The Doctor Shops for a Minicomputer…

And here’s a rather nice pair of Doctor Who-themed adverts for the Prime Computer range of minicomputers. There are so fairly obvious hints that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are phoning it in but the shoutout to their current – but brief – marriage is rather nice.

Converting PDFs to JPEG sequences using imagemagick

Imagemagick (available from all good package managers) has the ability to split a .pdf file into a set of numbered images via the following incantation…

convert -quality 100 -density 200 -colorspace sRGB <PathToPDF> -flatten <PathToOutputDirectory/>Page-%02d.jpeg

…where, of course, ‘%02d’ represents the auto-numbering element of the incantation.

‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’

Another aide-memoire so that I have the link kicking around…

There used to be a somewhat famous ThinkGeek teeshirt called ‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’ that, even now, gets periodically referenced on the more tech-ish end of the internet. With ThinkGeek now lost to the mists of time, it’s not as easy to Google for as it used to be.

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Using Machine Learning for Geoglyph Detection

PNAS has an interesting paper on using AI and Machine Learning to try and identify new Nazca Pampa geoglyphs in the Peruvian Nazca Desert. It’s a fun little lunchtime skim with a few nice images of some of the newly found geoglyphs.

PNAS: AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose