vxlabs

It took me longer than I would have liked to setup the latest Thunderbird 128 (Supernova!) to use my existing GnuPG-based encryption setup , for a large part because TB defaults to its own more s...

https://vxlabs.com/2024/08/09/configure-thunderbird-128-e2e-encryption-with-gnupg/

lf , or “list files”, is a single binary file manager, inspired by the ranger file manager, but written in Go. Using this tool, you can navigate really quickly, build up a mental model of th...

https://vxlabs.com/2024/06/01/gokcehan-lf-image-code-archive-previews/

Last week Microsoft had to deal with some criticism, because they announced “Recall”, a new feature, available only on their new Copilot+ AI-enabled laptops , that makes regular screenshots a...

https://vxlabs.com/2024/05/25/ai-screenshot-renamer-with-ollama-llava-gpt-4o-and-macos-ocr/

LTTB, or Largest-Triangle-Three-Buckets , is a fantastic little algorithm that you can use for the visual downsampling of timeseries data. Let’s say your user is viewing a line chart of some ...

https://vxlabs.com/2024/05/01/lttb-python-drag-race/

INTRODUCTION Just the other weekend, I had to exchange contact details using quite primitive means with a fantastic new friend after a deeply enjoyable hike up Table Mountain via the India Venst...

https://vxlabs.com/2024/03/02/contact-qrcode-generator-with-marimo-and-wasm/

BACKGROUND I was curious whether it would in theory be possible to use the docx format as a storage format for markdown documents with their associated image files, and in addition, to support t...

https://vxlabs.com/2024/02/11/pandoc-roundtrip-from-markdown-to-docx-and-back/

THE BLURB Below is the emacs-lisp code I’ve evolved over the years to setup reasonable font sizes on all the machines where I use Emacs. The main goal is to get the physical / apparent size ...

https://vxlabs.com/2023/12/09/charls-super-hacky-but-often-working-automatic-emacs-font-size-setting/

This morning while working on my AoC submission, I wondered what the simplest procedure was for sharing a minimal setup for editing Python in Visual Studio Code using ruff for formatting, linti...

https://vxlabs.com/2023/12/09/minimal-vscode-settings-and-extensions-configuration-for-python-with-ruff/

INSTALL AND CONFIGURE HUNSPELL Imagine this: For intricate reasons, you have decided to get your Emacs setup working on Windows as well, although you have a perfectly fine and working WSL2 confi...

https://vxlabs.com/2023/11/14/fixing-hunspell-1.7.0-for-emacs-29-on-windows/

This is a small variation of the 2019 post on linking to emails from Org mode using Thunderbird , where instead we show how to open the message:// links with mu4e if active, or the fastmail web-...

https://vxlabs.com/2023/08/08/open-message/-links-with-mu4e-or-fastmail/

INTRODUCTION Python’s ThreadPoolExecutor’s context manager is a really neat way to run a bunch of (I/O) work in a thread pool, and then clean everything up when the context is exited. Some...

https://vxlabs.com/2023/02/12/threadpoolexecutor-context-manager-with-nested-tasks/

BACKGROUND For years and years now, I keep all of my work, including my checked-out source code, in some form of file synchronization system. The advantages of having all of your files always ...

https://vxlabs.com/2022/10/22/unison-file-synchronization-directly-via-the-wsl-bridge/

BACKGROUND My notes database consists primarily of Emacs Org mode files, interspersed with a small number of markdown files, some of them from previous note-taking systems (for example, I went ...

https://vxlabs.com/2022/09/24/modify-md-roam-for-frontmatter-less-operation/

You’ll see in Python bug 37962 that datetime.isoformat() and datetime.fromisoformat() use a restricted subset of the ISO 8601 timestamp formatting standards. This is similar to the subset ...

https://vxlabs.com/2022/08/05/conservative-rendering-and-liberal-parsing-of-iso-8601-timestamps-in-python/

In this post, I show how to setup Emacs for TypeScript and React (tsx) development, with tree-sitter for syntax highlighting and indentation, and LSP with the TypeScript compiler (including a plu...

https://vxlabs.com/2022/06/12/typescript-development-with-emacs-tree-sitter-and-lsp-in-2022/

This post shows how you can connect a Shelly 1 unit to an ET Systems gate motor so that you can open your driveway gate via internet. In my case I opted to flash the Shelly 1 with the brilliant...

https://vxlabs.com/2022/03/05/connecting-the-shelly-1-to-an-et-systems-gate-motor-for-apple-homekit-control/

In this post I show how you can setup a Kubernetes pod for reproducible development purposes on a single-node Kubernetes cluster using Rancher Desktop on Linux or Docker Desktop for Windows. WH...

https://vxlabs.com/2021/11/21/using-kubernetes-for-development-containers/

Imagine the following possibly hypothetical situation:

https://vxlabs.com/2021/10/03/dx-minimal-api-go-csharp-python/

The wonderful Emacs Org mode is the basis for the largest part of my personal knowledge management system. However, as I’ve mentioned before, mobile accessibility is its weakest point . In ...

https://vxlabs.com/2021/09/29/convert-org-mode-files-to-docx-with-cmake-and-pandoc-for-mobile-accessibility/

This post is reproduced here with permission from The OrgMode ExoCortex . org-roam v2 , which was recently released , removed the update database on idle functionality (which I coincidentally c...

https://vxlabs.com/2021/07/22/configure-org-roam-v2-to-update-database-only-when-idle/

Welcome to open source vxlabs software development handbook. It contains a number of best practices for building software, generally web-based, using Python on the backend and TypeScript for th...

https://vxlabs.com/software-development-handbook/

Recently the great support folks at FastMail helped me to debug a rather irritating issue where emails that had languished in my inbox for too long, and were then processed by me to end up in th...

https://vxlabs.com/2021/03/21/mbsync-copyarrivaldate-yes/

On the various and different platforms where I use Emacs and GnuPG encryption, I’ve traditionally always had a bit of a struggle setting up a suitable mechanism for private key passphrase entry...

https://vxlabs.com/2021/03/21/gnupg-pinentry-via-the-emacs-minibuffer/

Recently, as I replaced more of my Emacs-helm configuration with counsel and ivy , I noticed that ivy-switch-buffer, when augmented by ivy-rich , was not showing the directories of the buffers i...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/11/15/fix-ivy-rich-switch-buffer-directories-display-in-emacs/

Welcome to the first entry in a new series that’s probably going to stop with this first entry, or maybe not. The series is called Charl’s Unwritten Rules of Software Development, or cursd ...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/10/06/sort-typescript-import-groups-from-standard-to-local/

You might have noticed the side-note in yesterday’s blog post where I mentioned that exporting Orgmode notes with org-download attachment-style screenshots to blog posts using ox-hugo requir...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/07/25/emacs-lisp-function-convert-attachment-to-file/

Pylance is Microsoft’s new and improved Python language server. I have been using this in my Visual Studio Code remote editing sessions (editing Python codes on the machine learning Linux ma...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/07/23/vscode-pylance-type-mismatch-warning/

From the department of how-obscure-can-you-get-really, I present you with this neat trick to open WSL2 files in their native Windows handlers via Emacs TRAMP connection from WSL1 to WSL2. MOTI...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/05/21/open-wsl2-files-in-windows-apps-using-emacs-tramp/

On Windows, running Emacs on WSL (the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or rather Linux in Windows), is faster and in my experience an altogether a better experience than running native Windows Emacs....

https://vxlabs.com/2020/05/09/emacs-wsl-helm-locate-and-everything/

This post originally appeared at Org Mode Exocortex , my Org mode-focused blog, on April 30, 2020. :ID: b3c6cee0-567e-4324-9685-f6fd9959d402 INTRODUCTION Inspired by Stéfan’s post explain...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/05/01/voice-capture-org-mode-notes-and-more-using-siri-shortcuts-on-ios/

WARNING ON 2021-06-21: DON’T TRY THIS WORK-AROUND With a pandoc 2.5 installation on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS I am not able to get this hack working anymore. My suggestion is to look into some of t...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/04/26/cite-consistently-between-org-ref-and-ox-hugo/

TL;DR: Install my WSL-specific xdg-open replacement by following the instructions on the xdg-open-wsl github page . CONVERT A PYTHON SCRIPT TO A PYTHON PACKAGE WITH POETRY. In my previous vxla...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/03/15/xdg-open-wsl/

BACKGROUND. On Windows, I run Emacs on WSL 1 whilst displaying to Windows via the X410 X-Server . This is currently the best compromise if one wants to interoperate with the NTFS side, at leas...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/03/07/patch-emacs-org-open-file-using-advice/

Previously I wrote how to get the WlzIIPSrv large image server running on webfaction, using lighttpd . Fast-forward 2.5 years, and I was busy porting the whole site (again), this time from webf...

https://vxlabs.com/2020/02/22/supervisor-fastcgi-nginx/

BACKGROUND I recently joined the Windows Insider Program , on the slow ring, to be able to test a development version of the soon-to-be-released Windows Subsystem for Linux, version 2, hencefort...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/12/06/wsl2-io-measurements/

TL;DR. In this post, I propose bending the format=flowed RFC by allowing lines up to the SMTP limit of 998 characters, in order to improve the plaintext reading experience for users of non-comp...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/08/25/format-flowed-with-long-lines/

As I mentioned in a previous blog post , I switched from a 2017 15" MacBook Pro to a Thinkpad X1 Extreme in April of this year. Although I’m still using Windows on this machine in order to se...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/07/28/manjaro-bumblebee-thinkpad-x1-extreme-2019/

As I recently changed my imap downloading tool choice from offlineimap to mbsync , and because the word on the street (where with “street” I mean “random discussion forums on the internet�...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/07/05/mbsync-vs-offlineimap-speed/

These days I’m running mu4e , the mail programme that runs on the Emacs operating system (the one with the terrible editor), on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). (Previously, see my othe...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/07/03/send-queued-mails-in-background-with-mu4e/

On Wednesday, May 8, 2019, South Africans had the opportunity to elect their leaders for the coming five years by taking part in the 2019 general election . Of the 26727921 registered voters, 1...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/05/28/sa-elections-votes-to-seats/

This post documents my measurements of the slow-down caused by the Windows 10 (1903) anti-virus real-time protection of Hugo static website builds, both with and without the Windows Subsystem fo...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/05/23/windows-10-anti-virus-slows-down-hugo-and-wsl/

On macOS, links of the form message://message-id are by default supported by the system. Using a tool such as org-mac-link , it is straight-forward to link directly to relevant emails from Orgm...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/04/20/link-thunderbird-emails-from-emacs-orgmode/

A few days ago I switched my main development machine from a 2017 15" MacBook Pro with a 4-core 2.9GHz 7820HQ i7 , 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme with a 6-core 8750H...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/04/19/django-typescript-docker-compose-windows/

One of the great new F# tools in .NET Core 3 Preview 3 is F# interactive as pure .NET Core application. To use dotnet fsi in your Visual Studio Code with the Ionide F# IDE plugin instead of...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/04/16/dotnet-fsi-in-vscode/

On Wednesday April 3, 2019, I finished migrating this site from Wordpress to Hugo . An important part of this project was finding a new system for handling blog post comments. On my personal bl...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/04/06/isso-on-webfaction/

There are at least two ways to be kept up to date of any new content on this blog: DAILY EMAIL UPDATE If you would like to receive an email update at 11:00 AM South African time ONLY WHEN A NE...

https://vxlabs.com/subscribe/

TL;DR: For best results with mixed precision training, use NVIDIA’s Automatic Mixed Precision together with fastai, and remember to set any epsilons, for example in the optimizer, correctly. ...

https://vxlabs.com/2019/02/04/improving-fastais-mixed-precision-support-with-nvidias-automatic-mixed-precision/

I have prepared a simple Ansible script which will enable you to convert a clean Ubuntu 18.04 image (as supplied by Google Compute Engine or PaperSpace ) into a CUDA 10, PyTorch 1.0 preview , fas...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/11/21/a-simple-ansible-script-to-convert-a-clean-ubuntu-18-04-to-a-cuda-10-pytorch-1-0rc-fastai-miniconda3-deep-learning-machine/

In a previous post I showed how to get Palantir’s Python Language Server working together with Emacs and lsp-mode. In this post, we look at the brand new elephant in the room, Microsoft’s ...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/11/19/configuring-emacs-lsp-mode-and-microsofts-visual-studio-code-python-language-server/

(The wheel has now been updated to the latest PyTorch 1.0 preview as of December 6, 2018.) You’ve just received a shiny new NVIDIA Turing (RTX 2070, 2080 or 2080 Ti), or maybe even a beautifu...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/11/04/pytorch-1-0-preview-nov-4-2018-packages-with-full-cuda-10-support-for-your-ubuntu-18-04-x86_64-systems/

Over the years, I’ve built up quite a collection of notes as Org mode text files. So far, it has proven to be the MOST EXPRESSIVE AND THE MOST ROBUST NOTE-TAKING MODALITY out of a long list of...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/10/29/importing-orgmode-notes-into-apple-notes/

The language server protocol was proposed by Microsoft as a way for different editors and development environments to share language analysis backends This post describes how to configure Emac...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/06/08/python-language-server-with-emacs-and-lsp-mode/

Phil Hagelberg recently won the Lisp Game Jam 2018 with his entry EXO_encounter 667 . What I found most interesting however, was his interactive programming setup. He programmed his game in...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/05/18/interactive-programming-with-fennel-lua-lisp-emacs-and-lisp-game-jam-winner-exo_encounter-667/

tmtxt-dired-async  by Trần Xuân Trường is an unfortunately lesser known Emacs package which extends dired, the Emacs file manager, to be able to run rsync and other commands (zip, unzip, ...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/03/30/asynchronous-rsync-with-emacs-dired-and-tramp/

The official Arduino Desktop IDE is fantastic at what it was made for. After downloading, opening your first sketch (say, blink.ino) and flashing this to your connected Arduino hardware takes al...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/03/24/developing-arduino-sketches-with-jetbrains-clion-a-minimal-example/

I had to use the ITEAD Studio XBee shield v1.1 with an Arduino m0 (SAMD21) board, which is a 3.3V board, whereas the most common Arduinos are 5V. At the time of this writing, the shield’s we...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/03/23/which-jumper-to-set-on-the-itead-xbee-shield-v1-1-for-use-with-a-3-3v-arduino/

As I was listening to the December 21 episode of the CPPCast , together with TWiML&AI my two most favourite podcasts, I couldn’t help but be a little bewildered by the number of times the gues...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/02/15/use-the-google-cloud-speech-api-to-transcribe-a-podcast/

In order to add a GiST index on a Postgres database that could be used to accelerate trigram matches using the pg_trgm module and the special gist_trgm_ops operator, I had to code up a special D...

https://vxlabs.com/2018/01/31/creating-a-django-migration-for-a-gist-gin-index-with-a-special-index-operator/

I have recently become fascinated with (Variational) Autoencoders and with PyTorch. Kevin Frans has a beautiful blog post online explaining variational autoencoders, with examples in TensorFlo...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/12/08/variational-autoencoder-in-pytorch-commented-and-annotated/

TL;DR When debugging DLL load errors on Windows, use lucasg’s open source and more modern rewrite of the old Dependency Walker software . Very importantly, keep on drilling down through indire...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/12/06/how-to-debug-pyinstaller-dll-pyd-load-failed-issues-on-windows/

As is briefly documented on the ob-ipython github , one can run code on remote ipython kernels. In this post, I give a little more detail, and show that this also works wonderfully for remote g...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/11/30/run-code-on-remote-ipython-kernels-with-emacs-and-orgmode/

TL;DR: Parallels Desktop 13 only supports OpenGL 3.2 on an extremely limited subset of mostly games. VMWare Fusion 10 has full OpenGL 3.3 support. In my case, this made the difference between bei...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/11/27/if-you-want-to-run-opengl-3-2-apps-in-a-windows-guest-avoid-parallels-13-and-buy-vmware-fusion-10-instead/

ob-ipython is an Emacs package that enables org-babel to talk to a running ipython kernel. The upshot of this is that you can use org-mode instead of the jupyter notebook for interspersing exe...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/11/24/getting-ob-ipython-to-show-documentation-during-company-completion/

RobotDyn offers a well-manufactured Joystick and XBee shield for the Arduino Uno which I am currently using for some IEEE 802.15.4 -related experiments. However, as it is not mentioned in any ...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/11/07/the-robotdyn-joystick-shield-has-the-xbee-tx-rx-lines-switched-to-d0-and-d1-or-completely-disconnected/

In a post from 2014 , I showed how to drive the sub-standard HDMI input of the Dell U2713HM 27″ UltraSharp at a resolution of 2560×1440 from the HDMI 1.3 output of a Linux-running laptop. Fa...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/08/29/driving-the-dell-u2713hm-at-2650x1440-from-the-hdmi-output-of-the-hyperdrive-usb-c-dock-with-macos-switchresx/

UPDATES Because this matter is still ongoing (Jaxx does not seem to want to fix this vulnerability), I have moved the updates here to the front. The original post is below. 2022-08-14 In orde...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/06/10/extracting-the-jaxx-12-word-wallet-backup-phrase/

The WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme was exactly what I needed to update the look and feel of the Visible Orbit project website , except for one thing: No sidebar on pages, only posts. For  the...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/06/07/adding-page-sidebar-to-wordpress-twenty-seventeen-theme/

For the high-resolution orbital slice viewer on the Visible Orbit website , I had to setup wlziipsrv , a fork of the iipsrv large tiled image server. This is a FastCGI app, which means that, un...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/06/06/setting-up-fastcgi-apps-on-webfaction/

In this post, I’ll show you how you can use Emacs and orgmode to query live data from any RESTful webservice, and then use that data in orgmode tables, a really great way to get live table-base...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/06/03/querying-restful-webservices-into-emacs-orgmode-tables/

(This post is an extract from another post  written a year ago on my other, more personal blog .) I finally got around to studying the math behind bitcoin. If you more or less know what a HA...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/06/03/bitcoin-and-the-blockchain-in-10-minutes/

The crux package for Emacs contains, amongst a list of useful functions (crux does stand for A Collection of Ridiculously Useful eXtensions for Emacs after all), the function crux-open-with. Thi...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/03/31/fixing-crux-open-with-on-ubuntu/

Google recently announced the availability of GPUs on Google Compute Engine instances . For my deep learning experiments, I often need more beefy GPUs than the puny GTX 750Ti in my desktop workst...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/03/17/miniconda3-tensorflow-keras-on-google-compute-engine-gpu-instance-the-step-by-step-guide/

If you’re not using projectile, but you would like to be able to perform interactive, search-as-you-type, recursive searches through the current project, this is pretty easy to do if you have c...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/03/11/recursive-text-search-in-project-without-projectile/

Screenshot of orgmode source, PDF preview on the right, interactive citation selection in the minibuffer. Click for full resolution. I have (co-)written a few LaTeX documents in my time. How...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/02/20/from-org-file-with-local-bibtex-to-latex-and-pdf/

In this post I talk about three great new features in the latest release of mu4e , an email programme that runs in Emacs. I also show my mu4e configuration as an example to others who would like ...

https://vxlabs.com/2017/02/07/mu4e-0-9-18-e-mailing-with-emacs-now-even-better/

A core part of my note-taking strategy is a growing collection of Emacs Org mode files containing my monthly lab journals, project summaries and various technical documents. Usually I rely on...

https://vxlabs.com/2016/11/07/date-sorted-interactive-recursive-search-with-ivy-counsel-and-ag/

If you want C++ completion and navigation (jump to definition, jump to declaration, and so forth), there are several good options for Emacs. For a QtQuick / C++ project I’m working on, I needed...

https://vxlabs.com/2016/04/11/step-by-step-guide-to-c-navigation-and-completion-with-emacs-and-the-clang-based-rtags/

Stats for Huawei LTE Routers is a simple Android app to check the signal stats on the Huawei E5186 LTE router. It currently retrieves and displays four different measurements (RSRQ, RSRP, SINR, ...

https://vxlabs.com/stats-for-huawei-lte-routers/

When developing a mobile app using Cordova or PhoneGap, the browser target platform can really speed up your development. You could serve the HTML files directly using cordova serve, but the br...

https://vxlabs.com/2016/03/17/fixing-the-cordova-browser-platform-access-control-allow-origin-error/

ECL is of course Embeddable Common Lisp , a small but quite complete Common Lisp implementation that can be easily embedded in your C applications to act as dynamic extension language, but it is ...

https://vxlabs.com/2016/03/05/up-and-running-with-ecl-and-slime-in-4-easy-steps/

Usually when I’m working on a Django project, I use the built-in runserver command. For deployment, we mostly use nginx and uwsgi in front of Django. However, for a new side project I needed ...

https://vxlabs.com/2015/12/08/gunicorn-as-your-django-development-server/

Just in case you were wondering how one could go about having any child widget of a Kivy Scatter widget that would stick in a single window-relative position whilst the scatter itself was being ...

https://vxlabs.com/2015/05/17/fixed-position-of-any-scatter-child-widget-in-kivy/

Ever since I dropped Dropbox in September of 2013 due to mounting privacy concerns, I’ve been searching for and testing various filesystem syncing solutions to take its place. This post is a...

https://vxlabs.com/2015/03/29/notes-testing-7-dropbox-alternatives/

(This post has been updated since initial publication, see last section for details.) INTRODUCTION My blog post on usable hardware-based SSD encryption has seen a great deal of activity. Alth...

https://vxlabs.com/2015/02/11/use-the-hardware-based-full-disk-encryption-your-tcg-opal-ssd-with-msed/

For a project that I’m currently helping with, we needed recent OpenGL features that are only available on NVIDIA drivers with version 340 and later. Unfortunately, I have one of those NV...

https://vxlabs.com/2015/02/05/solving-the-ubuntu-14-04-nvidia-346-nvidia-prime-black-screen-issue/

Org mode is great for authoring rich documents with syntax highlighted source code, LaTeX math and images. It even supports evaluating live snippets of code embedded in the text. It does all of ...

https://vxlabs.com/2015/01/28/sending-emails-with-math-and-source-code/

With Emacs, org mode and org-babel, it’s possible to evaluate source code samples embedded in your org files and have the output of said evaluation appear inline. This makes for a beautiful li...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/12/04/inline-graphviz-dot-evaluation-for-graphs-using-emacs-org-mode-and-org-babel/

The Django REST Framework is awesome, for a whole bunch of reasons, one of them being the browsable HTML version of your API that it automatically generates for you. As a part of this, it extr...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/11/12/getting-django-rest-framework-to-parse-docstrings-as-restructuredtext/

Last night I had to backup 2760 photos and videos, about 6.3G worth, from my Nexus 4 Android phone to my Linux laptop. The Nexus 4, like many other Android phones, only supports the Media Trans...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/11/06/use-adb-to-bypass-dog-slow-mtp-transfer-of-files-from-android-to-linux/

I’m helping someone process a collection of research data that has been entered by a third party using Excel. We’re using LibreOffice Calc, because research should be reproducible by anyone, ...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/10/06/convert-dates-to-other-formats-in-libreoffice-calc/

I’ve just activated CloudFlare (the free tier) for vxlabs.com, hoping to do even faster page loads. Most of my WordPress installations already use WP Super Cache to serve mostly static pages ...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/09/30/cloudflare-full-optimizations-break-mathjax/

(TL;DR See the last paragraph for how to get the Dell U2713HM working on the HDMI output of the Acer V3-571G at 2560×1440 @ 50Hz.) The Dell Ultrasharp U2713HM is a 27″ IPS panel with a reso...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/08/08/driving-the-dell-u2713hm-at-2650x1440-from-the-hdmi-output-of-the-acer-v3-571g/

Today, Qt 5.3.1 was released along with Qt Creator 3.1.2. Unfortunately, nsf’s EmacsKeys plugin, merged into the Qt trunk a few months ago , was not a part of this release (it should be includ...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/06/25/getting-emacskeys-working-with-qtcreator-3-1-2/

Post summary: The level set method is a powerful alternative way to represent N-dimensional surfaces evolving through space. (This is a significantly extended blog-post version of three slides ...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/06/16/level-sets-the-practical-10-minute-introduction/

In the store today, I wanted to check that the Huawei E3331 3G USB dongle I was about to buy would work with my Ubuntu Linux laptops. Because I couldn’t find any posts confirming this, I’m w...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/06/15/huawei-e3331-3g-usb-dongle-works-on-ubuntu-14-04-linux/

Just in case you run into the same problem I did when upgrading Roundcube from version 0.9.5 to 1.0.1, I’m posting the exact steps I took to fix the Error in DDL upgrade problem. So, you’ve...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/06/09/fixing-roundcube-error-in-ddl-upgrade/

mu4e is a mail user agent for your Emacs. After leaving GMail a few months ago, this is the first MUA that I am loving even more. The major reasons for this are the faster than GMail real-time ...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/06/06/configuring-emacs-mu4e-with-nullmailer-offlineimap-and-multiple-identities/

UPDATE 2014-11-18 I’ve forked the original Deft, added this recursive directory listing feature as well as support for multiple different file extensions, and pushed it all to github as deft-tu...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/06/04/modify-emacs-deft-for-recursive-directory-search/

I’ve recently discovered the absolute joy that is writing and publishing wordpress blog posts using Emacs 24 and org2blog . Because it took me a while to get everything (including source code s...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/05/25/emacs-24-with-prelude-org2blog-and-wordpress/

The syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks in GitHub flavored markdown, or GFM, are a beautiful and useful invention. One starts a code block with three or more backticks or tildes, followed by th...

https://vxlabs.com/2014/04/08/syntax-highlighting-markdown-fenced-code-blocks-in-emacs/

This is just in from the department of silly Zotero hacks : I’ve recently started using the brilliant papercite wordpress plugin to publish a list of my academic publications . This is aweso...

https://vxlabs.com/2013/12/22/export-zotero-pdfs-named-with-bibtex-keys/

impress.js is a great system for building Prezi-like non-linear presentations using HTML5, with the added benefit that it’s open source, and your infinite canvas is in 3D. See here for the ori...

https://vxlabs.com/2013/10/11/impress-js-with-embedded-live-webcam/

Have you ever wondered to which extent you could emulate the beautiful ColorBrewer single hue sequential colour schemes with some form of linear interpolation between the endpoints? Wonder no mo...

https://vxlabs.com/2013/10/04/d3-interpolators-vs-colorbrewer-single-hue-sequential-scales/

Usually we use Google Hangouts for group video calling and also for screen sharing with more than two participants. If you’re not using Google Hangouts yet for your video conferences (full vide...

https://vxlabs.com/2013/07/11/skype-4-2-0-11-on-linux-premium-subscription-but-no-group-video-and-no-group-screen-sharing/

I recently acquired the Samson C01U USB condenser microphone for better quality voice-overs on the sleep-inducing screencasts I sometimes make. It took some fiddling to get it setup correctly on ...

https://vxlabs.com/2013/04/24/samson-c01u-usb-condenser-microphone-on-ubuntu-12-04/

I recently needed a new mobile development workstation. My main requirements were that it should have at least a Full HD (1920×1080) IPS (in-plane switching) screen and a good keyboard, and that...

https://vxlabs.com/2013/03/24/acer-v3-571g-fullhd-ips-superb-priceperformance-linux-development-laptop/

(tl;dr / post summary: Many current SSDs do super fast hardware AES encryption, but only a very few expose this correctly to the user, meaning you often still need a third-party software solution...

https://vxlabs.com/2012/12/22/ssds-with-usable-built-in-hardware-based-full-disk-encryption/

visualization, imaging & software engineering

https://vxlabs.com/blog/

This site serves as the official internet presence of the vxlabs consultancy. More importantly, I regularly write technical blog posts dealing with programming, Linux and Ubuntu, Android telepho...

https://vxlabs.com/about-this-site/

I’ve just purchased an Intel 520 SSD drive, which does hardware-based AES encryption of the whole disk, and is clever enough to encrypt the AES passphrase with the ATA / HDD password. This encr...

https://vxlabs.com/2012/11/28/adding-the-ata-security-extension-bios-to-amibios/

The Motorola Atrix 4G, flagship phone about a year ago, is now a great budget option if you need an unlocked and high performance Android phone. An NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1 GHz processor, 1GB o...

https://vxlabs.com/2012/11/18/european-motorola-atrix-4g-rooting-unlocking-and-cyanogenmod-7-2/

Contact vxlabs by sending a mail to the address that results when you join info and vxlabs.com with a @. vxlabs (Pty) Ltd 13 Caeser Close Somerset West 7130

https://vxlabs.com/contact/

Themes: Software architecture, data visualization, data science, machine learning, 3D graphics techniques, (medical) image processing. Tools: Python / C++ / C / JavaScript / Java / Processing...

https://vxlabs.com/expertise/

When you export bibtex from zotero, it includes the URLs in the bibtex records. Some LaTeX bibliography styles include this information, and sometimes this is not what you want, for example becau...

https://vxlabs.com/2012/06/29/removing-urls-from-zotero-bibtex-exports/

AN IMPORTANT WARNING: During installation, do NOT activate home folder encryption. Due to bugs 957843 and 509180 , YOU WILL MOST PROBABLY SUFFER DATA LOSS, AND YOU WON’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT IT UN...

https://vxlabs.com/2012/05/01/review-of-ubuntu-linux-12-04-on-the-samsung-np300v3a-core-i5-nvidia-optimus-laptop/

As you know, we here at VXLabs are of the educated opinion that the HTC Desire Z is an absolutely brilliant telephone. However, recently we noticed that some of our phones (at least two) started ...

https://vxlabs.com/2012/03/04/fix-for-blurry-photos-on-htc-desire-z/

In my view, Zotero is currently the best reference manager available, and it’s also completely open source! I had one niggling problem though with version 2.1.10 (latest stable at the time of...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/12/01/how-to-get-zotero-ieee-style-not-to-abbreviate-with-et-al-in-the-bibliography/

We’ve all been there: You’re used to the terminal on Linux or OSX, and then for some or other reason you need to work on Windows and you’re confronted with the half-baked monstrosity that i...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/08/28/a-windows-console-that-does-not-suck/

As you know by now , I really do love my HTC Desire Z phone. However, besides the miserable battery life which one tries to live with because it’s otherwise such a kickass phone, a major gripe ...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/07/20/how-to-stop-accidentally-answering-or-declining-calls-when-trying-to-fish-your-htc-sense-android-phone-from-your-pocket/

I recently upgraded my Dell E6410 with NVS 3100m GPU laptop from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) to 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), and I can’t shake this feeling that the distribution has taken a few s...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/05/15/ubuntu-11-04-natty-narwhal-annoyances-dell-e6410-with-nvs-3100m-gpu/

I wanted to read the web preview of the Django Book’s second edition on my Kindle. Besides the fact that all image links are broken on that website and have apparently been so for some time, I...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/04/25/the-django-book-2-0-in-mobipocket-kindle-format/

The VXLabs collective sometimes releases art works in the form of Android Apps. TOILET BUDDY If you have taste, you have this app on your smartphone. If you have exquisite taste, you’ll rat...

https://vxlabs.com/android-apps/

(Post summary: The real-world throughput of current generation Homeplug AV 200 Mbit/s powerline ethernet adapters in a modern house is woefully inadequate. Even wireless is much to be preferred, ...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/03/02/dont-buy-homeplug-adapters/

After recently spending some hours configuring my new Cisco SPA3102 Voice Gateway with a Betamax SIP provider (voipbuster / voipstunt / voipcheap / and so forth, see http://www.backsla.sh/betama...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/02/05/sipura-linksys-cisco-spa3102-voice-gateway-in-the-netherlands/

I’m typing this up because it took me far too long to find, probably because I wasn’t using the right search terms, or because I was trying stupid key combinations… In any case, if yo...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/01/24/international-characters-on-the-htc-desire-z-keyboard/

This review differs from other HTC Desire Z reviews because I’ve actually been using this phone as my only smartphone quite intensively, and because I’m writing up, in great depth, my iopinio...

https://vxlabs.com/2011/01/22/htc-desire-z-an-in-depth-and-nerdy-review/

Well howdy hoo! This is the fastest and most painless guide to installing Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) x86_64 on your Dell E6410 laptop with NVS 3100m GPU. More specifically, installing Ubun...

https://vxlabs.com/2010/11/30/ubuntu-10-10-x86_64-on-your-dell-e6410-with-nvs-3100m-gpu/

I can’t tell you what the Visual X Laboratories are. You have to see it for yourself. 🙂 (… or you could just read the about page when I finish writing it.)

https://vxlabs.com/2010/11/21/welcome-to-the-visual-x-laboratories/

This site is first and foremost a weblog with technical content on the topics of machine learning, Emacs, Python, Django, programming language tidbits, algorithms and other interesting topics . ...

https://vxlabs.com/about/

Lab journal: Foundry Gonzo-Qt LAB JOURNAL: FOUNDRY GONZO-QT TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. 2014-11-28 Friday 1.1. LatticeDeformerQML 2. 2014-11-27 Thursday 2.1. QtQuick Lattice Deformer 2.2. Latti...

https://vxlabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/wpid-gonzo-qtquick/