Our dog is so ridiculous. ❤️

I’ve been on a machine learning kick lately. Given a large enough dataset to train with, it’s really interesting to see what a neural network can come up with.

This week, it’s names for craft beer.

If you’re a fan of IPA beer, you’ve got names like Dang River, Yamquak, Yall in Wool, Wicked Geee, Yampy, and Oarahe Momnila Day Revenge Bass Cornationn Yerve Of Aterid Ale. Like strong pale ales? Trippel Lock, Third Maus, Third Danger, Spore of Gold and Drammnt. Stouts more your thing? Look for Sir Coffee, Shock Slate, Take Bean, Black Sink Stout, Shrump, Avidberry, or Cherry Trout Stout.

Naturally, I tried to create my own model using a Python library called Keras and a dataset of 7,500 craft beer names.

…I should leave this stuff to the professionals.

Update: Kaggle has a new tutorial teaching you how to do this exact same thing. Neat!

Recently, I decided to start meditating in order to be more mindful of the present, be less anxious about the future, and to just enjoy things as they happen. It’s not an end-all-be-all cure to life’s problems, but it feels good and definitely helps reshape your perspective on things.

I picked up the book 10% Happier by Dan Harris.

It definitely seems like one of those cheesy self-help books, but it was a pretty quick and easy read.

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.

I’d encourage folks to try it.

Fun fact: You can replace “typical Fourth of July” with “typical New Years Eve”, “typical Warriors win”, “typical Friday night…”

Playing around with some circuits, LEDs, and an Arduino. Pretty neat!

Saw them tonight at the UC Theater in Berkeley. They rank up there as one of my favorite bands of all time.

Do you have an iPad? Because you can totally play Civ on your iPad.

“WHAT?! NO. CIV REVOLUTION DOESN’T COUNT,” you loudly yell.

JUST WAIT! I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Civ V (and even Civ VI).

Photo Proof here:

How does this magic work?

Yes, you guys will think I’m crazy but I regularly play Civ on my iPad. (What?!). I’m also a masochist. But you can totally make it work.

There are a few options:

• Through Nvidia’s Geforce Experience app:
• Have a Windows PC with an Nvidia graphics card (What if you don’t have one? We’ll tackle that farther down.)
• Make sure GeForce Experience is installed. This basically allows streaming through the same protocol that Nvidia Shield uses.
• Install Moonlight on your iOS device (iPhone?!?!) or even an Android device. Open source app that can connect / parse Nvidia Shield streams.
• Play Civ! (Via dragging your finger around to simulate a mouse, sometimes tedious, but it works!)

Pros: You get to play Civ on your iPad!

Cons: Kind of a pain to setup.

Through Remotr:

• Have a Windows PC (hmm, there seems to be a pattern here).
• Install Remotr on your PC. It should auto-detect Civ V. It doesn’t auto-detect Civ VI for me though.
• Install Remotr on your iPad.
• Open Remotr and play Civ!

Pros: You get to play Civ on your iPad! And it’s much easier to setup on your Windows PC, plus you aren’t tied to an Nvidia only GFX card.

Cons: The iPad app is free (good!). But whenever you disconnect from your game (or maybe something crashes), it will show you one of those cheesy popup ads that won’t let you click away for 10 seconds or so. You can optionally pay for a monthly pro subscription through an in-app purchase. Also, Remotr tries to squeeze your (probably 16:9) resolution display into the iPad’s 4:3 display. So things will look janky. Just change the resolution of Civ to 1024 x 768 and things will look good on your touch screen device. (Obviously, change it back when you get back to your real machine though).

Through Screens (I also have a Mac) or a similar VNC client.

• Install VNC server of your choice on your Mac or Windows machine.
• Install a VNC client of your choice on your iPad or other mobile device.
• Open and play Civ!

Pros: You get to play Civ on your iPad!

Cons: While Civ isn’t what we think of as a graphically intense game, prepare for a bunch of jerkiness as you move the map around, delays while various modals pop up, screen tearing. But… you get to play Civ.