Books Giveaway
Let me know if you want any of these books and it’s yours. https://drola-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/matjaz_matjazdrolc_eu/Ea2Qtuam2xhNlMdW7UtS1ZkBss5f3rOY5LoNoEIWt9sy4Q?e=SIAPxH
Home on Matjaž Drolc
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This week in climbing: 01/2022
Summary of my week in climbing: January 3rd - January 9th. Climbing lessons The exercise is simple. Put a short piece of rope (20-40cm) on top of each shoe and climb a route without any piece of rope falling off. There are more variations to this exercise. Pieces of rope can be replaced with coins or hacky sacks. Maintaining those pieces of rope on top of shoes requires extremely controlled feet…
Climbing lessons debrief: Flags
This is a debrief from last week’s climbing technique lessons. Lesson 7 Goals: Extend the warm-up with muscle activation circuit: 5 push-ups, 3-5 pull-ups, and a 10-second hang (straight arms, activated shoulders!). Repeat the circuit 3 times. Negate a barn door by utilizing a back flag Observations: The warm-up: When warming up, the hang board is not the appropriate place to do the hangs.…
Climbing lessons debrief: Adrenaline Rush
This is a debrief from this week’s climbing lessons. I’m taking a course on belaying when lead climbing and a course in climbing technique. This week I took the fourth (and final) lesson in belaying (lead) and the third one in climbing technique. Course: Belaying - Lead Climbing Lesson 4 Goal: Learn to fall and catch falls as a belayer safely and comfortably. Observations: This lesson…
Climbing lessons debrief: Ballet on the Wall
This is a debrief from this week’s climbing lessons. I’m taking a course on belaying when lead climbing and a course in climbing technique. This week I took the third lesson in belaying (lead) and the second one in climbing technique. Course: Belaying - Lead Climbing Lesson 3 Goal: Learn to give out slack quickly with a Grigri by squeezing the brake. Rehearse everything we learned so…
Climbing lessons debrief
This is a debrief from this week’s climbing lessons. I’m taking a course on belaying when lead climbing and a course in climbing technique. This week I took the second lesson in belaying (lead) and the first one in climbing technique. Course: Belaying - Lead Climbing Lesson 2 Goal: Start belaying with a Grigri. This time without second belayer with top-rope technique. For now without…
On Schedule Frontend Development
My dream project makes me happy because we’re solving an important problem for our customers. To stay best in class we heavily rely on tooling. Automation lets us focus our brainpower on hard challenges. We reliably ship improvements and features, as multiple automatic safety nets catch problems in the product before a human touches the new version. The stakeholders are happy, as our…
Pareto meets Vim
It was at the JSDayES conference at Madrid where substack (James Halliday) coded on the stage of the big auditorium. The lines and words were changing quicker than I was used to. He wasn’t editing code character-by-character. Whole statements, lines, and blocks were moving around. Editing code like that looked magical to me. We weren’t watching a recording. It was Vim that was the…
These Lightroom Tools Will Ruin Your Timelapse
Lightroom is a Swiss knife for RAW files from a camera. When I come home from a shoot, I start Lightroom, import SD card contents, and edit the photos. For most photos, Lightroom will be the only piece of software sitting between a camera and the finished product. Timelapses are different. The end goal is to stitch individual shots into a video. For that part, I settled on using Adobe After…
Learning the Hard Way: A Story of 3 Shutterstock Rejections
I find photography a very relaxing hobby. It leads me to seek beautiful landscapes, wake up before sunrise, climb hills, and visit locations I wouldn’t bother with otherwise. This hobby ain’t cheap though. To offset the cost of the camera and the lens I signed up as a creator for Shutterstock. So far this made me richer by $0 dollars and some wisdom. Here are 3 rejected photos, and the…
NAS vs. Cloud in 2021
Here we are throwing some numbers on the table to decide where to put 10 TB of data I don’t want to lose.
My Favorite Podcasts in 2021
My choice of podcast mostly follows my interests otherwise: technology, business, software engineering. The podcasts listed below are the top picks among my subscriptions.
2021: The Year of Progressive Web Apps
In 2021, progressive web apps will be the choice of more app developers than ever before. New APIs, absence of gatekeepers, lower development cost, their cross-platform nature, instant updates and the push by Google and Amazon will make them the optimal choice for most situations.
Knowledge base
STM32 Blue Pill HID Bootloader sudo apt-get install stlink-tools stlink-gui (upstream: https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink/blob/develop/doc/tutorial.md) Install STM32 HID bootloader https://github.com/Serasidis/STM32_HID_Bootloader . Doing it via STLink v2 dongle is the easiest way. All jumpers stay in 0 position all the time For initial blinky, install…
Three tips for faster bulk inserts into a PostgreSQL database
Tens of gigabytes of data. An amount that doesn’t quite fit into an Excel spreadsheet but doesn’t warrant the use of big data tools like Hadoop either. PostgreSQL can easily handle this volume. This post is about speeding up the initial import of a large number of rows.
Seriously bad advice about SSL errors in Python and a better fix
This is a post about fixing certificate verify failed error in Python without compromising security of your code. Don’t blindly follow suggestions on the internet because some suggested solutions can have serious unintended consequences.
Books
Bodanis, David. E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation Brown, Dan Angels & Demons The Da Vinci Code Origin Digital Fortress Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time Hesse, Hermann. Siddharta Gladwell, Malcom. Outliers: The Story of Success McDougall, Christopher. Born to Run: A Hidden…
Why the shattered dream of the free internet is good?
When I was in my teens, the internet was a symbol of opportunity for me. In the physical world, we always lacked money. Parents sacrificed a lot to build a house. The jobs available to them were not great because of their education. We lived in a village, where everything seemed so backward to me. I was battling this internal fight with the environment around me. My father appreciated physical…
Tools I use
Electronics Ersa i-CON Pico - soldering station Raspberry PI USBasp - USB programmer for AVR microcontrollers Software Autodesk Fusion 360 Ubuntu Linux Services Toggl - time tracking Gitlab - git repositories and CI/CD pipelines Office 365 - office, e-mail Google Firebase - hosting for this and other sites Command-line software Insect - scientific calculator Hugo - static site generator oh my zsh…
Standardizing HTTP API testing
This blog post is actually a draft for a standard operating procedure for my software development and consulting business. I’ve come across the task of writing tests for HTTP APIs for three or four times in the last couple of months. I’ve tried multiple ways of writing automated tests and this is the method I’ve converged on. TypeScript, Jest, and supertest appear to work well…
Surely I can repair this. I've seen it on YouTube!
I love good sound. I’ve been suffering with my poor bookshelf speakers for a while now. They simply don’t produce enough output at the bottom end of the spectrum. I don’t want to annoy neighbors. But I do want to feel the rhythm. I went to a Hi-Fi store to listen to a couple of speakers. I flirted with a pair of Polk Signature Series S55 floor standing speakers. But I…
Uncomfortable, but great decision
You are reading a success story of avoiding premature optimization. I had to design an API for a service that receives some geographical data and returns the same data with additional information for each point of interest.
Creating JavaScript objects in 2018
If you want to learn how some popular design patterns look in JavaScript I recommend you to read The Comprehensive Guide to JavaScript Design Patterns by Marko Mišura. It argues why learning design patterns is important and shows some examples. However, the post was written in 2015. Since then JavaScript has evolved and obsoleted some common patterns that we were used to in the past. Making a…
How to easily speed up your prime number generator with factorization wheels
Prime numbers. Somehow boring and yet fascinating topic in mathematics. A number is a prime number if it’s divisible by one and by itself. In contrast composite numbers are divisible by one, itself and one or more other numbers. Primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13... Composites: 4 = 2 * 2, 6 = 2 * 3, 8 = 2 * 2 * 2, 10 = 2 * 5... It’s all so simple and obvious when numbers are small.
Academic Projects
Here are some reports/assignments I’ve done during my education at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of LJubljana. They’re mostly in Slovene. Seminar: Real-time cloth simulation [pdf, Slovene] Project for Industrial physics: Garage version of computer tomography using a gramophone: Slides [pdf, Slovene], Video Assignment for Mathematical physics 1 on the subject of current in…
WebAssembly
WebAssembly or wasm is a new portable, size- and load-time-efficient format suitable for compilation to the web. Official site: http://webassembly.org/ Presentation slides and transcript: https://wasm.drola.si Browser support Internet Explorer: no Firefox: 52+ Chrome: 57 Safari (WebKit): In development (source) MS Edge: 15, by enabling “Experimental JavaScript Features” flag (source) Opera: 44…
Dear FinTech companies, be careful with external scripts
Just last week I installed a Chrome extension called Privacy Badger. It is supposed to protect you from third party scripts included on websites that might track you. It does that by checking content loaded from other third-party domains. The side effect of this extension was that you suddenly begin to notice which sites include external scripts. I’d say I am not surprised by them on social media…
Slovenian hosting providers with PHP 7
Slovenian hosting providers with PHP 7 PHP 7 has been released months ago. Increased performance makes upgrading a really attractive option. Some of us still remember the long transition that took place when PHP 5 has been released. That’s why it was interesting to see state of PHP 7 support today. I posted an email to the most popular shared hosting providers in Slovenia. I asked them about state…