Progress

I'm becoming an AI expert. I've read more and understand stuff much better now. Also, I organised my first workshop for a client.

I built two night-lights for children and made about 6 firmware upgrades. They can do everything now, short of singing a lullaby🤔 Hmm! Feature idea!. It was nice to do something with hardware and micropython again. My absolutely clean and usable code is on my Gitlab.

I learned how to make tilt-shift-videos with ffmpeg this week. You'll need to draw a greyscale mask where white means "full blur" and black means "no blur". Then apply this command:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i mask.png -filter_complex "[0:v][1:v]alphamerge,avgblur=25[alf];[0:v][alf]overlay[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -movflags +faststart maskedblur.mp4

Thanks to llogan on SuperUser for figuring this out. Note that you'll have to remove -map 0:a -c:a copy if your video doesn't have audio. Adjust avgblur=25 to your needs.

I built myself a little template and tool for printing the recipes from my site so I can carry them to the kitchen. Call me a luddite, but I just don't use a tablet or anything other than paper during cooking.

Articles

• It's Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated - miguelgrinberg.com
• GitHub - cxli233/FriendsDontLetFriends: Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualization - What are they and why are they bad.
• Lindau: Mann greift Kind bei Schachturnier an – Zähne ausgeschlagen
• UNIGE 14x050 – Deep Learning Course: Deep Learning Course You can find here slides, recordings, and a virtual machine for François Fleuret's deep-learning courses 14x050 of the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
• Solving duplicate data with performant deduplication -- QuestDB
• [2311.11045] Orca 2: Teaching Small Language Models How to Reason
• Anthropic Introducing Claude 2.1
• Northvolt develops state-of-the-art sodium-ion battery
• [2311.09234] Genetic Algorithms for Evolution of QWOP Gaits
• The Hardware Lottery
• Embeddings: What they are and why they matter (via Jochens weeklog)
• SVB, Inverted Curve and Bond Risk.ipynb - Colaboratory (via Jochens weeklog)
• BASIC Interpreter Hidden In ESP32 Silicon -- Hackaday
• Bluetooth stack modifications to improve audio quality on headphones without AAC, aptX, or LDAC codecs / Habr
• Ansel
• The Bond villain compliance strategy
• Reality has a surprising amount of detail
• My First PCB! - Laura Lindzey
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation – Economics from the Top Down: THIS WAS COUNTERED AND SHOULD NOT BE THOUGHT RELIABLE!
• SDL Sopwith 2.3.0
• The New Paris Métro Is Coming, And It’s A Very Big Deal

Libraries, programming, etc

• GitHub - arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games: A curated list of engineering-related video games rated Very Positive or higher on Steam
• GitHub - yl4579/StyleTTS2: StyleTTS 2: Towards Human-Level Text-to-Speech through Style Diffusion and Adversarial Training with Large Speech Language Models
• GitHub - google/cel-spec: Common Expression Language -- specification and binary representation
• GitHub - cloud-custodian/cel-python: Pure Python implementation of the Common Expression Language

Books

• A City on Mars

Games

• Raft with the crew: relaxing!
• unpacking: what a cute little idea, and what a chill game.

Backlog

• Golf It (from waitlist)
• Escape Simulator (from waitlist)
• We Were Here Too (from waitlist)
• Valheim (from waitlist)
• Deliver us Mars (free from EGS)

Other media

• Mobius Strip Tank - YouTube
• Building the Ultimate LEGO® Tank... - YouTube
• The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics - YouTube
• Mr. Sandman, Man Me A Sand (Full parody) - YouTube
• Gore-Tex is a Marketing Gimmick - YouTube
• What it takes to fan-translate a video game - YouTube
• Out-braking the ABS Myth - YouTube