I received my Orange 30 in a well-packed box via DHL. My box did not contain a manual, which I think might be an indication that it was among the first few hundred printers shipped. (It did, however, have a USB with what would apparently have been the printed manual …

One of my big weekend projects (for longer than I care to think) has been trying to create a pipeline for identifying individual whalesharks from photos. The project had kind of grown moribund as I repeatedly failed to get any decent level of recognition despite using what I thought was …

OMG I can't believe I missed this competition. It's exactly in line with my whaleshark identification project.

https://www.kaggle.com/c/humpback-whale-identification

Here's a baby humpback whale that swam up to the boat a few weeks ago. In the second photo you can see it popped it's head up …

I'm a big fan of using a pair of identical networks to create output vectors that are then fed into a network that is trained to judge whether it's two input vectors are the same or different.

This is a powerful technique for "low k-shot" comparisons. Most ML techniques that …

Ricky Jay was one of my heroes. I first became aware of him in the pages of the remarkable “Cards as Weapons,” an oversized paperback that I bought at age 13 because it had a few pictures of topless women in it (you really can’t appreciate how much the …

Once upon a time, when I, a C programmer, first learned Smalltalk, I remember lamenting to J.D. Hildebrand "I just don't get it: where's the main()?" Eventually I figured it out, but the lesson remained: Sometimes when learning a new paradigm, what you need isn't a huge tutorial, it's …

I’m a hair’s-breadth away from declaring that “The Deuce,” HBO’s Sunday night “prestige drama” about flesh-peddling and pornos in Times Square and 42nd Street in the mid-70s, is an exercise in trolling, some kind of meta-level commentary on the lack of drama, characterization, or stakes in, y …

This last weekend I participated in the "Hack for the Sea" hackathon. As part of that, I needed to store images and structured data to Azure Storage. The process is very straightforward using F#'s async capabilities.

First, you'll need the connection string for your Azure Storage:

Use that to …

In Xamarin, if you observe / subscribe to a particularly-named NSNotification in an object that is IDisposable (this includes any class descended from NSObject!), you MUST explicitly unsubscribe from it in your Dispose handler, or you will get a segfault (the system will attempt to call a method at a memory …

Whalesharks are the largest fish in the ocean, but very little is known about their movements (where they breed, for instance, has been a huge mystery, although there's now pretty good evidence that some, at least, breed in the Galapagos).

Whalesharks have a "fingerprint" in the form of distinct spots …