Alex Volkov | website

TinyGo intro

Alex Volkov — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Update 2023-11-25. I got some technical feedback in this mastodon thread, so I updated my post based on it.

Introduction

I went through a Go tutorial back in February and discovered the TinyGo project, which supports running a subset of Go on microcontrollers. It's similar to MicroPython, but this project …

3D-printed DIY LED light

Alex Volkov — Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Summary

I think I just went through the exercise when anyone who buys a 3d-printed and seriously gets into CAD software does -- design his own lamp.

I built my video light, because this is what I'm using it for.

Here's the video of the assembly process

DIY LED COB 3d-printed …

What I learned setting up Reprap Discount Smart Controller

Alex Volkov — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0400

ReprapDiscount Full Graphic Smart Controller install on youtube

References

Discount Full Graphic Smart Controller Marlin variables

I've been working with Marlin 1.1.8 configuration starting from scratch and it took surprising amount of effort …

Django config for implementing a password policy

Alex Volkov — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

A quick rundown on how to check user password for compliance and enforce password security for Django Admin users.

Bear Upgrade custom parts

Alex Volkov — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Custom designs and non-standard STLs for my build

Assembling Bear upgrade

Alex Volkov — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Overview

I had a homemade clone of Prusa i3 MK2 for a while, and it never worked exactly right. The design is somewhat dated and I have decent quality components in it, so I thought it would be a worthwhile to try and make a series of videos about it …

Octoprint plugin troubleshooting: bed visualizer

Alex Volkov — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400

BedVisualizer doesn't get installed

Practial prints: rear bike light clip

Alex Volkov — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Using 3d printing to fix something broken

Upgrading from old version Octopi and Raspbian

Alex Volkov — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Intro

I currently run Octoprint 1.3.0 and would like to upgrade to OctoPrint 1.4.0. The latest version requires Python 3.6/3.7.

When I tried to upgrade to this version I've realized I still run Raspbian Jessie which only supports Python 3.4. I will …

Tweaking the first print layer

Alex Volkov — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Intro

This is a followup to my previous post Fixing the first layer when usual tweaks don't work. Where I describe issue of getting poor first layer print quality and the test I use check fixes I come up with.

I started working on this article first, however at the …

Fixing the first print layer when usual tweaks don't work

Alex Volkov — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Intro

A while a go I built 2 Prusa clones following Tom's 3D guide on building cheapest possible Prusa i3 MK2 [1]. I learned some problem solving working with electronics and physical material, but it is much easier, faster and cheaper to just get a Prusa Kit.

In my system …

GoAccess as google analytics replacement

Alex Volkov — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Intro

Since removing google analytics from my blog a few months ago, I kept looking for a tool that would give me some idea who is reading my blog while respecting visitor's privacy.

I have found that tool and it is GoAccess.

GoAccess is an open-source web analytics tool that …

Audio offset error fix for 4K video after render in kdenlive

Alex Volkov — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Intro

If you've used kdenlive to work with 4K video, you likely experienced the problem when playing rendered 4K video clip, audio plays before the video. This feels pretty unsettling and ruins the video for anyone who tries to watch it.

Resizing down to 1080p

I've tired several workarounds like …

Banning log and mail spam with Fail2Ban

Alex Volkov — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Intro

Since I've set up my self-hosted blog I've been using goAccess log analyzer -- it is a really handy program that gives me a summary of my http log with very little set up.

Looking at my logs revealed a lot of bot spam, which I find very annoything to …

Community organizing and meetup.com

Alex Volkov — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

The article published on January 13, 2020 and updated on January 27.2020

Presentation

Here is the recording of a presentation of this blog post at a GTALUG meeting on January 14, 2020.

Direct link to the video in case youtube embedding is disabled -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v …

Setting up nvidia cuda for tensorflow in debian

Alex Volkov — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Intro

In this article I describe how to set up supported Nvidia hardware to work with debian, by the end you should be able to run a tensorflow tutorial on the video card. I ran this tutorial on Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB.

This tutorial uses CUDA kit packaged by Debian …

Automatic deployment of pelican blog with ansible and gitlab

Alex Volkov — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Intro

I want to be able to edit my blog post from gitlab interface and then have changes automatically deployed to my blog. For that I will setup a gitlab runner on my existing web server and create a CI job to execute on that runner.

I will use 'website' …

Moving pelican blog to own server

Alex Volkov — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Rationale

For the longest time my website consisted only of a contact page -- it was a pyramid process that served only a single template page, with a very few variables on it. Talk about overkill.

Given that, when I created my blog with Pelican static site generator I just threw …

My Training Plan for 2020 Marathon

Alex Volkov — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Published on January 1, 2020 and updated on January 27,2020

Intro

I got into running to loose weight sometime around 2010-2011 and I kept this habit since. I've been running for a decade I've managed to run 4 marathons:

2014-05 Scotia Toronto
2016-05 Scotia Toronto
2017-05 Scotia Toronto
2017-08 …

Kdenlive nvenc video settings for Youtube

Alex Volkov — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

youtube video settings

Speeding up generation of Kdenlive proxies with nvenc

Alex Volkov — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400

speedup proxies using nvenc

Fear Of Missing Out as a business model for Facebook

Alex Volkov — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 16:50:00 -0500

I have written this post back in September, but didn't get arount to posting it now.

I quit twitter back in September, when I finally I got convinced that twitter managed to find business model where they convert human misery into money.

I'm a member of the board of a …

Simple threading in Python 3

Alex Volkov — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400

I've been working in Python 3 on an an embarrassingly parallel task of parsing and importing data into Postgres. Once I've done single-threaded implementation I looked around for parallelizing the program and after a few tries I managed to get everything running in parallel.

This is a quick note on …

Quick gitlab runner setup

Alex Volkov — Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

gitlab-runner setup for simple ci configuration

Upgrading from old version of Gitlab CE

Alex Volkov — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0500

I've came across an old instance of Gitlab running on CentOS 6.

The old instance version is 8.10.5 installed using omnibus package. The omnibus package contains Postgres database, which needs to be updated from Postgres 9.2.x used in Gitlab 8.10 release to Postgres 9.6 …

Installing python packages in development mode

Alex Volkov — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

installing package requirements in development mode

Pyramid web app setup with with Postgres, SQLAlchemy and Alembic.

Alex Volkov — Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Pyramid web app setup with with Postgres, SQLAlchemy and Alembic.

Grapical tool for mercurial similar to git blame

Alex Volkov — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500

thg -- A handy GUI tool for looking up historical date

Testing Python with Mock

Alex Volkov — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Testing with mocks and less well know mock methods

Nose2 profiler setup

Alex Volkov — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0500

nose2 profiling configuration

Cricket -- awesome test visualizer

Alex Volkov — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Cricket, a handy GUI tool for running tests in python

Running Jenkins in Docker

Alex Volkov — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 10:19:00 -0400

setting up jenkins in docker

Setting up python dev environment in Sublime Text 3

Alex Volkov — Sun, 23 Oct 2016 22:18:00 -0400

Recently I had to completely reset my Sublime Text 3 project settings and set everything up from scratch. I find the following two features the most important and need to be configured first:

linting -- letting the computer keep track of consistent coding style
definition lookup -- letting the computer to look …

Debian Automated Install

Alex Volkov — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 21:44:00 -0400

A few days ago in my part of the talk at GTALUG [1] I mentioned using Debian automated install [2] to quickly bring up fully virtualized systems, as one of possible methods of system deployment or testing Ansible scripts.

This idea worked so well that I made a video out …

Hello world

Alex Volkov — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 22:01:00 -0400

A one way of learning restructured test is to start writing all of the things down using rst. Pelican is a rather nice static site generator, it is written in Python, so it is more intuitive for me to use.

I followed this short tutorial on how to set up …

Thursday's Raspberry Pi meetup

Alex Volkov — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 22:01:00 -0500

I went to Raspberry Pi meetup on Thursday, January 14, and would like to share some links about the presentation I gave and things I brought with me.

Fun of premature optimization

Alex Volkov — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 -0500

Last week I deployed a redesigned website that included a new search feature, looking at the server logs I've noticed that users of the site use search. A lot.

I wanted to know more about what kind of questions end-users were asking, so I wrote a short program to parse …

My awesome 15K MEC Run

Alex Volkov — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 22:44:33 -0500

These are my experiences from MEC Race Seven that happened on October 20, 2015. I posted this a while ago on EYTR page, now I finally got a couple of photos of it.

I'm still not sure how that's possible but I ran MEC 15K in 1:09:42.0 …

Raspberry Pi Wireless config

Alex Volkov — Sun, 06 Dec 2015 00:57:30 -0500

Here's working wireless configuration I use to connect my Raspberry Pis with USB wifi dongles to my home network.

I've been using Realtek RTL8188CUS and Ralink RT5370 based devices rated for 150Mbps.

Dongles based on Ralink chip have been working flawlessly, but I have experienced two issues with the Realtek-based …