Three things from this week. If binge-watching old TV were a part time job then I pulled a double shift this week. My niece mentioned some news about Dr Who to me mid-week and that was all it took. That night I scrolled back to the newest episode that I was pretty sure I’d seen and hit play. Suddenly I’ve now regained consciousness and days have passed. Unfortunately this isn’t a new thing for me.

Three things from this week This week I’ve been fanagling a lot of files, trying to organize my backups and my archives a little better. It turns out I have a lot of partially-duplicated copies of ad hoc backups. Don’t judge me. Trying to compare lists of files across directories gets complicated and it can sink a whole lot of time. I’m using some shell one-liners to compare lists of files and so this week I thought I’d share a three good bash commands for this kind of work.

Three things from this week. I tried out three different ways to use an LLM on my home PC this week. A Large Language Model (LLM) is the kind of ML model that runs inside of ChatGPT and other similar popular chatbots. Running on my home PC lets me see just what they can do and whether they’re useful to me. While there have been a whole lot of different models emerging lately, there are also a few different frontends or user interfaces that can load the model and perform inferences.

Three things from this week. This week I have too many browser pages open so you’re going to get three tabs from this week. Boardsource Technik-O 4x12 First up, here’s a little image I made to help me learn to type on my 40% keeb. I made it by messing around with this script. Then I printed it out and put it above the keeb. And no, I am not typing this text on that keyboard right now.

Three things from this week. This week I’ve had NeRFs on my mind again. Last week I had fun making NeRFs of some plants and a couple weeks ago I wrote about how I make NeRFs with COLMAP and Instant NGP. I follow almost the same process whether my images come from a cellphone, a GoPro, or my gammacam flexible camera array. I’ve been doing two flavours of NeRF tinkering: understanding how to use the tools better and skimming a lot of papers covering developments beyond the original NeRF paper.

Three things from this week. California is having a superbloom. As far as I know that means there are a lot of pretty flowers in bloom all at once. It’s as if all the plants that were holding something back during the drought got together and decided today’s the day to make it all pop. It makes the world look brighter and more colourful everywhere that anything is growing. That goes for the hedges filling in around the highways and medians, the mundane little buds that pop up between the sidewalk and the street, and even every little potted plant seems to just be going all in this week.

Three things from this week. Three more things from this week. No code this time, just a few random things from my week. One event attended, one audiobook backed, and one piece of free open source software to add to your kit. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater My wife and I were watching a Hallmark movie on a lark around Christmas time. I’d link to the moving but it was so unremarkable that I couldn’t remember enough details to find it.

Gammacam P6 produces a lot of output files. It takes photos multiple times a second from each camera. Many pipelines don’t need all of the output. In my case I like using Nvidia Instant NGP to make NeRFs from my photos. The first step in processing pictures to use with Instant NGP is to run the SfM (Structure from Motion) pipeline called COLMAP. COLMAP incorporates a number of well-established photogrammetry algorithms to produce useful data from imagery sets.

Three things from this week. I want to tell you about oranges. And two other things that aren’t related except for the fact that they’re on my mind this week. Oranges The little ones that are easy to peel by hand are just addictive. Those little ones might technically be mandarins or maybe a tangerine but they’re all just magical. Something about the moment that first little spritz of juice triggers the notion that you’re about to have a tasty treat.

Three things from this week. This week I thought it’d be nice to talk about a simple camera hack to solve a niche problem, a Linux API to solve different niche problems, and a couple 3d printed parts that solve an entirely different niche problem. Seeing the back of your own head I have a personal mission of making it easy to see things that might otherwise be impossible or unpleasantly difficult to see.