Author archives: Mike

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Dell XPS 15 2016 on Kubuntu 15.10

Update: The battery in this machine started swelling/exploding at 1.25 years, do not order one!

So I finally got a replacement for the old laptop, which works, but is winding up out-of-RAM basically all the time. This time, instead of going for the cheap inspirons I decided to plunk for a higher-end machine that ...

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Review: Dell XPS 15 (9550) as a Linux Developer's Laptop

Update: the battery in this machine started swelling/exploding at 1.25 years Strongly recommend not buying one!

So I've now had a Dell XPS 15 9550 as my primary driver for approximately 9 months. I covered the (painful) setup process a bit when I first got it, so I won't repeat most of that here. Suffice ...

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Dell XPS 15 (9550) Exploding Battery

So I guess it's necessary that I write this up, as my previous reviews of this laptop were relatively positive, despite the PITA-ish ness of using it with Linux and the coil-whine of the power supply, and the latest issue makes it a "stay the hell away" recommendation.

Background:

A few months ago ...

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PyCon Canada running Nov 12-15th 2016

PyCon Canada is going to happen in downtown Toronto. The conference is Nov 12-13th and then two days of sprints. The call for proposals is up and you have until the end of August to get your talk/tutorial proposals in. PyCon Canada is a pleasant conference with lots of friendly people, not as overwhelming ...

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nVidia, package cudnn for Ubuntu already

It's half-way through 2016 and to get Tensor Flow installed on Ubuntu 16.04 one has to register for an nVidia developer's program? Here's a hint, current LTS for Ubuntu installing a widely-used AI library should require (in total):

apt-get install tensorflow tensorflow-gpu

Seriously, why make installing a widely used library a PITA? It's only useful ...

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Black Screen on KDE after disconnecting external monitor

So yesterday I tried connecting an external monitor to my nVidia proprietary driver KDE laptop. It went meh, as the external display is so much lower resolution (and so much larger) than the configurations on the laptop make the monitor look like a VGA blown up to ridiculous proportions. Oh well, unplugged the monitor this ...

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mcastsocket broken out into its own project

I use multicast a lot in my work, and I almost always wind up using my branch of PyZeroconf's mcastsocket module... and that's not cleanly pip installable, so I've now broken out the mcastsocket module into its own project. Changes with this release:

  • implements (IPv4-only) single-source-multicast support
  • should work cleanly on python 3.5 (it may ...

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Trivial bug in synaptics is so frustrating...

There's a rather annoying bug in the synaptics driver on Linux on the Dell XPS 15 9550. Basically, if you are using one finger to move around and another to click the "button" areas at the bottom of the screen, instead of taking that second finger as "click here", it sometimes interprets the second finger ...

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