Part of the beautify of git is that it is distributed. I’ve often hosted projects on more centralized services like GitHub or GitLab. I’ve also hosted some repos on private servers using just plain git and ssh. But, for a while now I’ve wanted to host mirrors of projects on my own servers, but still have some access control and a web interface. No need for the overhead of issues and pull requests if I accept patches via an email-based workflow.

If you’re hosting a mumble server, it’s nice to get a server certificate so that your server is trusted by default. This means that people joining your server won’t have to manually accept a self-signed server certificate.

It’s always interesting how some toys rise and fall in popularity. Pogs were popular just before my time, but haven’t made a comeback. I grew up with the craze of Pokemon cards, and Magic: The Gathering, the latter of which seems to still be popular with my nephews.

Rubik’s cubes seems to be another game that has lasting enjoyment, and my nephews recently wanted to learn how to solve one. So, I took this as an opportunity to learn a more modern method myself, and put together small cheat sheet that is handy to use when teaching someone to solve a cube.

If you use Zoom on Linux, you may have noticed that about a month ago, they pushed an update which scaled the UI elements to be very large. There are a couple of suggestions on reddit for how to address this.

Usually you want asynchronous communication for remote work. But when you don’t, consider Mumble as a potential tool for maintaining a community-like feel for synchronous communication and serendipitous interactions.

Cable lacing is a technique for managing cables by lacing them together or to harnesses using a series of running lockstitches. This is done using waxed cord or flat lacing tape, often made of nylon or polyester. Where most people reach for plastic or Velcro zip ties to do this job, I’ve found that spending some time to use string is quite enjoyable. I’m not trained in the high standards of cable lacing used by NASA, the Navy, or other experts. But, for just managing cables around the house, these references work well.

It’s important that research be accessible and reproducible so that results and evaluations can be verified. As part of Stanford’s graduate course on computer networks, students have been reproducing parts of network systems research papers for several years on the public Reproducing Network Research blog.

Knowledge bases are incredible enablers of valuable downstream applications such as information retrieval, question answering, medical diagnosis, and data visualization. However, building high quality knowledge bases can be incredibly difficult. While extensive efforts have been focused on unstructured text, troves of information remains untapped in richly formatted data, where relations are conveyed using textual, structural, tabular, and visual cues.