Recurse Center, 2014-06-26

Thu, 26 Jun 2014 09:30:20 -0400

I played around a little bit with my emacs configuration and got jedi working, with virtualenvs, thanks to virtualenvwrapper.el
Continue to work on the singal processing stuff and built a DTMF decoder using FFTs. It’s able to decode audacity generated audio, but not recorded ones. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong, yet.
As with every Thursday, there were a bunch of interesting presentations:
- A rice cooker hooked up to an arduino in an afternoon!
- A presentation on how scopes act as monoids
- An implementation of Eularian Video Magnification
- A regex engine visualizer using NetworkX.
- A tag system to organize your files
- A web-socket based chat client
- A Go Parser written in Go
- …

Recurse Center, 2014-06-25

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 09:51:07 -0400

I like how some of the people here are taking check-ins so seriously. A bunch of people posted messages on Zulip, informing that they would not be able to make it to check-ins, and seemed quite sorry about it.
Check-ins are indeed useful. At the end of every day, I review my work wondering what I did, and sometimes end up pushing myself harder, to have something reasonable to talk about during the check-ins!
Yesterday, I read up about FFTs and ended up playing around with fft in scipy, and played around with audacity, etc. Nothing concrete, really.
There was a “goals” workshop by Stacey, where she talked about how to get the most out of this batch of Hacker School, and then we split into groups of 3, and presented our goal-statements to each other, and gave our impressions of each others’ goals.
I didn’t really have a goal, but the exercise seemed to help, anyway.
Also, I think it is making me nervous to treat Hacker School as super-important. It is important to make the best use of every hour, every minute here, but at the same time, I shouldn’t be constantly worrying about whether or not, whatever I’m doing is the best use of my time here.
I think I would like to form some good habits, and make a few good friends, more than finish projects and build something uber-cool. Of course, it would be great to build awesome stuff (and may be the only reasonable way to form habits, and make friends) but I shouldn’t worry too much about time running out. Never Graduate!