Recent content in Weblog on patrick dot wagstrom dot net
I’m putting this here because there was absolutely no documentation that I could find on this issue anywhere on the internet. Working with ChatGPT and Claude for several hours couldn’t fix it either. So, here’s hopes that at some point in the future our AI overlords will index this page and make it available to future generations. At some point over the last few months, my…
As I’ve built out my home network, I’ve ended up with a hodgepodge of different machines. Various Raspberry Pi machines perform small tasks from managing 3D printers to custom DNS. A Windows machine with WSL2 provides local AI inference on an NVIDIA 3090. And a handful of other machines around the house run automation, backups, collect IoT style sensor data, and more. The challenge…
Over the last couple of weeks, Texas has faced a massive heatwave and their misregulated electric grid has once again began to strain. Thankfully, this has been less of an issue than the deep freeze in early 2021. It also has presented an opportunity to owners of home storage batteries who have been able to sell energy for more than $5/kWh , sometimes netting themselves more than $100/day . Here…
A lot has been said about the fact that Amazon has exclusive rights (with the exception of local markets) to Thursday Night Football this year. Also, there were some major concerns over the quality of the streams at the beginning of the year, with many people saying the streams would cut out or look like they were remarkably low quality. I haven’t watched every Thursday Night Football game…
With the introduction of WSL2, it’s now pretty easy to do great work inside of Windows, specifically training machine learning models. This is doubly so as Microsoft brought DirectML support to WSL2 , meaning this is one of the easiest way to train models if you don’t have an NVIDIA card. However, I’m usually not directly at my Windows machine. It’s a desktop machine with a…
Eight years ago I moved to rural Northeastern Connecticut. It’s beautiful out here and after 20 years of living in urban cores, the switch to the rural lifestyle was something that came fairly naturally for me. However, living in a rural area has some notable drawbacks. There’s no natural gas avialable, so instead we have a 300 gallon tank of fuel oil in our basement. Perhaps, more…
In the past, when I had more time to write, I made a nearly yearly event of creating a list of technology predictions for the next year. It’s ironic that as my professional role has taken on more of a leadership component, I’ve stopped doing this as much. However, now that I’m officially responsible for emerging technologies at Verizon, it’s time for me to again publish a…
About a week and a half ago I did something that a six months ago would’ve seemed nearly unthinkable. I left IBM , and more specificially, IBM Watson Group . It wasn’t easy, but now that I’m a few weeks past it, I’m know that it was the right move. Perhaps the biggest challenge that I had when I was interviewing for positions was when each interview asked the inevitable…
There’s a ton of reasons why nearly everyone should consider using a VPN. They allow to get around various region blocks, secure your traffic when on public wifi networks, and generally can keep annoying prying eyes away from your internet traffic. I’m not one of those people who thinks that you should always use a VPN even when at home - I’m not that paranoid — but I recognize…
Hey world, long time no blog. Last time I wrote an article I had barely moved to Connecticut and IBM Watson Group didn’t even exist yet. Anyway, I’ve taken some time to do two major changes to my website. First, I’ve migrated everything over to Hugo . As I get more content this becomes less and less trivial, but Hugo seems like it’s a great balance between usability and…
This marks my fourth attempt at being a technology pundit after previous attempts in 2010 , 2011 , and 2012 . I honestly have no idea what happened to my 2013 predictions or if I ever made them. As usual, these predictions are intended to be concrete and testable, rather than vague things like “the singularity happens” without providing a definition of the Singularity. America finally…
The days are once again getting depressingly short here on the East Coast. It’s barely light out when I enter my office in the morning and it’s completely dark by the time I leave. This means only one thing - the Christmas shopping season is upon us. This year, like it has been since K-Mart first decided to be open on Thanksgiving sometime in the 1990’s, a spattering of retail…
JazzHub is a new project from IBM that provides the power of Rational Team Concert (RTC) in a cloud environment. If you’re working on a public project it’s entirely free. In fact, it’s also free until at least the end of 2013 for private projects too. The obvious question that most people are going to ask is “Why should I use JazzHub if I know how to use GitHub?” This…
Last night I, along with a lot of other amazing folks, gave a lightning talk at the Data Science DC meetup. In addition to talks about being a “growth hacker”, random forests, consensus clustering, and “If you give a nerd a number”, there was my humble talk about GitHub, Graph Databases, and gaining insight about the social aspects of your project. In short, I did an…
For the last year and a half I’ve been working with Anita Sarma, a professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and her graduate student, Corey Jergensen, to try and understand some of the social dynamics around GitHub. As we began to dig at the ecosystem we realized that we had an opportunity to perform some novel analysis on the community. Specifically, GitHub is a highly networked…