Recent content in Alex Dunn's personal site on
If you lived in Northern California during the December of 2021, you may have noticed the torrential downpour causing thousands of downed trees, multi-week power outages, and general mayhem. Up here in the mountains, we received the snowiest December on record and the third-snowiest month of all time. We, of course, took advantage of this snowpocalypse with some dives off of our deck - normally a…
Over a couple of weekends a few months ago, I made a weather dashboard which you can run yourself and which stores all it’s data (optionally) on your own resources in perpetuity. It is a relatively basic from a meteorology perspective but shows a lot of data pertinent to a layman (like me). It is configurable for any latitude and longitude in the world and includes air quality measurements…
TOC: What is this? The Hall of Fame The Hall of Shame What is this? Much as great literature, high art, or great music deserves praise, so does software. And I mean software in all of its forms - from robust bash scripts which hide in the internet’s shadows, to the expansive open-source projects known the world over, to weirdly helpful websites which refuse to run ads, and even to a select…
I came upon a Python situation recently where I had to hash a dictionary of arbitary depth, where: all keys are strings all values are either strings, numbers (numpy or native python ints/floats), basic iterables (non-object dtype numpy ndarrays, numerical pandas Series, or native python lists or tuples of python native numbers/strings), OR… …values are themselves dictionaries…
At 2:00 AM on June 21, 2020, my two friends and I began climbing Mt. Shasta; what followed was an exhausting 2 day trek filled with many highs, lows, and a helicopter rescue. Whether you’re reading this just for kicks or preparing for a Shasta climb of your own, this post should offer some interesting content. If you’re just looking for cool video, skip to the Helicopter rescue section
Just a quick and fun update: earlier in December, my friend and I got put in a Wall Street Journal story about… Science? Politics? The internet? No, none of the above. Seemingly at random, we got put in the WSJ for a story about phone cases. Check out the live version here. Featuring pictures of us! In case (no pun intended) you’re wondering, I do in fact have the beefiest case ever,…
CalGradData: Interactive Visualization of Cal Graduate Financial Data Recently the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly put out a call for a Data Visualization contest of UC Berkeley’s graduate financial data. I think their motivation was to take the most boring data on the planet and transform it into an engaging and interesting form. Whether they succeeded or not, only time will tell. Well my…
TOC: Motivation Step A: Requirements Step B: Physical setup and formatting Step C: Mounting and configuration Step D: Test out your new time machine Maintenance and Conclusions Motivation I have a Macbook Pro (2017) dedicated exclusively to my work as a graduate student. If I lost it and had no backup, i would be uttely devastated. Having a backup is an absolute necessity - as the saying goes:
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Here’s some pictures I took with a DSLR (more coming soon!) yuba river, ca yuba river, ca astoria, or cathedral peak, ca eastern sierra, ca grouse ridge, ca grouse ridge, ca downtown la, ca echo park, ca sabrina wilderness, ca santa barbara, ca seattle, wa lake tahoe, nv yosemite, ca
TOC: Introduction Step A: Configure SSH Access Step B: Configure automatic backups with crontab and rsync Step C: Easily mount your Pi with SSHFS Step D (optional): Configure access outside the local network Step E (optional): Configure a samba share Maintenance and Conclusions For $35, the Raspberry Pi is an incredible single board computer. You can connect to the internet, run Linux, automate…
The posts section on this website are an elcectic collection of my non-work interests, experiments, and thoughts. Generally what’s here is related to computing, technology, science, or mathematics, but not strictly so! If you are hoping to learn more about the research I’ve worked on, my Google Scholar is the best place for that; if you’re looking for the code I’ve…
My CV Scientific computing and data science. (And sometimes both together) Last updated: 2022.08.20 I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the HackingMaterials group at LBL. I use computers to help find and design new materials; I design and deploy machine learning pipelines, run quantum-mechanical simulations, and develop open source software to help automate these processes. I also work alongside the…
Here’s a short list of recent - and relatively self-contained - open-source software projects I’ve created, led, or principally developed. If you are interested in larger scale projects that I helped develop, but did not lead (e.g., matminer), see my Github profile. If you are interested in non-open source projects I’ve lead , please contact me via email. Data Mining automatminer…