Tech

This site now has comments, right below this post. I didn’t want trackers, ads or cookie banners so I’m running Remark42, a small open-source, self-hosted comment engine.

I visited the python conference in Groningen: PyGrunn. On this page I collect some thoughts and learnings.

I’ve been on the fence for a while, but the last Windows machine in our house now runs Linux. There have been annoyances for a long time, but with Windows 10 being end of life, and the upgrade tool telling me my system didn’t meet the minimum requirements for Windows 11, this was the perfect moment. This machine is mainly used for gaming by myself and the kids, and as a mediacenter to play web radio and act as a photo frame.

I’ve been playing chess with my son recently. A well known variant of chess is Chess960, also known as Fischer Random Chess. I wanted to have a generator on my own website to use to generate starting positions by number. Previously I wrote a small python script to do this, so I decided to convert it to Javascript using google gemini and embed it here.

Over the years I have given many presentations about how to use machine learning to classify text documents. I wanted to create a notebook that would serve as a template for such presentations, allowing me to quickly demonstrate the process of text classification using machine learning techniques. The problem of text classification is a common task in natural language processing, where the goal is to assign predefined categories to text documents based on their content. This notebook demonstrates how to classify documents from the 20 Newsgroups dataset using a decision tree classifier. We will preprocess the text data, extract features using a bag-of-words model, train a classifier, and evaluate its performance.

Recently I’ve started to learn to play the piano. There are a lot of resources available to start learning, but where to start? I remembered seeing a video of a kind of game where you could learn to play the piano. Synthesia as I found out it is called, is unfortunately not free, and also does not really teach sight reading. Therefore I considered it more of a novelty than a real learning tool, however fun it looked.

This year I intend to join Advent of Code again. While we wait to celebrate Christmas we can solve some programming puzzles together. This year I will join the ING leaderboards. You can also check out my solutions for Advent of code 2021, or see me publish my solutions for 2023.

Freedom has taken on a new dimension in the information age. The internet has transformed the way we interact, share information, and express our thoughts. It’s a powerful tool that has the potential to connect us with a global audience, yet the concept of freedom in this digital world is not as straightforward as it may seem.