How to cast yourself as a C++ pro without segfaulting — C++ is easy to pickup and read. Features like mutable by default and implicit conversions, are powerful features that make it easy to write “close to the metal code”. However it is also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot by writing sub-optimum code that generates unnecessary machine instructions…

How to break from the shackles of C/C++ thinking and leverage the full potential of Python — Intro I get the feeling that a lot of embedded folks have a contemptuous attitude towards Python. That Python is only for beginners and that “real” developers use C. Even when I ask interview candidates about Python, a very common response I get is “I am not an expert but I…

How to spot and fix the red flags in your workflow — Intro DevOps is a significant part of a web related tech developer’s life. A lot of smart people have put a lot of effort to develop tools and establish processes to optimize throughput. …

Theoretical options and practical solutions — We all accumulate digital files that we can’t bare to loose. Many only realize the importance of backups when they loose something important. The most common case being lost baby pictures that were on someone’s phone. In this blog post I aim to outline the available options and give some…

How to replicate a ZFS dataset to a second offsite TrueNAS computer with OpenVPN — I am a big fan of the ZFS filesystem and the TrueNAS operating system for DYI NAS. In my previous post I wrote about why backups are important and described my personal backup strategy. In this blog post I’ll describe the nitty-gritty involved with setting up automatic replication to an…

What modern science has to say about obesity, diabetes and cholesterol — Recently, my wife and I watched a documentary movie called Fat Fiction (2020) and had our minds blown! Turns out that there is no science behind some of the things we were taught about nutrition during grade school. Needless to say, we have since made drastic changes to our diet. …

Tips and tricks on how to do fast OCR with Python and Tesseract — Unstructured text is the opposite of what you find in a printed text book. It’s when you have text in random places with different fonts, sizes and colors. Traditionally OCR (optical character recognition / text extraction) of such unstructured text has been a difficult problem. …

Here is how you setup your Linux computer to code, build and debug apps for Windows — Wait.. what? Yeah.. you read that right! You can use the comfort of your Linux computer, with your multi-monitors and tools setup just right, to develop Windows stuff. No, using a remote desktop doesn’t count. That’s laggy and you can’t use your Linux tools. I am leveraging SSH here, which is nothing…

Zbarlight is a lightweight Python wrapper for the popular ZBar barcode reader library. In this post I describe how to get it to work in Windows. — Why? I am currently developing an application that needs to quickly decode QR codes off of a video stream. I initially started development under Ubuntu and evaluated Python modules on Pypi. It appeared that all the popular libraries were based on libzbar, which is based on the popular ZBar project. The…