The allure of quantitative analysis almost led me into a career in finance instead of biotech, and while I don’t regret that road not taken, I still enjoy the occasional foray.

A father’s way of connecting with his daughter, wrapped in a story of a frog’s unexpected adventure.

This post is mostly for my future self, but others may find it useful. It assumes a Windows machine (😱), with most development work done in WSL 2.

Free hosting of custom domain websites? Many companies advertise “free website hosting” and it can be frustrating to finally find, buried in a FAQ, that custom domain hosting is an additional charge.

A poem.

I recently transitioned my site from GitHub’s freely hosted github.io domain to https://www.derekcroote.com after seeing how quick and inexpensive it was for my sister to create a beautiful portfolio website. This short post walks through the process.

I first saw a wood elevation map at the World-Class Mountain View Art & Wine Festival.¹ The contrast of blue Lake Tahoe, California water and intricate layering of stained wood representing the surrounding mountains was visually captivating and technically impressive. I wondered if I could choose a different lake and build my own wood elevation map.²

GitHub Actions should simplify continuous integration (CI) for public repositories hosted on GitHub when compared with external services like Travis CI or CircleCI. To test this, I decided to migrate one of my public repositories from Travis CI to GitHub Actions. This post describes my approach and also lists the resources I found helpful. Overall I am satisfied with the outcome, but found getting there somewhat tricky; documentation on workflow syntax and individual Actions is plentiful, but few examples describe how to combine Actions into jobs that accomplish specific tasks. My hope is that this post can help others construct GitHub Actions workflows that require more than testing source code.

For some coffee fanatics, myself included, summer is synonymous with an ice cold variety of the caffeinated beverage: cold brew. Differing from “iced coffee” in that it is produced in the absence of hot water, cold brew trades acidity for a smooth, often chocolatey flavor. To compensate for slower extraction of the delectable compounds that give coffee its identity, the process of cold brewing lasts hours to overnight. I became hooked on the beverage years ago and here I recount some early mishaps attempting to brew my own.

I have a cheap garlic press, which means that after each use garlic is stuck in seemingly every one of its 63 holes. The faucet water pressure is insufficient to free the garlic and I am left with the unsatisfactory process of poking garlic free with a toothpick. This is obviously an irritating problem that needs solving.

Background

To maintain quality, integrity, and aesthetics, vector graphic formats such as PDF or EPS are generally preferred for artwork and data visualizations over raster (pixel-based) formats such as png, gif, or jpeg. The reason becomes especially apparent at high magnification. As shown in the extreme example below, vector formats maintain smooth curves (left), while raster formats become pixelated (right).

The Brave web browser is an interesting take on providing greater privacy while still rewarding content creators through ads, views, and tips. To explore it a bit more, I thought I would try to verify this GitHub Pages blog.

I have been using the Mio Fuse (similar to a Fitbit Charge HR) for a couple months now and I wanted to illustrate how to perform your own data analysis on raw heart rate data extracted from the device.