geekery

A month of QSOs

I’ve finished a month of QSOs and thought it’d be fun to look at the results. Early (5pm) in the evening, I can hear activity along the east coast, Mexico, and Cuba(!), but I am unable to get through.  Not surprisingly, most of my contacts have been between 7pm and 10pm (02 – 05 UTC), when […]

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Fitbit Charge HR review

Since my Fitbit Force was recalled earlier this year, I’d been pining for a simple motivational aid.  Microsoft’s Band looks awesome, but it’s sold out as soon as they get another batch of units.  The Garmin VivoSmart had some interesting features, but lacks stair climbs (important to me because I do so much of that in a

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Garage Door Automation

A few times a year, the last person coming into the house via the garage will forget to shut the door, leaving its contents vulnerable to critters or the unruly, post-apocalyptic mobs speeding through our quiet suburban streets at night.  The obvious solution is to check it each night before I go to bed.   But that’s a

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Nutrition Course External References

… speaking of great Coursera offerings, I just finished Katie Ferraro’s excellent Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course.  Its focus on evidence-based medicine was refreshing and helped clear up a lot of confusion I’ve had from contradictory sources over the years.  Since Coursera content is prone to being archived, I wanted to preserve the extensive set

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WPEngine experiment

Executive summary: Dissatisfied with my blog’s response time, I looked into a variety of options.  For about a month, I tried a wpengine experiment whereby I moved everything to them.  It didn’t work out, but I learned a lot along the way.  I’ve been dissatisfied about the page load times of my blog for a long

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Online classes

This fall, Stanford has been offering free online classes this fall in three subject areas of computing: Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Machine Learning.   It’s different from MIT’s excellent OpenCourseWare series in that Stanford is offering a course you can play along with while MIT is providing the materials for self-study. For two of the courses, two

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