Miscellaneous
These are just some random musings and tidbits. There are also some one-off projects or hacks that don't warrant their own page.
October 18, 2021
Favorite Podcasts 2019-2021
What is now becoming an annual tradition, here is my list of favorite podcasts from 2019-2021. See my past posts for comparison:
I’ve combined my 2019, 2020, and 2021 lists, since I (like many of us) was driving much much less, and therefore had less time to listen to podcasts. I didn’t particularly like this change of events (I really like podcasts!) but it meant I shifted my podcast focus a little bit.
This list is organized by category and annotated with average podcast length and a “seriousness scale.”
February 9, 2020
Favorite Podcasts 2018-2019
What is now becoming an annual tradition, here is my list of favorite podcasts from 2018-2019. See my 2016-2017 post and 2017-2018 post for comparison!
I am still driving to work, but less often now, so there are not too many additions to my classics from last year.
As usual, this list is organized by category and annotated with average podcast length and a “seriousness scale.”
April 18, 2019
Lasercutter Memes
I recently got trained on the lasercutter at Artisan’s Asylum and wanted to do a project! Thankfully, my friend Emilie had just the thing.
October 26, 2018
Protecting Yourself Against rm
Those who use the command-line on GNU/Linux operating systems know and love rm
. But it also comes with so much power! No one wants to accidentally rm -rf
the company data. To prevent myself from doing this on our data server, I aliased rm
to something more sensible.
September 3, 2018
Why I Left Amazon
Friday August 17, 2018 was my last day at Amazon Go as an Applied Research Scientist II. The following Monday August 20th, 2018 was my first day at my new job as Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Root.ai. Deciding to leave Amazon was not an easy decision, and I wanted to share my personal reasons for leaving Amazon, both for myself for the future and for others in similar situations.
August 25, 2018
Blogging with Jupyter for Learning Julia Part 2
I’ve previously posted about Blogging with Jupyter in a previous post. For the latest post on LearningJulia I needed one additional feature: LaTeX equation numbering in Jupyter. Here’s how I got that to work.
August 17, 2018
Favorite Podcasts 2017-2018
As I move from a driving commute to a biking commute, I anticipate my podcast consumption to decrease over the coming years. As a followup to my previous post of podcasts I listen to from 2016-2017, here is the 2017-2018 list, organized by category and annotated with average podcast length and a “seriousness scale.”
March 18, 2017
Blogging with Jupyter for Learning Julia
For the Learning Julia blog, I use Jupyter notebooks as my primary blogging tool. The website is generated with Jekyll and hosted with Github pages. with a single command-line jupyter
command and some custom configuration, I generate an HTML file I can embed into a Jekyll post.
February 15, 2017
Favorite Podcasts 2016-2017
I have a 45-minute commute to work (each way) every day, so I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts. Here is a roundup of my favorite podcasts from 2016-2017, organized by category and annotated with average podcast length and a “seriousness scale.”
September 8, 2015
Installing Zim Wiki on OSX
Running programs meant for Linux are hard to run on OSX, especially if they use graphics. This is how I got Zim wiki running on OSX.
February 5, 2015
Word Frequency in the King James Bible
Somehow in undergrad I never got around to learning about the MapReduce algorithm. To fix this, I learned about it from the first lecture of MIT’s 6.824: Distributed Systems Engineering, and will attempt to explain MapReduce here, then implement it in Python on a real live example.
February 13, 2014
A Fictional Middle East
I have never written a piece of fiction before. My first attempt, written in February 2014 over the course of a week, was prompted by a “call for fiction” submission to Mashallah News. The prompt was this (taken directly from the Mashallah News website):
Imagine alternate fates for what is, at present, a complicated Middle East. While the various crises sweeping the region might oppress our sense of what is possible and confine our hopes to a handful of initiatives, our imaginations are beyond the scope of contemporary limitations. By inviting writers to use the tools of fiction to contemplate the farfetched and seemingly impossible, we hope to spark a very real debate about what kinds of future Middle Easts are conceivable.
June 6, 2013
MIT Graduation Cap
MIT has many interesting traditions. But my personal favorite is the tradition of MIT’s graduation hats. I had a lot of fun with this tradition, especially given the weather.
April 28, 2011
Playing Zork on Linux
The inspiration behind Terminus, Zork, is a fantastic game. Here’s a guide for how to set it up to play on your Linux machine (tested on Ubuntu >= 12.04).
All Posts about Miscellaneous
2021 October 18 -- Favorite Podcasts 2019-2021
2020 February 9 -- Favorite Podcasts 2018-2019
2019 April 18 -- Lasercutter Memes
2018 October 26 -- Protecting Yourself Against rm
2018 September 3 -- Why I Left Amazon
2018 August 25 -- Blogging with Jupyter for Learning Julia Part 2
2018 August 17 -- Favorite Podcasts 2017-2018
2017 March 18 -- Blogging with Jupyter for Learning Julia
2017 February 15 -- Favorite Podcasts 2016-2017
2015 September 8 -- Installing Zim Wiki on OSX
2015 February 5 -- Word Frequency in the King James Bible
2014 February 13 -- A Fictional Middle East
2013 June 6 -- MIT Graduation Cap
2011 April 28 -- Playing Zork on Linux