Here is the definition of A279860 from OEIS: a(n) is the first n-digit substring to repeat in the decimal expansion of e. There is ongoing competition[ 1 , 2 ] to find such repeated sequences in π, A197123 , so I took a crack at the second-most-famous transcendental constant. I searched the first 250 billion digits and found a(1) - a(22) . a(23) was not found (I only had a 26.8% chance of finding…
When writing papers, managing evaluation data and plots has been consistently troublesome. While getting to the first draft of a plot is often quick, the challenge arises during the inevitable subsequent revisions. Here’s the workflow I’ve been using to speed up my iteration time. Issues & Inconveniences There are two categories of issues/inconveniences that my previous bespoke Excel-based…
I used to use a OnePlus 6T. One day, the screen stopped accepting touch input. The Android ecosystem has been a bit slow lately, and I didn’t want to create e-waste, so I tried to get the screen replaced. I found a company with a local store, uBreakiFix, that could service my phone. However, the new screen seemed dull and lifeless. Worse, it had backlight bleed . That should be impossible. My…
Background Some things are too important in technology to not standardize. Contacts and calendars, for example. They can be represented as vCard and iCal respectively. These work fine for simple import/export operations, but they provide little aid in supporting users across devices. CardDAV and CalDAV are the synchronization protocols built on top of vCard and iCal. Thanks to them, you can use…
I’ve organized a hackathon or two. Figuring out how to score them is difficult. Even excluding social aspects aggregating results is far from an exact science. However, some methods can enforce additional constraints. Especially if they don’t have to be simple or practical. Reducing the probability of ties Ties can be problematic in practice at competitions. Should two teams receive the same…
Back in 2016, I wrote a daemon that grabbed the system battery stats every second and dumped it into a CSV. I ran it on my laptop for 99 days: Major takeaways: Cheap replacement lithium-ion batteries have a really limited number of cycles. Linux laptop power management still has a ways to go. Pulling battery stats and writing a file once per second isn’t great for power management.
The malloc function is fairly simple. Either give me a pointer to some memory I can use or give me NULL if I’ve asked for too much. And, on Linux that’s exactly what happens: int main () { int * ptr ; ptr = malloc ( 1000 ); // ptr = 0x563bd6707260 ptr = malloc ( 1000000000000 ); // ptr = 0x0 printf ( "%p \n " , ptr ); } However, something interesting happens when you try this on a Mac: It works……
I’m thrilled that this year I had the opportunity to present my research at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research at Kennesaw State University. Day 1 NCUR19 kicked off with a plenary session featuring a keynote on whale sharks . Thanks to the Georgia Aquarium, which has the only captive whale sharks in the US, Atlanta is the front-runner on their research. Even though a handful are…
Swerve drives are fun. While sometimes impractical they check off more boxes than any other drivetrain. Not only can you drive them in any direction, but you can also rotate independently, all while using conventional wheels aimed in the optimal direction for force. Unlike mecanum wheels, which have found use in forklifts, swerve is almost exclusively used by FIRST robotics groups. Mathematical…
The OSU Freshman Engineering program concludes with a Software Design Project where students compete to build the best MATLAB games they can. Since there was no way I’d win for UI I took a stab at building a multiplayer version of battleship. Background While MATLAB certainly isn’t known for its easy game creation this hasn’t stopped people from creating some really impressive projects. TCP/IP…