A mountain glacier in Southern Iceland. (photo by me, 2023)
What i’m up to
January was an exhilarating month. i managed to finish my classes with decent enough grades that i basically didn’t need to go to exams to try for a better grade, which gave me a lot of free time to pursue my projects.
NOVA University courses are all on either java or C, so i started by redoing and finishing the Automate the Boring Stuff with Python course. It was barebones but just what i needed to brush up on my Python programming to get back to it.
Afterwards i started Stanford’s Machine Learning Specialization by Andrew Ng. i finished the first course on Supervised Machine Learning and I’m already halfway through the 4-week Advanced Learning Algorithms course. It is a fantastic course series but i wish the lab exercises were more hands-on. Still i am hoping to practice more and more with my own projects later on.
What’s next
For february i’ll be hopefully finishing the ML specialization series and getting into a more intermediate specialization series (probably Deep Learning).
i have also got a couple of books on Machine Learning and Deep Learning that i am really looking forward to get into.
i have a Kaggle account that is still mostly inactive, so i got the Kaggle book to guide me through and get me started on using it.
Anything else?
i have been slowly chipping away at the fantastic Baldur’s Gate 3 and recently Exapunks. The latter is very reminescent of x86 assembly programming, but made accessible and really, really fun.
i just watched and absolutely loved the movie Magnolia.
i ordered a Raspberry Pi 5, mounted a cooling fan on it, installed Linux (Raspbian) and made it automatically run PICO-8 on boot. Then i plugged a couple of USB PS1 controllers i had lying around, effectively turning it into a retro console that can run my own game on a TV. It was a very fun proof-of-concept and i am hoping to use it in a ML project in the next couple of months.