct that should be more like natural paper and pencil, and not automatically show the answer when you click on a misspelled word (not great for learning, Google Docs!) This should be useful for learners especially during a pandemic.
Continue reading “MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround”What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app
What3words is an interesting alternative to sharing around long latitude/longitude numbers, instead share just a few words!
The first step to integrating the api is signing up for a free API key. Then require the library using composer – in the main project folder run:
Continue reading “What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app”Online learning conferences
While many of us may not be going to favorite programming conferences, there are some interesting upcoming conferences to watch or watch the videos:
Digital Ocean TIDE – Going on now, a bit like the AWS free conference – a bit of an infomercial.
Knime – still a few upcoming live dates coming up on this one and the previous sessions are up, explaining this powerful machine learning tool.
May you go fourth and program!
Update –
200 OK conference – tomorrow, May 15th
Enthusiastcon – 10min talks June 6th