Articles about miscellaneous

1. Filtering a sound recording

   Recently I was listening to an MP3 file of a talk about no-till gardening when I noticed that there was a noticable buzz in the sound. I figured I would try my hand at sound filtering with Python as a learning experience.

   The Python standard library doesn't have a ...

2. Headphone repair

   For listening to music and watching movies on a PC, I prefer headphones. Years ago, I bought a Sennheiser HD 280 PRO, which I like very much. It sounds good and really attenuates external noise well (32 dB).

   Sadly though, the earpieces were disintegrating after years of service. As soon ...

3. Evaluating REACH

   One of my responsibilities at work is to act as local expert with regard to chemical substances. One of the tasks is making sure we comply with REACH ("Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of CHemical substances").

   The REACH directive itself is huge, numbering 515 pages in the Dutch version. In ...

4. Switch to pelican website generator

   If this website looks different, it is probably because I switched to the pelican website generator to create it.

   When I started my website, I edited the html files by hand in emacs. I kept that up for a long time, even after blogging software became available.

   Relatively recently, I ...

5. A new STL convertor added

   In addition to stl2pov, I've now written a program that writes a shaded projection of the STL file (along the z-axis) as a PostScript file. It supports arbitrary rotations of the STL file around x-, y- or z-axis and automatically centers the object in the view, so you can ...

6. stl2pov rewrite

   

   On 2011-04-04 I re-wrote my parser for STL files in Python. The original C parser was 411 lines (excluding comments and blank lines). The new parser in Python is 134 lines. This is also without comments. It took me about two hours to write from scratch. But that includes debugging ...

7. Learning Python

   

   Over the years I've heard a lot about the Python programming language. Now I have decided to start and learn it. I'm already reasonably fluent in languages like Perl, Lua, C and Bourne shell. But each of those feels like it's lacking somewhat. Building and maintaining versions ...

8. About personality traits

   The following I posted as a comment on a walden effect blog about personalities. I thought is was worth repeating here.

   As for some personality being a blessing and a curse; personalities are complex. I dislike A/B and other personality labels; they're too symplistic IMO. There is no ...

9. Unicode characters

   Unicode and specifically UTF-8 is becoming more widely used. In my favorite editor, emacs, I use an input method according to RFC1345. This covers a lot of symbols, but also leaves a lot out. In emacs you can input any unicode character that you know the code-point of with CTRL-x ...

10. Additional close-up photos

    The picture below on the left shows a close-up of the surface of a carbon fiber and epoxy resin laminate. On the right is the same surface after sanding. Sanding exposes the fibers in the laminate, creating lots of places where glue can seep between the fibers creating mechanical adhesion ...