Data, donuts, and detours

A photo of me crossing the finish line at Ath Half 2023 this past October, holding up my arms in exhausted triumph.

Rebuilding

Nowhere to go but up
personal
covid
running
weightlifting
food
health
Content warning: discussions of body image, eating habits, diet culture, and long COVID. Also, language.
November 9, 2023
Shannon Quinn

An in-game picture of Link from _Tears of the Kingdom_ with pink hair and dark lipstick, and wearing the Cece hat. Picture from this Polygon article: https://www.polygon.com/legend-zelda-tears-kingdom/23725926/tears-of-the-kingdom-totk-best-hat-outfit-cece-mushroom-hat-how-to-get-slay .

The Hero Of Everything

Apparently it’s not enough to merely save the world
personal
video games
zelda
tears of the kingdom
This is the first of two Tears of the Kingdom related blog posts I’ll be making. Don’t worry—there won’t be any story spoilers in either one. But my wife did…
July 30, 2023
Shannon Quinn

My home office desk, with the GamersNexus rubber mat, along with all the hardware materials for the cluster upgrade, including: a stack of PoE HAT boxes, a Netgear 8-port PoE switch, a small power brick from Anker with two 2-port USB-to-outlet adapters, and my laptop.

Upgrading the Raspberry Pi Cluster

Nothing bad has ever happened in the history of planned upgrades.
personal
raspberry pi
kubernetes
k3s
mastodon
hardware
As I write this up, I’m sitting in my SciPy hotel room. It’s a nice way to relax and unwind after a long day of travel and tutorials, but I also…
July 10, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Midjourney-generated image of an art easel with a picture of a raging fire, anthropomorphized with a giant smile on its face. Meant to convey a ham-fisted 'this is fine' metaphor.

This post is about burnout

Metaphor is a tool best left to those trained to use it
personal
professional
burnout
movies
books
…but before I get to that, I want to talk about a movie I saw recently and a book I read recently.
June 6, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Official Nintendo poster for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

My thoughts ahead of Tears of the Kingdom

Not to be mistaken for cheap facsimilies of ‘truth’ or ‘facts’
personal
gaming
zelda
totk
tears of the kingdom
For those who aren’t following the increasingly unhinged ravings of my countdown bot on Mastodon, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is coming out on Friday, May 12.
May 9, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Head-on view of the middle of Forsyth Park in Savannah, GA, including the fountain in the middle and trees along both sides of the main walkway.

Three years later

The Savannah Women’s Half Marathon
personal
running
covid
pandemic
getaway
travel
Oh by the way, I have a second blog.
April 4, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Aerial view of an ancient but advanced civilization, an island-nation (generated by Midjourney).

Mastodon: Conclusions, musings, ramblings, ravings

The beauty!pain!beauty of open source
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
This article is part of a series…
February 28, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Close-up of two Mastodon-like sailors on the deck of a ship at sea (generated by Midjourney).

Mastodon, Part V: Installing and configuring Mastodon

Sorry, I blacked out, what are we doing again?
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
This article is part of a series…
February 24, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Sean Bean LOTR meme, stating: 'One does not simply use HTTPS when it doesn't work' (obtained from imgflip).

Mastodon, Part IV: SSL with Let’s Encrypt

DNS is the cause of, and solution to, all our networking problems
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
ssl
dns
This article is part of a series…
February 16, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Midjourney-generated image of a rabbit in a nightvision style, as if pictured by an infrared camera at night (generated by Midjourney).

Setting up a wildlife camera

It’s almost like the corporate solutions are on to something
personal
raspberry pi
wildlife
ir
camera
video processing
For years, I’ve been wanting to set up an outdoor wildlife camera. Somewhere in the PyImageSearch forums1 there’s a post from 2017-me remarking on how excited I am to have finally gotten my hands on an Nvidia 1080 Ti and…
February 15, 2023
Shannon Quinn

XKCD comic #1579, Tech Loops

Mastodon, Part III: Configuring and installing the prerequisites

Welcome to dependency hell, we have recursion
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
dependencies
This article is part of a series…
February 9, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Dramatic image of a galleon sailing on stormy seas (generated by Midjourney).

Mastodon, Part II: The Mastodon Helm chart

A package manager for people who enjoy pain I guess
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
helm
This article is part of a series…
January 25, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Horrific jumble of networking wires and equipment stylized like Cthulu (generated by Midjourney).

Mastodon, Part I: My home network topology

DNS. It’s always DNS. Except when it’s not.
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
networking
This article is part of a series…
January 23, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Rear view of a sitting elephant gazing at mountains in the distance (generated by Midjourney).

Running your own Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster

Now you too can unwittingly become an unpaid sysadmin!
personal
raspberry pi
k3s
mastodon
As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent the last month of last year spinning up my own Mastodon instance (which you can check out!) I’ve had a Raspberry Pi cluster of 5x Pi 4B modules sitting…
January 20, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Close-up of a broken sword lying amidst ruins (generated by Midjourney).

2022: A year in review

Last year doesn’t deserve a rhyming couplet
personal
professional
news
There’s going to be language in this post. Consider skipping if you prefer your blog posts merely warmed and with cream; this one is straight out of the pourover.
January 17, 2023
Shannon Quinn

Our bunny Clover.

Pardon de dust (2)

Migrating blog backends is hard
personal
professional
news
Why hello there. You may have noticed that things look a little bit different around here.
December 13, 2022
Shannon Quinn

Generated with the text: `4K, wide angle, hyper detailed, starfield, nighttime sky, crescent moons, stars, nebulae, cosmic` by MidjourneyAI.

Fiddling with generative art models

personal
professional
ai
generative modeling
deep learning
raspberry pi
legal disclaimer
zelda
family
Much like a lot of the internet over the past couple months, I’ve been tinkering with some AI art generators, mainly Midjourney (if only because I’m waitlisted on DALL-E 2).
August 3, 2022
Shannon Quinn

Our white bunny, Clover, sitting on the couch, looking beautiful.

What the f*@$ is this s%#& (2022 ed.)

personal
professional
clover the bun
z
covid-19
running
professor
university
quansight
travel
holidays
year in review
I’m…
January 5, 2022
Shannon Quinn

Facepalm gif meme from The Office.

Back in Action

personal
blogging
python
pelican
dependency hell
It’s been a day/week/month/year/decade, this 2021.
December 30, 2021
Shannon Quinn

Festivus for the Restivus sign.

Festivus for the Restivus

personal
festivus
fuck 2020
fuck that shit
airing of grievances
Content warning: rough language ahead. You’ve been warned.
December 30, 2020
Shannon Quinn

A stick figure standing in front of a Wheel of Fortune style wheel, where each possible option is something regrettable, and the person's thought bubble says 'Ooh! Wonder what it's going to be today?'

At home during COVID-19

personal
professional
covid-19
sars-cov-2
work from home
zelda
pandemic
furbabies
zippy the cat
clover the bun
Well, this has certainly been a unique past couple…
May 20, 2020
Shannon Quinn

Link from Breath of the Wild overlooking the scenery from the vantage point of Lake Hylia.

Breath of Fresh (albeit, indoor) Air

personal
breath of the wild
zelda
running
gaming
nerds
the lady
injury
This is a divergence that is simultaneously strange and entirely predictable.
August 12, 2019
Shannon Quinn

The Gap of Dunloe in Killarney, Ireland.

Quinnwitz in Ireland

personal
travel
ireland
The Lady and I just returned from a 12-day trip to Ireland (with a stop at the very start in Kent, England, to visit some dear friends and their 6-month old twins!).
June 3, 2019
Shannon Quinn

A meme image of the Frozen song, with the words instead indicating 'Do you want to play Starcraft?'

StarCraft II Questions

personal
gaming
video games
I’ve been sick…
January 31, 2019
Shannon Quinn

A diagram of Einstein summations. Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26089893/understanding-numpys-einsum .

An einsum use-case

professional
python
Recently I’ve been working with some of my students on a paper for the SciPy Conference related to our OrNet project. Part of this involved designing our own Gaus…
June 19, 2018
Shannon Quinn

Looking downscope of a sniper rifle in Jedi Outcast 2 zoomed in hilariously right on a friend's avatar's face.

Jedi Outcast: Echoes of a bygone gaming era

personal
gaming
star wars
fps
communities
I should start by issuing fair warning: this is a post I’ve been meaning to write in some form or another for the better part of the last 15 years.
April 26, 2018
Shannon Quinn

Resolutions for 2018

personal
professional
new year
blog
writing
side projects
research
A solid three weeks late on the new year’s resolutions, but still a marked improvement over last year.
January 21, 2018
Shannon Quinn

New year, new blog layout

personal
new year
blog
Happy 2018!
January 6, 2018
Shannon Quinn

Summer of Data Science 2017

professional
personal
data science
python
computer vision
imaging
machine learning
deep learning
nvidia
gpu
teaching
education
bioimaging
A few days ago, while I was still in Portland, OR enjoying the last few days of PyCon 2017, Renee (@BecomingDataSci) mentioned on Twitter that she might…
May 31, 2017
Shannon Quinn

So, you want to conduct research with me?

professional
phd
graduate school
research
mentoring
computer science
graduate student
Deviation #1: This is wholly separate from the “should I get a Ph.D.” question. For that I would recommend one of numerous guides that ask all the right questions.
March 16, 2017
Shannon Quinn

Game-ify Your Raspberry Pi

personal
raspberry pi
gaming
video games
nvidia
steam
My project over the 2016 holiday season was to take the Raspberry Pi 3 I’ve had sitting around the house idling for the previous nine months and turn it into a RetroPie-ified…
January 6, 2017
Shannon Quinn

Open Science in Big Data (OSBD) Workshop

professional
workshop
big data
ieee
open science
Ba…
September 26, 2016
Shannon Quinn

A twitterbot for posting weekly running stats

personal
python
strava
running
oauth
tweepy
twitter
pybot
We runners (we’re a crazy bunch), for…
May 16, 2016
Shannon Quinn

Reviewing a reviewed grant’s reviews

professional
academia
grants
feedback
rejection
Rejection in any context sucks. As a new faculty trying to prove himself (to himself, but most importantly, to his tenure committee), I particularly hate rejections in the…
February 2, 2016
Shannon Quinn

Introductions

personal
pelican
python
github
jupyter
Well, this seems to be working. Kinda.
November 7, 2015
Shannon Quinn
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