Hacking Mapbox Unity SDK to Get Sub-Meter Coordinates Accuracy in iOS

May 11th, 2018

AR is a particularly interesting technology when combined with geospatial. AR provides an intuitive interface to navigate and understand the world in 3D. Some geospatial applications need precision. Consumer phones and tablets’ GPS units are not particularly accurate, so this is often not a concern. If we encode latitude and longitude data using single precision floats, we can expect to be off. How off? So if we need sub-meter accuracy, we need to exercise care. Mapbox Unity SDK makes it easy […]

Running ROS on Arch Linux (The Easy Way with Docker)

February 24th, 2018

Installing ROS on Arch is a pain in the rear. The fact that Arch is a rolling release distro makes it difficult to compile most of ROS dependencies. Even if you eventually manage to compile everything, you will find yourself running into all sorts of trouble compiling third party libraries, fixing problems between Python 3 and Python 2 and don’t even ask what happens when you do a system update. Save yourself the trouble and use docker. You will be up […]

How to Write a CGAL Polyhedron to PLY (or any other format)

April 18th, 2017

I ended up having to read the CGAL source code to figure this one out. There you go. You’re welcome.

Use Your Kindle as an External Monitor (well, almost)

April 21st, 2015

You can share a terminal session using your Kindle, which means you can use it as an external monitor for text-only applications. You won’t be able to do much web browsing or design work beside ASCII art, but if you’re a coder or a sysadmin, I’m sure this is not really going to bother you. Here’s a brief list of steps required to get this hack working. Jailbreak your Kindle. Install a Terminal application on it so that you can open […]

Hack to fix WordPress 3.5 Add Media issue when using Flexible Lightbox

July 25th, 2014

The problem: You cannot add media images on WordPress >= 3.5 when using the “Add Media” button in the WordPress editor. You are also using the Flexible Lightbox plugin, which is the root cause of the issue. Here comes a dirty, quick, ugly and imperfect hack to the rescue: Find your wp-admin/post-new.php file Scroll to the end of the file, and modify the file as follow: Before: After: This should also serve as an example of code not to write.

I’m releasing the source code of Snappy Frog, a Libgdx game for Desktop, Android, iOS, OUYA and Amazon Fire

July 25th, 2014

Back at the beginning of May, while my wife and I were getting ready for our upcoming trip around the United States, I picked up the following challenge: Build a Flappy Bird like game. No commercial software allowed. Three weeks of time. Bring it to as many platforms as possible. Sound and textures had to be made from scratch. After some research, I ended up choosing the following open source tools to achieve my goal: Libgdx: a great multiplatform game […]

How to make pictures with a point and shoot camera look great

July 21st, 2014

If you’ve seen the pictures that I’ve been posting, you might be wondering about what kind of camera equipment I’ve been using. Today I’m proud to show you the powerful and expensive equipment that I’ve been using to take the shots of my travels. Canon PowerShot Digital ELPH SD750 – Around 50$ on eBay Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to spend hundreds of dollars for a good camera, but that is not part of the living small philosophy. Plus I love to push the limits […]

My reply to a Google Recruiter – I’m much more than a number

June 2nd, 2014

A few days ago I received the usual e-mail I get every year from a Google Recruiter. Apparently my name must be in one of their databases of possible candidates from the days when I was actively seeking a position there. They like to check on me every once in a while. Here’s what I wrote back: Hi <recruiter name>, thanks for getting back to me. I understand that this is a general position open to anybody who applies. I’m quite familiar […]

Horizontal scrolling single page website done right

March 7th, 2014

Single page websites are quite a hot trend in web design, with vertical scrolling being the most popular (probably because of its ease of implementation). In this article I will summarize a strategy to implement a horizontal scrolling single page website for the purpose of achieving a certain usability goal. Too many times people implement a scrolling strategy just because “it looks cool”, or just because it’s the hot new trend, forgetting that a good design should be functional and aimed […]

My hardest debugging session just ended today

November 28th, 2013

The hardest debug situation of my life just ended. Celebrate! I was trying to make a USB audio adapter to work on an embedded device running OpenWRT, but Linux wasn’t recognizing the USB device. The device turned on, but wasn’t getting mapped to /dev. So I think, ok, I probably forgot the modules. I Installed the modules. Still no luck. Maybe I chose the wrong modules? I started trying different permutations of modules (with each try taking half an hour […]

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