High level intro to everything you need to know to get started with cross compiling — Primer What is cross compiling? The act of compiling applications to run on a different computer system is referred to as “cross compiling”. This is oppose to “native compiling” where what you compiled is supposed to run on the same system that you compiled it on. The classic example for cross compiling is when you…

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. …

Some not-so-obvious stuff I wish I didn’t have to learn the hard way — 1. Tooling Before you do any scripting, install these must have tools: VS Code: Seriously, don’t use the default text editor to write shell script ShellCheck: A powerful static analysis tool. Available standalone or more preferably as a VS Code extension shell-format: Code formatter for VS Code Code Spell Checker: spell checker…

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. …

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…

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. …