tmtxt-dired-async by Trần Xuân Trường is an unfortunately lesser known Emacs package which extends dired, the Emacs file manager, to be able to run rsync and other commands (zip, unzip, downloading) asynchronously. This means you can copy gigabytes of directories around whilst still happily continuing with all of your other tasks in the Emacs operating system. It has a feature where you can add any number of files from different locations into a wait list with C-c C-a, and then asynchronously rsync the whole wait list into a final destination directory with C-c C-v.

The official Arduino Desktop IDE is fantastic at what it was made for. After downloading, opening your first sketch (say, blink.ino) and flashing this to your connected Arduino hardware takes all of 3 seconds. However, once your sketches become a little more complex, a more sophisticated IDE with code navigation, documentation and context-sensitive completion can be a great help. Currently, one of the better solutions is the Arduino extension for Visual Studio Code.

I had to use the ITEAD Studio XBee shield v1.1 with an Arduino m0 (SAMD21) board, which is a 3.3V board, whereas the most common Arduinos are 5V. At the time of this writing, the shield’s website was not very clear on how exactly to set the jumpers (zone 5: “When operated in 3.3V, install the jumper” — which one?!), and the rest of the internet also did not seem to know.

As I was listening to the December 21 episode of the CPPCast, together with TWiML&AI my two most favourite podcasts, I couldn’t help but be a little bewildered by the number of times the guest used the word “like” during their interview. Most of these were examples of speech disfluency, or filler words, but I have to admit that they detracted somewhat from an otherwise interesting discourse. During another CPPCast episode which I recently listened to, the hosts coincidentally discussed the idea of making available transcriptions of the casts.

In order to add a GiST index on a Postgres database that could be used to accelerate trigram matches using the pg_trgm module and the special gist_trgm_ops operator, I had to code up a special Django Index Django will hopefully soon support custom index operators, but if you need the functionality right now, this example will do the trick. The special GiST index class looks like this: from django.contrib.postgres.indexes import GistIndex class GistIndexTrgrmOps(GistIndex): def create_sql(self, model, schema_editor): # - this Statement is instantiated by the _create_index_sql() # method of django.

I have recently become fascinated with (Variational) Autoencoders and with PyTorch. Kevin Frans has a beautiful blog post online explaining variational autoencoders, with examples in TensorFlow and, importantly, with cat pictures. Jaan Altosaar’s blog post takes an even deeper look at VAEs from both the deep learning perspective and the perspective of graphical models. Both of these posts, as well as Diederik Kingma’s original 2014 paper Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes, are more than worth your time.

TL;DR When debugging DLL load errors on Windows, use lucasg’s open source and more modern rewrite of the old Dependency Walker software. Very importantly, keep on drilling down through indirect dependencies until you find the missing DLLs. The Problem Recently I had to package up a wxPython and VTK-based app for standalone deployment on Windows. Because of great experience with PyInstaller, I opted to use this tool. With the first try with the freshly built package on the deployment machine, it refused to start up due to an ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.