My NASA Virtual Guest Passport: Mission Stamps and My Name in Space
My NASA Virtual Guest passport now spans five mission stamps, while my name is flying to Jupiter aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft.
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113 posts
Can AI enhance our ability to communicate complex concepts?
A reassessment of Gestalt communication in Diaspora and how generative AI could help people align complex mental models with less explicit explanation.
Codex Computer Use - Diagnosing a Lenovo Laptop That Would Not Wake or Power On
How Codex on Windows used Event Viewer, power reports, Lenovo diagnostics, custom PowerShell capture scripts, and driver verification to narrow a recurring Lenovo freeze and no-power wake issue to hibernate and embedded-controller behavior.
Fixing Windows Screenshot and Camera Roll Sync with OneDrive Using Codex Computer Use
A practical example of using Codex computer use on Windows to diagnose duplicate screenshot paths, OneDrive folder backup, and Camera Roll behavior without guessing.
Using Codex and Microsoft Graph to Turn Outlook Email into a Documentation Timeline
How Codex on Windows can use Microsoft Graph to retrieve topic-specific Outlook email, analyze the communication flow, and document findings without manual mailbox archaeology.
Fixing VS Code Forgetting Recents, Workspace Trust, and GitHub Sign-In on Windows
A Windows permissions issue in VS Code's shared state folder can break recents, Workspace Trust, and GitHub sign-in persistence.
Mad genius Starlink constellation potential use cases
I prompted Grok to answer the following question: Consider that you are the owner of starlink and a mad genius […]
Three Ways to Install OpenClaw (and Why You Might Choose Each)
Three Ways to Install OpenClaw (and Why You Might Choose Each) If you’re getting started with OpenClaw—or rethinking how you
OpenAI Frontier and the Rise of Hands-On Enterprise AI Implementation
OpenAI Frontier and the Rise of Hands-On Enterprise AI Implementation https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-frontier/ OpenAI recently introduced Frontier, a new enterprise-focused platform designed
OpenClaw setup – Digital Ocean Marketplace app vs bare-server implementation
From Marketplace Convenience to Owning the Box: Rebuilding OpenClaw the Hard Way I didn’t start this project intending to write
Flutter Photo Image Data Extraction
Extracting Data from Blood Pressure Device Photos into Using Flutter + LLMs This project was designed specifically for extracting structured
Medication Reminder System with Voice AI Agents
Building a Medication Reminder System with Voice AI Agents, Telephony, and LLM-Assisted Development This documents a recent project to provide
Media TV and Movies: Turning Streaming Viewing History into Outlook Calendar Events
Media TV and Movies: Turning Streaming Viewing History into Outlook Calendar Events Like many people I watch TV and movies
Use MS Graph API to transfer files between OneDrive accounts – 295 GB / 400k files in 48 Hours for about CAD $10
TL;DR I migrated about 295 GB / 400k files from a Microsoft 365 Business?Standard OneDrive (source) into my personal Microsoft
Open Data, Hidden Mess: What 405 Canadian Innovation Grants Reveal About Government Data Quality
TL;DR Canada’s Innovative Solutions Canada programme publishes the grants it gives to help SMEs solve public-sector challenges. But our deep
Use MS Graph API and VS Code GitHub Copilot Agent automation to create, inspect and manage Office 365 content
Introduction In this project, we successfully automated the synchronization of Outlook calendar events to a SharePoint list using Microsoft Graph
Newsgroups and Usenet – Flashback to 2001
Learn how to use Newsgroups and Usenet! 1000’s of people from around the world upload a variety of digital material
Use Microsoft Fabric to serve multi-tenant data & analytics
The Challenge of Multi-Tenant Data Solutions As a data and analytics consultant serving multiple customers, one of the biggest challenges
A Shift in Tone: Unpacking Sam Altman’s Bold AGI Claims
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared a reflective blog post (Reflections) on January 5, 2025, offering a candid look at
Canada’s productivity puzzle – tale of a cautious Canadian owner class
Canada’s BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) published a document in June 2024 titled “Canada’s Productivity Puzzle” link that highlighted
First-time journey publishing an app to the Google Play Store
Introduction As a first-time Google Play Store publisher, I embarked on a journey to publish my app “AI Image Describe”
FitSignals – Google Watch Fitbit data and visualization
Unlock the Hidden Power of Your Fitbit Data FitSignals transforms your Fitbit data into comprehensive, interactive visualizations that reveal insights
Radio wave light spheres – radio waves washing over nearby stars
Light sphere – have radio waves reached any stars yet? Yes, radio waves have long reached many stars near to
Visualization of tennis player rank vs match outcome and betting odds
This was a project to create a visualization using data from tennis-data.co.uk, which provides up-to-date information on men’s and women’s
DeepMind Materials new crystal structure data analysis
A recent Google DeepMind project paper Scaling deep learning for materials discovery described using GNNs trained on a large and
DeepMind AlphaMissense matched to 23andMe data
TLDR: It is pretty cool that you can directly leverage Deepmind’s cutting edge AI powered AlphaFold and AlphaMissense projects to
Apache EChart alternative faux legend solution
Legends can be quite fiddly to include on a chart when the chart content can dynamically change and result in
Use ChatGPT to standardize and categorize bank and credit card descriptions
ChatGPT can help you by standardizing and categorizing bank and credit card descriptions. Steps: Copy and paste your bank or
Gestalt communication facilitated by multi-modal generative AI?
Gestalt is a form of communication that appears in Diaspora, a hard science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan
Microsoft Windows Copilot General Availability September 26, 2023
Microsoft Copilot is coming across Microsoft products that will bring Copilot LLM user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and
Voip.ms get call detail records and set call detail record filters using API
Voip.ms is a reliable, affordable and customizable VoIP service. Sign-up with my referral code to get $10 discount. Recently I
OpenAI ChatGPT 4 Advanced Data Analysis used to do river water flow analysis
OpenAI ChatGPT 4 Advanced Data Analysis is pretty amazing! I put it to the test on some data I analysed
Attended London Power BI User Group: Introducing Fabric! – London, UK – May 23, 2023
It was a very happy coincidence that I was in London, UK to be able to attend this May 23,
Fabric Dataflow Gen2 Web API connection with dynamic current date parameter
I created a Fabric Dataflow Gen2 Web API connection to retrieve csv file data from an Environment Canada daily environmental
Attended Data Science Festival Mayday – London, UK – May 20, 2023
Attended the excellent Data Science Festival Mayday event May 20, 2023 in London, UK at CodeNode, Moorgate and Old Street.
CBC news article comments analysis and visualization
This post is focuses on a project of the analysis of scaped comments from CBC News website articles. (BTW, there
CBC news comment and replies interaction network visualization
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news website articles often have a comments section. It would be interesting to see the
Canada cell tower distribution QGIS visualization
opencellid.org has global cell tower location data that I used to do a series of QGIS maps showing Canada’s cell
CBC news article comments web scraping
This post is focuses on a project where I scaped comments from CBC News website articles. (BTW, there are lots
Xero.com data consolidation and reporting solution selection
Once upon a time, I was using Xero to record and manage a company’s finances and wanted to use Zebra
Canadian Government First Nations long term water advisory data
The Government of Canada is working with Canadian First Nations communities to end long-term drinking water advisories which have been
COVID-19 Data Analysis and Visualization Summary
This is a list of Canadian COVID-19 related data analysis and visualization that I created during 2020/21 pandemic. Canada COVID-19
TendiesTown.com – WallStreetBets gain and loss analysis
For a 16 month period, from February 2020 to June 2021, TendiesTown.com used the Reddit API in an automated process
Use Excel Power Query to get data from Our World In Data
Our World In Data (OWID) has been doing a hero’s job of collating the world’s covid vaccine distribution and administration
Sir Patrick Stewart @SirPatStew #ASonnetADay dashboard
Sir Patrick Stewart @SirPatStew was doing Shakespeare Sonnet readings from his home during the COVID-19 lockdown and they were really
The human radio-broadcast bubble
“Space… is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is” (quote from The Hitchhiker’s
Amazon AWS Transcribe used to get 2020 presidential debate #1 speaker segments
TLDR: I used Amazon Transcribe to transcribe the first presidential debate audio that included timestamps for each word, to create
D3.js SVG animation – COVID-19 rate “race” visualization
This visualization shows COVID-19 new cases as a “race” of dots moving from left to right. The dot’s “speed” or
Amazon AWS Textract – WHO “Draft landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines” – convert PDF to csv
TLDR: I extracted text from the WHO’s vaccine candidate PDF file using AWS Textract and made text into a set
Periodic chart elements by origin from SVG using Python
This cool periodic chart of the elements shows source / origin of the chemical elements. Source: Wikipedia created by Cmglee
Retrieve and process Environment Canada hydrometric and climate data using Python
Recently needed to get flow and level data for a watercourse hydrological station as well as regional precipitation data for
Plotly Express Python remove legend title
Plotly.py 4.5, Plotly Express no longer puts the = in trace names, because legends support titles (source). Prior to Plotly.py
Legend and polygon colors for Leaflet choropleth using Chroma.js
A Leaflet tutorial uses the following hard-coded getColor function to return colors. // get color function getColor(n) { return n
Scraping public health web page using Python, BeautifulSoup4, Requests and Pandas
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Canada I wanted to get COVID-19 confirmed cases counts data for the city of
Heat maps of Canadian activity changes due to COVID-19 using Google Community Mobility Reports
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Canada I wanted to get better understanding of the geographical distribution of COVID-19 related
Choropleth map of Canada COVID-19 cases by health region using Leaflet and D3.js
During the early days of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, I wanted to get better understanding of the geographical
GlobalPrePaidCreditCard.com – Prepaid and gift credit card feature comparison for multiple countries
GlobalPrePaidCreditCard.com – Prepaid and gift credit card feature comparison for 9 countries. Sort and filter cards by features to find the
Delete Google Calendar events by date using Google Script
To quickly and easily delete Google Calendar events by date you can use Google Script https://script.google.com to run the following
OneDrive SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT)
I have a Office 365 Business Premium account. I wanted to sync many large folders with OneDrive for Business. However,
AWS S3 csv file as D3 report data source
This is an example of how to read a csv file retrieved from an AWS S3 bucket as a data
Introduction to Microsoft Power Query in Excel and Power BI
What is Power Query? Power Query is an Microsoft tool for Excel and Power BI that is used to do
AWS RDS Postgres database external secure connection
Require an SSL Connection to a PostgreSQL DB Instance? Here are some notes from my investigations. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_PostgreSQL.html#PostgreSQL.Concepts.General.SSL Not great examples
How to use Hadoop HDFS as a datasource for Power BI
I have a local Hadoop server running on my Windows laptop. To connect Power BI to this Hadoop file system
How to use Python as a datasource for Power BI
Step 1 – Download latest version of Power BI to get new features (version that came out in early August
Comparison of my old Palm vs my new Pocket PC (from 2004)
Here is a blog post from old Word Press site I wrote back in July 7, 2004 Comparison of my
BC Executive Compensation Tableau Visualization
The Province of British Columbia publishes public agency executive compensation each year. The data is grouped by: Sector – Employers
Business Intelligence – IT Black Box Challenge
The process of engaging IT teams can be difficult to understand for many non-technical people. IT is perceived as a
Twitter Followers and List Membership Tracking
I have created my own historical reporting of my Twitter account followers and list memberships. I have hosted the reporting
Installing Hadoop on Windows 8.1
It turned out to be quite simple to install Hadoop on Windows 8.1 I have been using Hadoop Virtual Machine
Vultr and Digital Ocean make it easy to get projects going fast
Recently I developed a Django web application for a friend. I wanted to be able to get it up and
Django form geocode submitted address to get lat, lon and postal code
One of my Django applications includes a form where user can enter and submit a property address. The user submitting the form
Leaflet.js choropleth map color by count using geoJSON datasource
I have a Django web application that needed an interactive map with shapes corresponding to Canadian postal code FSA areas
Canadian Canola seed crushing more efficient at extracting canola oil
Statistics Canada regularly tweet links to various Canadian statistics. I have occasionally created quick Tableau visualizations of the data and
Chart.js tooltip format number with commas
Chart.js V2.0 is a useful javascript charting library. It looks great, has ton of features though it is new enough
Python get image color palette
I created a web application that included screenshots of about 190 country’s national statistics agencies website home page. I created the site
Excel Power Query tutorial using Canadian potato production statistics
This data comes from Statistics Canada. Statistics Canada download pages often provide the opportunity to modify the data structure and
Django recreate database table
Django’s makemigrations and migrate commands are very useful to update existing database tables to reflect model changes. However if you
Canadian TCS FDI Officers Twitter list member analysis
Blog post updated to add the following: Updated Python “TCS Members Details” code to get additional information from the List
Use Excel Power Query to scrape & combine Wikipedia tables
Power Query is quick and easy way to scrape HTML tables on web pages. Here is step by step on
How to update Office 365 password in Power BI dataset refresh
I recently changed my Office 365 user password for an account that I was using for a Power BI Dataset
How to avoid wide margins on a Power BI dashboard
A Power BI Report with multiple charts or other objects can be added to a Dashboard in Power BI Online
How to use Google Adsense API to download Adsense data
Google’s APIs make getting Adsense (or any other Google service) data easy to download. The code below downloads Adsense data
Create Python 3 Virtualenv on machine with Python 2 & 3 installed
I have been using Python 2.7 for most of my Python work but have a few projects where I want
Use OneDrive API to upload files to Office 365 Sharepoint Site
I have automated uploading files from my web site host’s server to my Office 365 Sharepoint site using scheduled cron jobs running
Careful! Don’t click “Try Power BI for free”
This was a weird quirk. I have Power BI Free account and uploaded a report to Power BI Service. The
How to schedule Power BI dataset refresh
Do you want to create a Power BI Report that gets a daily scheduled refresh of data from a Sharepoint
Power BI Online – get data from Office 365 Sharepoint file
I want to create a Power BI Online report with a data source from a file on a remote web server that updates
OneDrive API features
Microsoft has three file storage options: OneDrive Personal OneDrive Business Sharepoint These have recently been unified into one new OneDrive API https://dev.onedrive.com and oAuth
Tracking Cuba Gooding Jr’s Twitter follower count
Happened to see Cuba Gooding Jr’s first tweet about 30 minutes or so after he created it. Update: @cubagoodingjr is no
Dell ecommerce web site scraping analysis
Once upon a time, I needed to find Dell monitor data to analyse. A quick search brought me to their eCommerce
Power Query MySQL database connection
Excel Power Query can make a connection to MySQL database but requires that you have a MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.5 for
How to serve multiple domain name websites with one CakePHP application
Say you have a need to deliver multiple websites which have same structure but each site is served on different
Always remember to start Python Virtualenv
When learning to develop Django and Flask Python applications using virtual environment I did not know that I should activate
Flask SQLAlchemy relationship associations and backref
Flask-SQLAlchemy relationship associations are useful to easily retrieve related records from a related Model. In a Python Flask application I
Using ATMs as wifi hotspot
Wirebase was a concept created in 2001 before broadbrand, wired or wireless was widely available. The concept was shopped around
Get list of custom segments from Google Analytics API
This is a post on how to create custom Google Analytics Profile Segments for the purpose of removing referral spam
Display Django queryset results on Google Map
I wanted to be able to show locations by latitude and longitude with data from Django 1.8 website on a
How to setup and and use a Twitter API application
The Twitter API allows you to read and write tweets on your own Twitter account. But you can also create
How to move Google Chart x-axis to top of chart
The newest Google Charts API allows you to more easily change the axis that you want the ticks and labels
BC Hydro’s amazing #BCStorm social media turnaround
BC Hydro made an amazing social media turnaround to communicate with customers in crisis! Go BC Hydro! On August 29,
How to create OData data source Gateway for Power BI Report
Microsoft has a free Microsoft Data Management Gateway that you can install on your desktop or server to act as
Introducing Speedvisit – a quick and easy way to record visits from people
Here is a demo web application / SaaS called SpeedVisit that individuals and companies can use to easily and quickly record
How to filter referral spam from Google Analytics using API and Python
Google Analytics data has become incredibly polluted by “spam referrals” which inflate site visits with what are essentially spam advertisements
Tableau vizualization of Toronto Dine Safe data
The City of Toronto’s open data site includes the results of the city’s regular food and restaurant inspections. This data
Single CakePHP application & MySQL database to serve multiple domains
I have a bunch of websites that have the same structure and content that vary only by the category for
How a new salmon stream was carved from the land
Back in the days when I was working in environmental science, the consulting firm I was working for was doing
Tableau vizualization of Vancouver Car2Go vehicle locations
I happened to have an dataset of Car2Go vehicle locations in Vancouver and used Tableau to plot them by latitude and longitude.
How to vizualize a work schedule using a Qlikview Gantt chart
This is a Qlikview solution I posted on Qlikview’s forum in response to a user request for displaying employee work schedules in a Gantt chart style presentation.
How a UK tent rental company used Google analytics and Tableau to improve sales
UK wedding marquee rental website Google analytics data was analysed using Tableau Public. The client’s target geographic area is UK Northwest centered around Manchester.
Time based SLA KPI created using MS Access VBA
A client had a time based activity that had a start and end datetime. The client wanted to be able to calculate a service level agreement (SLA) metric based on the duration of time to complete the activity.
Visualization of Toronto’s 311 contact centre open data
This is based on City of Toronto’s Open Data website 311 call performance data for the 4 years 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Introducing Cardivvy – a website showing Car2Go real time car locations, parking and service areas
Car2Go provides developer access to their real-time vehicle location and parking availability, and service area boundaries for all of their city locations around the world.
LinkedIn ‘People You May Know’ web scraping and analysis
A while back LinkedIn sneakily vacuumed up all of my contacts from my phone via the Android Cardmunch app. Turns out Cardmunch is owned by LinkedIn. There must be fine print somewhere that indicates they do this but I sure didn’t see it.
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