I've just migrated to a new Macbook Pro as my primary work machine. As part of setting it up, I installed the following: Caffeine to prevent it from going to sleep when I don't want it to go to sleep BetterTouchTool so that I can middle-click (three finger tap) to close tabs and paste in … Continue reading Setting up a new Macbook
Tuning wifi on Mac OS 10.10.3 Yosemite
I've experienced increasingly bad wifi performance on my Macbook Air over time. This has been accentuated further by me being somewhere with a lot of network lag. I did some research and the following suggestions made the wifi faster and more responsive with Mac OS 10.10.3 Yosemite. 1. Disable Bluetooth. I don't use any wireless … Continue reading Tuning wifi on Mac OS 10.10.3 Yosemite
#DUTO2015 conference
I'm at the Data Unconference in Toronto today. Jarred Gaertner just gave a through-provoking keynote on the ethics of big data, and I'm about to dig my hands into some open data sets in Richard Pietro's hands-on session. My colleague Polong Lin will be on a panel about IBM's data science tools this afternoon, which … Continue reading #DUTO2015 conference
$10k! Spark hackathon in San Fran
I'll be in San Francisco this weekend helping run the Apache Spark hackathon, and afterwards I'll be at Spark Summit 2015. If you're curious at all about Spark, you should come out and hack with us. We'll have some fun data sets and help you find a team. You can take the free Spark Fundamentals … Continue reading $10k! Spark hackathon in San Fran
Encrypt Gmail, Facebook emails with OpenPGP and Mailvelope
Facebook just released a great use case for OpenPGP encryption in Gmail and other web email providers. You can now configure Facebook to encrypt all email it sends you with OpenPGP. Whether or not you use Facebook, it's surprisingly easy to use Mailvelope to integrate OpenPGP with Gmail and other email providers. Mailvelope is a … Continue reading Encrypt Gmail, Facebook emails with OpenPGP and Mailvelope
$7,500! Spark hackathon in Boston May 28-30
My team will be supporting the Spark hackathon in Boston on May 28-30. This weekend's a good chance to teach yourself Spark. "Apache Spark is an open source processing engine built around speed, ease of use, and analytics. If you have large amounts of data that requires low latency processing that a typical Map Reduce … Continue reading $7,500! Spark hackathon in Boston May 28-30
How I made my Android Galaxy S3 phone run faster
My primary phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 running Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat. It's a little old at this point, but I'm disinclined to upgrade for the sake of upgrading. It was getting slower, so I've recently taken a number of steps to tune and optimize its performance. Things I've done to make Android slower … Continue reading How I made my Android Galaxy S3 phone run faster
