Somewhere in the first week of January (when I begun writing this post) was the first time that I hosted a fellow CouchSurfer. Jacob comes from Alabama, USA and is currently studying in Birmingham, UK. During the Christmas holidays he wanted to visit mainland Europe a bit, and I offered to host him in Antwerp.
Of course, people don’t come over to just sit/sleep on your couch, they want to see things!
That’s why I made a list of interesting things to see and do in the center of Antwerp. You’ll find the things on that list below with some added explanation and history for each item.
It might also come in handy when an other CouchSurfer comes over.
This is just a list of places and explanations, not a path you can follow.
Also, all prices listed here are the ones at the time of writing for adults without any sort of discount.
Antwerp has special discounts for many of it’s museums if your age is either <26 or >65 or you’re in a group. (-26 is often € 1 entrance)
I recently had some nasty trouble with my Galaxy SII.
The problem I was having was that after working normally the phone would suddenly act like I was pulling out and putting in the usb cable constantly.
The battery would indicate being charged, discharged and then charged again (etc.).
After shutting the phone down and trying to reboot it I would get an image showing the big battery image you get when charging the phone while it’s off.
A few seconds later it would also display an exclamation mark and a thermometer.
I tried letting the battery “cool” to no avail (It didn’t feel exceptionally warm to the touch anyway)
Switching to a different battery did seem to fix the problem, at least for a short while. A day later I was having the exact same symptoms. Time for some more Googling I thought.
I updated my SoundSwitch Application.
You can install it by going here.
The purpose of SoundSwitch is to be able to easily switch between 2 or more Audio output devices.
For example, I have a wireless headset and my regular speakers.
Both are detected as a separate audio card in the sound panel.
The only way to switch between them is to open the playback devices panel and select one of them and choose to put it as default device.
That’s such a hassle!
With SoundSwitch you just press Ctrl+Alt+F11 and it toggles between the cards you selected.
Todos:
Let the application start up when the user logs in. (currently you have to start it yourself)
Allow users to set their own shortcut (instead of Ctrl+Alt+F11)
Make the configuration easier. (Won’t be possible I’m afraid though)
UPDATE: Changed the hosting to CodePlex, apparently you can host ClickOnce applications there!
This small plugin will scroll to a selected element when calling .scrollTo() on it.
It has an optional parameter which specifies the duration of the scroll.
For example, if i would have a div with the id “#mydiv” I would let the screen scroll to it using this code:
$('#mydiv').scrollTo();//Or, if you want the animation to be slower
$('#mydiv').scrollTo(2000);
The top of the selected element will be displayed at 50% of the screen unless the scrollbar is too short, then the element will be lower on the screen.
On weekdays I live by myself in Brussels to be closer to the University.
Of course, I have to do my own shopping and buy food supplies myself.
I also have to keep track of what’s in my fridge and what’s expiring when.
I suck at that.
However, I’m good with computers. And computers are good at keeping track of stuff.
So I created a small tool to do just that, Fridgemon.
With only 5 million speakers it’s not very easy to find resources on learning Norwegian compared to other languages. Listed below is a compilation of the resources I found while looking for learning materials. Norwegian is the first language I’m consciously learning on my own, not in a school environment. (I say consciously because I learned English by watching a load of movies and series, I didn’t really have to make an effort then) I’m currently a complete beginner in Norwegian with only 25/30 Pimsleur lessons done and some extra vocabulary with Anki.
The project I was talking about in the previous post was this one, bulktts.
With Google Translate you can only listen to the sound of the text you typed in, but you can’t download it.
I found a url which with the right parameters lets you download the mp3 file generated by Google Translate, but if you need a bunch of words converted to speech this is a a tedious job of changing the url, save as.. etc.
Bulktts allows you to choose a language, paste your list of words in and download a zip file with the mp3′s.
There are still some bugs though, at the moment words with special characters won’t product the correct sound. Update: Sound bug fixed. Only the filenames for special character words in zip files are still not correct.
I needed this for something where I wanted to send the visitor of a website a bunch of files he selected at once.
An easy way to do this would be to add the files to a zip file and then send that zip file to the user.
Unfortunately Python doesn’t have an in-memory zip file library, you can only interact with zip files on disk.
After a bit of googling around I came to this StackOverflow answer.
That worked like a charm, and here is my more reusable version:
Save as “inmemoryzip.py” and import it as “inmemoryzip”.
This is quite limited compared to the standard ZipFile class, but this gets the job done for what I needed it.
I have an Artificial Intelligence course and one type of search algorithm handled is Genetic Algorithms.
Very interesting because it uses the principle of evolution to find a solution to a problem.
You start with a population of begin states and each state has a ‘fitness’ which indicates how close it is to a solution.
Based on that fitness you will crossjoin or mate 2 states. Higher fitness = higher chance of mating.
I implemented the example given in my AI course’s slides in python.
The example is trying to find a solution to solve an n-queens problem, in this case 8 queens on an 8×8 chessboard.
Briefly explained: you need to place 8 queens on a chessboard so that none of the queens can attack eachother.
(A queen can move like a Bishop and a Tower, horizontally and diagonally)
The previous post was about the basics of setting up an application using Django on Google App Engine.
This one will continue on that as we follow the Django Tutorial for building a poll application, but with some modifications so it will run on GAE.
I’m Jeroen Pelgrims, currently transitioning between student and developer.
This blog is about things I have learned or discovered. It will mainly be about computer related things, especially programming.
If you see me write something wrong or something that can be improved, please tell me by writing a comment. Help me learn.
Somewhere in the first week of January (when I begun writing this post) was the first time that I hosted a fellow CouchSurfer. Jacob comes from Alabama, USA and is currently studying in Birmingham, UK. During the Christmas holidays he wanted to visit mainland Europe a bit, and I offered to host him in Antwerp.
With only 5 million speakers it’s not very easy to find resources on learning Norwegian compared to other languages. Listed below is a compilation of the resources I found while looking for learning materials. Norwegian is the first language I’m consciously learning on my own, not in a school environment. (I say consciously because I learned English by watching a load of movies and series, I didn’t really have to make an effort then) I’m currently a complete beginner in Norwegian with only 25/30 Pimsleur lessons done and some extra vocabulary with Anki.
