This is about having a non-Japanese name living as an immigrant in Japan and trying to get a SIM card with UQ Mobile.
Here’s a quick write up on how I was able to use my RTL-SDR V3 receiver to see aircraft flying above me using the dump1090 application, which FlightAware is maintaining in its current version. The RTL-SDR is a very cheap way to get started with software defined radios. Photo of RTL-SDR receiver which I have purchased (full image size 662 KiB) I have bought the RTL-SDR receiver in 2017 from a reseller on eBay.
Today, I have finished reading Marx: A Very Short Introduction and have thoroughly enjoyed it. I purchased the 2018 edition, which even mentions hot topics such as the gig economy and its relation to Marx’s critique of capitalism. On the other hand, the book falls short of defining capitalism itself as a contrast to communism. The author Peter Singer thoroughly describes Marx’s philosophical background in Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. Then, he examines the emergence of historical materialism in Marx’s work.
In which I describe how I got an Intel wireless network controller running on Debian
With the recent hype around ChatGPT, GPT-4, and large language models in general, communities like Hacker News are breaking out into a this time it’s different doom and gloom.
macOS Catalina introduced zsh as the default interactive shell. zsh is compatible with Bourne shell (sh) to a large degree and introduces many valuable extensions that make everyday productivity more pleasant. In this post, I list some shortcuts for the zsh line editor (also known as the command prompt) in its default configuration.
Some rather intense keyboard clacking over the past years has resulted in me having to give my hands some time off work.
If you’re like me, you love npm ci. A lot. Until that one fateful day.
Learning a language is different when learned as a native language or as a foreign language. We will illustrate this by taking a look at how Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners and Japanese as a native language (JNL) speakers learn about Japanese grammar.
For the past month I’ve been using the J programming language to solve Project Euler puzzles. The language makes many of the tasks that one would usually spend quite some time on, especially with multidimensional arrays, quite pleasant to work on.
I’ve taken some time to enhance my blog with two useful features:
I will cover how the two have been implemented.
If you are like me, you are more busy switching between static site generators than actually writing posts for your blog.
On April 15 2018, I moved to Tokyo, Japan. I suppose that changed a few things in my life.
I like hackathons. Hackathons are competitions that run over multiple days — typically a whole weekend — and in which the participants — programmers and designers — solve a challenge in order to win a prize. Typically, there are a few challenges that are all based around some theme — blockchains, sustainability, democracy, and so on.
As time goes on, smart contract requirements change. Often, a feature is added or a bug is found. But, once a smart contract has been deployed on the blockchain, it can’t be upgraded. The entire value proposition of a blockchain is immutability. Yet, in the real world, contracts change all the time. For example, a labor contract will change when new labor laws are introduced. Similarly, there are many circumstances under which smart contracts change as well, such as
When building your smart contract platform — whether on Ethereum or any other blockchain — at some you’ll be faced with the question of ownership. In this article, I will explain three different types of smart contract ownership and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.
Have you ever wondered how your users can spend
ERC20 platform
tokens to buy assets and other tokens from you? Or — in more technical terms —
how to make sure a smart contract executes a particular function as soon as it
receives tokens? This post is all about using ERC20 approve() and
transferFrom() to allow your users to do much more than just keep tokens in a
wallet.
Over the years I have found out how important it is to constantly challenge yourself. Coding is craftsmanship. A good craftsman will always try to improve the toolbox they use every day. Code patterns belong in any good toolbox.
I had the tremendous privilege of speaking about creating sustainable token platforms at TokenSky 2018 in Seoul, Korea. Not only did I have a great time presenting some of the ideas that I’ve come across, I also encountered a lot of stimulating questions from individuals and companies all interested in enhancing their platform using some kind of blockchain token.
Not many things a business owner has to go through are as scrutinous and unpleasant as a data privacy audit.
Imagine this: You’re pitching an idea for an interesting data science problem that you can solve for your client. The client is sold on the idea and wants to immediately know how fast you can get it done, and more importantly, what the project milestones will look like.
A great method to improve memory usage of Pandas DataFrames is by converting
columns with categorical
variables to use the data
type categorical.
I believe that being a data scientist is about communication first, and data science second.
The Pandas API surprises me with a new feature or method almost every day, and I have yet again discovered an interesting piece of functionality.
The other day I caught myself writing one too many df.groupby() in Pandas, and thought to myself:
Scaling Pandas DataFrame aggregations can be quite tricky. I have had a very specific problem to solve that involved aggregates on group by expressions.
I’ve now solved the first 15 Project Euler challenges in C. But then, I’ve hit a road block. Let me explain.
After a long time of being complacent with my skills, I thought I should up my InfoSec game. So far I’ve been mainly busy with figuring out how to enhance application security in my work. That means I learned how to
Let’s look at how 大切、大事、重要 are different. 大事 and 大切 Yep, both have the same meaning. Both mean 大事なアルバム This album is important (to me) 重要 This adjective serves to identify concepts as important in a context that transcends one’s own preference and identity. 重要なアルバム This album is important (in the history of music) Conclusion 大事 and 大切 come very close to the English word important. 重要 is about expressing importance in the context of something larger.
Uber Rush provides cost-effective on-demand courier services. It is an exciting service that will allow companies to start delivering to local customers faster. Uber tries to make the process as easy as possible by providing an API which can be easily integrated into existing shop solutions and lets customers order cheap and easy shipping.
The other day, I found out something real fun: Not all bike lanes in Germany need to be used! Since bike lanes are quite dreadful and not at all safe, I wanted to write a handy tool to show me when to use a bicycle lane and when not.
Python 3.4 introduced the statistics module. It contains helpful methods for
determining basic statistical properties, such as mean, median and standard
deviation of samples and populations.
I had this curious thought the other day: what is the byte value distribution
in binary files, such as an executable? Take for example /bin/echo on OS X
10.11.1.
The new Python 3.5 unpacking syntax makes a programmer’s life much easier.
I found a really neat data source online on unwanted robocalls that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission, a United States government agency) has created and published openly. The data source provides times and dates of unwanted robocalls that consumers have reported to the FCC. We can use this data source to find out all kinds of things, but today we will be content with just finding out the time of the day households are most likely to receive robocalls.
This is a simple s-expression parser written in Python 3. It understands symbols and numbers and uses tuples to represent the data internally.
Creating tuples from generator expression is surprisingly fast.
Today we are going to look at how to filter items in tree data structures using Python 3. We are going to compare a stateful approach and a functional and recursive approach. In the end we will discuss the advantages of a functional implementation.
As you might know, CPython, the most commonly used implementation of Python, uses a stack based virtual machine to run Python scripts.
This is a short evaluation on whether one can perform a series of basic tasks using the APIs that cloud photo services provide.
With the new async syntax in Python 3.5, defining asynchronous functions has become a lot simpler. In this article, I will demonstrate a simple example for this new feature.
Given a list items, that contains ints and None, produce a list that only
contains the int values with their order of appearance preserved.
The other day I received this ominous message on Skype from an infected machine: