Recent content on Miguel Magalhães
Recently, I’ve been frequenting the cinema thanks to my unlimited cinema pass subscription. For just 15 EUR per month, I have the freedom to watch any movie available in that cinema chain, anytime. This pass has encouraged me to see films I might not have otherwise considered. It’s the classic case of the sunken cost fallacy: since I’ve already paid for the pass, I feel compelled…
Are you looking for ways to manage your finances better? I have many friends in Ireland and Portugal, where I am/was a tax resident, who ask me quite a few questions regarding personal finances. As the usual finance post starts: this is not financial advice and this reflects my own personal views on the topic. Most of my knowledge comes from two subreddit r/irishpersonalfinance/ for Ireland (check…
“Why should you listen to this clown?” The clown in picture is the Turing-award winner Leslie Lamport and that’s the question he asks the viewers of his Introduction to TLA video part of the TLA Video Course, which I recommend you to watch. Lamport is also famous for LaTeX, Paxos algorithm, Lamport’s bakery algorithm, among others. In this post, we will focus on his work on…
Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) collects several images (bands) over a wide and continuous wavelength range. This forms a hyperspectral (HS) cube formed by 3 dimensions — 2 for the spatial position and 1 for the spectral coordinate ($x,y,\lambda$). 1 HSI has proven its usefulness with its rich spectral information, but lacks acutely in terms of spatial resolution. This is caused by hardware…
Recently, I’ve finished reading Principles, a book authored by Ray Dalio, a distinguished hedge fund manager and investor. In this book, Dalio highlights the importance of applying principles to our work, investment, and daily life. While I may not agree with all the principles put forth in the book, I find the concept itself quite compelling due to its straightforward and rational nature.…
My last year was both challenging and rewarding, with a lot happening in such a short period of time. Although, I haven’t been as active here as I wanted to (due to everything else I had to attend), I am writing this post to do a retrospective of 2022. Besides being able to share this with you, the writing of this blog post should help me look back at this period of my life to consider what…
The image alignment and registration pipeline takes two input images that contain the same scene from slightly different viewing angles. The picture above displays both input images side by side with the common scene (object) being the painting Las Meninas (1656) by Velázquez, currently at the Museo del Prado in Madrid (Spain). The first step is computing the projection that establishes the…
Recently, I’ve been riding my Xiaomi M365 quite a lot during this summer in sunny Portugal. However, since I’m 1.93m and weight over 90kg, the electric scooter has some issues on handling steep inclines (specially on cobblestone, which is extremely common over here). To improve the riding experience, I’ve decided to mod the scooter. When doing this, one must take into account the…
Recently, I’ve crossed an entire country in a straight line. “Why?”, you might ask… why not? Inspired by Tom Davies (aka GeoWizard), I decided to go on this harmless challenge across… Monaco! Not as exciting as Tom’s missions across Norway or Wales, but good enough as an adventure. Before embarking on this trip, some planning had to be done. Since Monaco is a…
Last week, DjangoCon Europe 2021 took place completelly online from the 2nd to the 6th of June. This yearly european conference focuses on the web framework Django, and it includes 5 days of talks, sprints, and tutorials. I was the lead co-organizer and it was both extremelly fullfilling and completelly exhausting! Orginally, the conference was planned to take place physically at the Super Bock…
ℹ️ COVID-19 vaccine Learn more from the World Health Organization. Earlier today, I went to get my first COVID-19 vaccine dose. Although accross the pond it might seem normal for a young person to be getting the vaccine, it’s still considered early for continental Europe, in particular France. So how did I get mine? Firstly, I’d like to make it clear that I did not cut in line! The…
This week (at the time of writing), I was a guest at the The Real Python Podcast - a weekly Python podcast hosted by Christopher Bailey. It includes interviews, coding tips, and conversation with guests from the Python community. As co-organizers of DjangoCon Europe 2021, David and I talked a bit about the conference: how the organization of the virtual event has been, some of the difficulties in…
A convolution is a mathematical operation that is done by multiplying a pixel’s and its neighboring pixels color value by a weighted matrix, and then adding those values together (for all the pixels of an image). The small matrix that defines the weights of the multiplication is called kernel or convolution matrix. This is used to apply effects to an image such as blurring, sharpening, outlining,…
If creating your personal page has been on your mind for a while, I hope this blog post inspires you to go through with it. This is not intended to be a manual, but an overview of my own process. As I’ve previously mentioned, it is important to define some guidelines of what we want to achieve (even if later on we need to change them). As such, this webpage is intended to be lightweight and…
Let’s start with the computer programming cliché phrase: > Hello, World It’s 2021 and I’m currently living in France as a grad student in a computer science program. “Inspired by the French writers Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Gustave Flaubert, I’ve decided to start my blog!” - not really, but I admit it would be cooler. This will be the place to share my personal…