Quasi-program

What are the causes of ageing? Is it the accumulation of damage, or over-running healthy development? The latter is addressed on Aging is not programmed: Genetic pseudo-program is a shadow of developmental growth, and these are my notes on that paper.

Ageing hallmarks

I’ve been learning about biological ageing over the last few months for a project. There’s so much to take in just on the basics, let alone the new research coming out. To help myself make sense of it, I’ve decided to write up my notes on various papers, starting with The Hallmarks of Aging.

What are the chances?

I’ve been flummoxed by some basic statistics questions recently. I’m not alone in this, as it’s a common one for students and 17th-century gamblers. I’m taking this chance to note this down for when I make the same mistakes again.

Combining differing error types

Rust, Scala, and many other languages let you use a kind of or to represent errors. In Scala it might be Either<E, T>, and in Rust it’s likely to be Result<T, E>. The E represents an error, and the awkward part of this is chaining together results with different types for E. This post contains my notes on this, for Rust.

Tips for using Findster

It’s now been a few years of using the Findster Duo pet tracker, and it’s time to share a couple of tips for making the most of it. They are: permanently attach the Findster to a collar; and start the app early in your walk.

The benefit of no legacy

I’m wrangling some job automation via email, again. I decided to do this in Rust, although part of me was wondering why bother?

Learning about genetics and epigenetics

I’ve been learning a little bit of biology during 2019, specifically genetics and epigenetics. This post lists out the resources I’ve been using.

NeurIPS 2019 presentations that caught my eye

NeurIPS 2019 is the 33rd annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Once again the recordings are online, and here are a few that caught my eye.

Tips for moving from tut to mdoc

Creative Scala and Essential Slick use mdoc, as will Scala with Cats in the next edition. mdoc helps us be sure the code we describe works, no matter how often we update the text. It does this by typechecking and running the Scala source in our text.

Before mdoc we used the mighty tut. We’ve learnt a few tricks as we switched from one to the other, and collected them together in this post.

Switching to Ecotalk

Ecotalk is a UK mobile (cell) network. It achieved the highest score in the Nov/Dec 2019 Ethical Consumer ratings. I’ve switched to it, and this post describes the experience.

TL;DR it works great; you should consider it.

Brighton Rust: Embedded systems, day 5

The one where we lit up the Xmas LEDs for the first time.

Brighton Rust: Embedded systems, day 4

Building on what we learned about RTFM last week, we converted our blinky code to use the RTFM scheduling facilities.