To download video from YouTube in small format / file size suitable for e.g. copying into Dropbox and watching on e.g. an iPhone where is…

Below are instructions for obtaining a recent version of go on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. At the time of writing the default version is 1.18 which…

Minimal definition: computers somewhere else which are always on and which can be accessed over the internet. What it is (physically…

tl;dr: If you don’t need or care about subs, is probably the way to go. If you do, worth using makemkv For the linux version, available…

Quick instructions for getting LaTeX and Pandoc set up on MacOS with enough of the bells and whistles to be useful. We use brew to install…

How to turn off mobile alerts Outlook mobile Open and go to Inbox Click the menu in the top left — look for a coloured circle with an…

Questions for the end-of-project retrospective: What went well? What did not go well? What did we learn? What changes can we make?

mods from Charm is a very cozy way to use LLMs (ChatGPT and the like) in the shell — just make sure your API key is set as an environment…

After a bootcamp or formal study and a thorough introduction to Python, there are some profitable avenues to pursue which, it seems, are…

Sometimes you want to use a database (e.g. postgres) to hold personal data that you would like to be able to query quickly and easily. A…

It’s not uncommon for coursework involving technology to be graded via the inclusion of a Youtube video, which the student (learner) uploads…

Tried-and-tested brownie recipe for brownie in a loaf tin which remains a bit gooey in at the centre Ingredients 100g dark chocolate 225g…

Spotify now wants to start automatically by default. If you would rather it did not: Spotify → Settings → Start-up and window behaviour…

A staple of science fiction, along with hover-boards and iPads, is the pill that somehow contains the nutrition of a single meal. That’s…

Brief coverage below of installing Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS on a Mac Pro 5,1 from early 2009; or, more correctly, a Mac Pro 4,1 which has had a…

The Elgato Streamdeck is a programmable console with illuminated buttons which supports both Windows and MacOS, with third-party open source…

These are my notes on Goodhart and Pradhan’s The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival…

Plex is like a kind of locally-hosted Netflix and offers a number of compelling benefits: It’s quick, free(mium) and easy to install and set…

Sometimes—in an ETL process for instance—the order of columns does matter, in which case it can be easily set. But what if you want to…

Below is how I set up pyenv-virtualenv on Ubuntu/Pop!_OS (Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS x86_64), with jupyter-lab set up with such pyenv-virtualenv for…

In a time of high inflation, if one can pay the same amount later it makes sense to do so, because inflation means that some quantity of…

The sensible established approach when saving times or timestamps is always to save such values as UTC (which approximately the same as GMT…

It’s very useful to cache data when working in the Jupyter notebook so that you can repeatedly call a function and get near instantaneous…

 (Apple) → System Preferences … → Spotlight will allow you to turn off a whole load of things you probably do not want when you hit ⌘-space

Pop!_OS is a Ubuntu-based distribution produced by System76. It has received good press and is, at the time of writing, ranked in fifth…

tl;dr: use Dropbox … Dropbox is a transparent to access cloud storage provider that can be used to easily sync files across devices, with…

I was puzzled as to why my Garmin Forerunner 735XT stubbornly persisted in showing the wrong time even when it was connected to the Garmin…

It can be easy to loose track of all the repos on your system; on unix/linux/MacOS the below will print a list of git repos and their…

You have (please ignore the two backslashes here): You want: Find/replace in VS Code, hit to turn on regex mode In the find box: In the…

The rename utility is available easily for MacOS, linux and FreeBSD and can be used to rename files based on a regex. It is particularly…

It turns out there is an easy way to find out how many films you have on your Plex server In Ref: this post in the Plex forums

Name folder e.g. If you want to keep originals Phone > Settings > Photos > Transfer to Mac or PC > Set to Keep Originals If you do this you…

On MacOS installing a fresh version of miniconda with brew is extremely straightforward:

When exploring an unfamiliar codebase it is often desirable to see where variables, functions, and the like are used. Some IDEs will help…

If you want to do something well in technology, choose something that has been proven to work time and time again, and aim to keep the…

I use the excellent pinboard.in bookmarking service to keep track of web pages of interest. Pinboard has the following benefits, which is…

Feature branching in git; creates branch from branch and retains branch after merging in:

Code to set the default plot size and colour scheme with matplotlib:

The first rule for success with usenet is to have multiple block accounts on different backbones. Some good assorted links on usenet, given…

One of the best things you can do early on in your career is to attempt to have candid conversations with more experienced people in your…

Firstly, get hold of some ODBC drivers; Microsoft have a good guide to getting the driver installed for many major distributions (e.g…

You use credentials in your (jupyter) notebook or python script and you are about to check it in to a (git) repository. What’s the quickest…

The below is a way to get data from a pandas dataframe into a relational DB with minimum effort. Note that from v2 onwards sqlalchemy…

The below table shows broadly which equity valuation multiples are used for certain sectors. DY is dividend yield, FCFY is free cash flow…

Some notes on SQL: these are in terse/note form because good detailed material in greater depth is readily found elsewhere. The general form…

Let’s say you are running low on disk space on a particular machine and so rather than running Dropbox on each computer on the LAN, you…

A pomodoro timer for the shell below—works in bash and zsh; drop this into your or and whenever you need help with motivation. For those…

Data scientists love jupyter notebooks, and for good reason. Often once a concept or approach is found to be viable, though, code will need…

In git it’s pretty easy to accidentally commit with the wrong details shows you where settings are from can be used to get configuration…

A simple if slightly contrived example of linked lists in C below. Why use a linked list? A linked list allows data structures (i.e. structs…

get_iplayer, software which allows you download from the BBC iplayer service, is back. There are packages for e.g. MacOS with Brew, FreeBSD…

From the main menu accessed with : for Run-Matrix for for Select the size of the matrix/vector you want with the to buttons, with for…

It’s been a strange year in the markets and as the year comes to a close, and the UK formally leaves the EU — which I won’t offer a comment…

The shift from analogue to digital sources and then to networked sources has implications for the seeker of good quality sound reproduction…

Harnham put out a survey of UK data and analytics jobs annually which seemed more than worthy of a closer look. Below are what I have…

Addendum September 2022 Since I wrote this, things have changed considerably and it looks like I will have to completely eat my words on…

False positive and false negative rates are important to bear in mind in a mass testing scenario. By way of example: you reside in an area…

One of the beauties of FreeBSD is of course its support for ZFS. For systems with ZFS volumes and UFS root, it makes sense to keep database…

If you want to know more about how to use Vim / Neovim, you could do worse than look to: Tim Pope, author of many great Vim plugins…

A friend is going away for a while and will have time to kill and uncertain access to the internet. You have a spare external drive and you…

My squeezebox touch was outputting what sounded like distorted/low sample audio on the SPDIF output which confused me because it didn’t seem…

Addendum June 2023 This is now up on github, written in Go: https://github.com/algrt-hm/gopodder Previously I have used bashpodder for…

Somewhere between an aide-memoire and a terse primer, below are my notes on WACC. The angle here is market practice for corporate finance…

‘Swapiness’ on linux can be reduced or increased with sysctl — a higher value will make the system swap out memory more aggressively; 0 will…

Dualit, known as the last word in toasters, are probably one of the best known British manufacturers of domestic machinery along with Dyson…

The numbers don’t lie, which is why they are so useful in motivating exercise. Like many people, I use a Garmin sports watch to monitor how…

With 2FA and a personal access token set up the way to initialise a repo locally and then push up to github is slightly different Instead of…

Below are the best tips I have come across for pitches and presentations. Three things to aim for while drafting your presentation: Brevity…

ffprobe (installed with ffmpeg) is a good way to get metadata from audio files e.g.

I have a few Squeezebox devices and I can only describe this and the related ecosystem, as an elite — if somewhat oldschool — multi-room…

rclone can be used to access many remote storage providers from the shell, even on platforms which may not be supported by the native…

After updating, Gatsby gave me the following error: Having had a quick look at the issues page, the below worked for me in terms of getting…

Most people have strong views about what they keep in the digital backpack. The below is the tooling I like to use and can recommend: Bear…

I wanted to access PostgreSQL database running on FreeBSD over the LAN from macOS, and thought I would log this setup for reference…

A couple of great resources for combining jupyter notebooks with blogging: Converting jupyter notebook into other formats: https…

If you studied economics at any point or have used Excel you probably know what linear regression is. It is extremely useful. In order to…

In linux and MacOS, the desktop is generally located at ~/Desktop. On Windows, it seems to be more complicated than that. Thankfully…

If not properly configured, samba can fall fowl of a couple of security issues: CVE-1999-0519: null session/password netbios access CVE-200…

1. Simple case: For each term in we can multiply the term by the index of then subtract from the index of . By way of example:…

Visual Studio Code with the vim plugin is actually a pretty good editing environment.

Ubuntu and Nvidia drivers will tell you which version of Ubuntu you are running: I am using 18.10 which is the latest as at the time of…

PDF editing on MacOS is not as problematic as you might think. The default Preview app offers editing—you need to hit the little toolbox…

Linkedin on mobile by default seems to assume you want push notifications for pretty much everything. To change this, because you probably…

Many shell programs can be controlled entirely with arguments and piping data in. Let’s say you are trying to do something in Python which a…

I recently read Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter’s paper on universal intelligence which I thought was worth summarising, not least as it throws…

Pandoc can be used to create a PDF from a markdown file like this If you use the defaults it make your doc look like an academic paper. The…

Turning off auto-renewing subscriptions on an iOS device Go to Settings > iTunes & App Store Tap your Apple ID at the top of the screen Tap…

Prelude Python is a language which is powerful, terse, and nice to work with. Arguably it’s built for comfort rather than speed of execution…

Intro Why know about the shell? The shell is a useful and flexible environment for controlling the computer and the history of the shell is…

1 Simple cases Simplest case is 1.1 Reverse chain rule for form If unsure about this, add 1 to the index, differentiate, and then adjust…