I Hacked My Dehumidifier to Control it Over WiFi
See disccusion on Reddit.
Tobias van der Werff
Personal website of Tobias van der Werff
Latest posts
The Age of AI-Powered Curiosity
When I was a kid, I used to ask my mother all kinds of questions about the world, asking things like Why is the sky blue? or Why does the sun disappear at night? Although my mother is a patient woman, she would usually get tired of my never-ending stream of why questions pretty quickly. Usually, this meant that she would shut down the conversation with a simple “because that’s just how it is”.
CUDA C++: Using __CUDA_ARCH__ the Right Way
TL;DR: Read this section of the CUDA C++ Programming Guide before using the __CUDA_ARCH__ macro so that you’re aware of cases where it’s problematic.
The Lindy Effect: Explaining the Longevity of Legacy Software
“Wanted: people who want to learn a programming language from 1959,” headlined a recent Dutch newspaper article. The language in question is COBOL, a language so old that most of the programmers who know it are either dead or retired. Nonetheless, banks, government institutions, and other large organizations still rely on this ancient language for some of their most critical infrastructure.
Why You Should Take a Personality Assessment
To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock. - Carl Jung
Knowledge Worth Learning
What makes someone motivated to learn new things? In my opinion, trying to answer this question is crucial to success in a knowledge economy. Most people have a learning style which is unique to them. For example, I consider myself a highly pragmatic person. I like to remind myself of this from time to time because it helps me to ground my thinking and better understand my motivations and drives.…
CNN vs. Vision Transformer: A Practitioner’s Guide to Selecting the Right Model
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a popular model architecture in computer vision research, excelling in a variety of tasks and surpassing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in most benchmarks. As practitioners, we often face the dilemma of choosing the right architecture for our projects. This blog post aims to provide guidelines for making an informed decision on when to use CNNs versus…
Extracting High-Quality Keyframes from Videos Using FFmpeg
I recently found out that when extracting individual frames from a video, not all frames are of the same quality. This is because temporal compression is employed to store videos in a more efficient way, without needing to store each individual frame in its full size. It exploits the similarities between neighboring frames to reduce the amount of data needed to store the video. This can lead to…
Using Albumentations in Detectron2
I have recently been using Detectron2 to train deep learning models for object detection and instance segmentation. This works great, but I found that there is one area in which Detectron2 is lacking: data augmentation. Although it has a decent API for data transforms, it has a limited selection of useful data augmentations. Normally, a dedicated data augmentation library such as Albumentations…