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paulwetzel

21 karma · joined June 2, 2024

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paulwetzel··on UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub
I cant really understand why Jupyter Notebooks do this in the first place. It makes it (a) really hard to version control, as there will always be some random blob of non-textual data in the notebook that pops up in a diff and makes it basically unreadable and (b) I can't really see the benefit, as it only stores some part of the data, and not the full table, as far as I am aware.

Enforcing Jupytext is a good adaption, and gives you all the, arguably really nice, comfort from a notebook, and the proper code practice from SW engineering.

paulwetzel··on CT Scans of Health Wearables
Really love these scans! I would love to have on of these at home, just to tinker with devices and understand how they work. Then I usually want to check the price, see "Talk to sales" an decide probably not the price range that is good for private use. Nonetheless, great articles and an amazing device.
paulwetzel··on Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere
If you set up the static site generator as a CI/CD action in you favorite git provider, can work with both hosted GitHub, GitLab, etc. or self hosted Forgejo [1], you have both version control for your blog as well as an automatic way of publishing.

Sure, the UX is not that great as with a dedicated interface like substack, but building a Hugo site is really just editing markdown files anyway, most mobile git enabled editors should be able to do that.

[1]: https://home.futuretim.io/posts/hugo_build_and_post/

paulwetzel··on Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
I think Voyager is not just a space exploration project, but more a demonstration of technical ingenuity. Sure, the probe probably collected great data just by being where no other probe was before, but to be real: I don't know nearly enough about space exploration research to get excited about the results and mostly just looked at the pictures.

What amazes me about the device and the mission as a whole is the sheer challenge of operating a device that is so far away, you have to use the prefix light to make the scale understandable. I like devices, that have been engineered to something close to perfection. I think aircraft a cool because they so very rarely fail. I think that pacemakers are amazing, because they can not fail. This is another example, and perhaps one of the greatest: a spacecraft that is running for 40+ years in the harshest environments and still works.

And that's not even touching the emotional and somewhat existential thoughts that comes with the scale and distance this little guy has traveled.

paulwetzel··on Minecraft HDL, an HDL for Redstone
Super cool project :) Just the right level of, objectively useless - but really fun!
paulwetzel··on OVM6948 miniature camera module [pdf]
For the most part, when working with hardware, I find this to be quite typical. A spec sheet, if one is lucky maybe an application note tackling a tangentially similar problem and thats usually it. Unfortunately open source hardware tends to be much less of a thing than software.
paulwetzel··on Chemistry Nobel: Computational protein design and protein structure prediction
While I am skeptical about yesterdays award in physics, these are totally deserved and spot on. There are few approaches that will accelerate the field of drug development and chemistry as a whole in a way that the works of these three people will. Congratulations!