Job Searching in 2022-2023

Job searching after the pandemic has been difficult, there is lots of competition, especially with the many layoffs happening in many larger companies and everywhere. I also found it difficult given my specific knowledge of single-cell image analysis which is a much smaller field. With all the competition, especially in the data science, domain knowledge was what I think made me stand out from other candidates. I wanted to share with others my job application trajectory to give some perspective of what it took.

If you are looking for a job, don’t get discouraged and keep applying. You can see how most of my applications got no responses and many rejected soon after I applied.

If you’re curious to see the code that I used checkout the repository
https://github.com/emmanuel-contreras/jobs_sankey_plot

How To: Use conda environments inside Spyder

It took me a while to figure out a reliable and robust way to use conda environments in spyder, and today I’m going to share the details with you!

First things first, download the tools:

  • Spyder IDE –> https://www.spyder-ide.org/
  • Anaconda Python –> https://www.anaconda.com/download

Create your conda environment

  • From the start menu open up anaconda prompt
  • create a new environment conda create -n my_env
  • Once it’s created conda activate my_env
  • and install pip conda install pip (this will install python and a bunch of other tools)
Read more

How to Fix: Washed-out display or changing contrast with Intel Iris Xe Graphics

The color pallet on my new dell 7420 inspiron plus kept changing and the display looked horribly washed out or with horrible contrast. This took me too long to diagnose so I’m making a post about it. The post below was super helpful in diagnosis this so I am linking to it.

Problem: Washed our colors and contrast on a laptop with Intel Iris Xe Graphics

Solution: Disable Display Power Savings

https://superuser.com/questions/1487069/how-to-disable-intel-display-power-saving-technology

https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/Washed-out-or-faded-colours-on-Intel-Iris-Xe-Graphics/td-p/1448656

I tried taking a good picture but it was difficult to capture the fine details. Contrast was way off and pixels appeared blurry. On the left is with the settings enabled and on the right with the settings disabled. Pay attention to the details on the cloud, you can’t tell the detail on it on the left side. the details are also blurry and washed out.

Fix: Black screen after upgrading RAM and/or SSD on a Dell Inspiron 14 PLUS 7420

What feels like one of dells last laptops with modular RAM, I decided to give this computer a try until something more modular and repairable comes along (Framework maybe?!) I bought the RAM and SSD below and upgraded the laptop. Be sure to disconnect the battery cable first! I tried disconnecting the cable connecting to the motherboard but it was stuck in there and I was nervous to apply much force. Luckily there is an additional connector on the other side of the battery cable, you can slide that metal tab down and pull the battery cable out.

Swap out the RAM and/OR SSD and it will boot up to a black screen. Be patient and wait about 5 min, it will eventually it will boot into the BIOS telling you hardware changed. I worried I fried something but fortunately that wasn’t the case. Hopefully this post helps you not freak out that something went wrong. Enjoy the upgrade ram and ssd!

  • Crucial RAM 32GB DDR5 4800MHz CL40 Laptop Memory CT32G48C40S5
  • Crucial P5 Plus 1TB PCIe Gen4 3D NAND NVMe M.2 Gaming SSD, up to 6600MB/s – CT1000P5PSSD8 Solid State Drive

Latest Beta BIOS for the motherboard Z87-G41, Version 1.8

Version 1.8 was taken down from the MS website for this motherboard, currently the latest version is listed as 1.7. If anybody is interested the 1.8 version is still up on the servers under the link below. Or I’ve attached it here if anybody want’s it.

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z87-G41-PC-Mate/support

V1.7
https://download.msi.com/bos_exe/mb/7850v17.zip
V1.8 (notice only the ending changed but there is no link to it on the MSI website)
https://download.msi.com/bos_exe/mb/7850v18.zip


Just remove the “.pdf” extension from this zip file and that will contain this beta BIOS

How To: Update the firmware on an LG SL3D Soundbar

There are no official firmware updates to this sound bar, but looking at the comments on the LG page, someone managed to use the firmware for LG SK4D 2.1 Sound bar which is what I did and it worked!
All you have to do is download the zip file and unzip the binary file into a flash drive that is FAT32 formatted, turn on the sound bar and set input to USB, then plugin the USB drive, the front LED’s will flash left to right until the sound bar turns off, firmware is now updated!


Download the zip file below and remove the “.pdf” extension. That will contain the latest SK4D firmware as of 11/14/2022

Support Page to firmware
https://www.lg.com/us/support/product/lg-SK4D.DUSALLK

Reasons why Linux (Ubuntu 22.04) can’t be my daily driver.

Updated: 2023/01/09

Main Reason: Stability

There is and inherent sense of anxiety and fear not knowing how your OS will react in any certain day depending on the task and whether or not it will be compatible with what you need.

Video Conferencing

  • This is lacking, online versions of zoom, webex, teams aren’t very well made and the desktop clients are lacking a lot of features. On top of this Wayland doesn’t support desktop sharing which is a pretty essential feature depending on your job.

Word Processing

  • No Microsoft Suite support
    • Closest I could find was OnlyOffice but it’s missing a lot of tools that makes MS Office work well.
  • No Adobe products including Adobe Reader
    • This is fairly important for signing legal documents.

Automation

  • There isn’t a robust built-in automation tool to use like macOS Automation

Other Random Issues

  • Mapping network drives can be difficult
    • By far not as straightforward and easy as in windows,
  • Remote Desktop (Remmina) isn’t as well made as Windows Remote Desktop
    • You can easily copy files between remote and local client as well as copy and paste from the buffer.


GPU Support

  • I have a NVIDIA 3070 Ti so with that in mind:
    • GUI/UI issues
      • Desktop icons shifting by themselves
      • With multi-monitors, dragging and dropping icons sometimes highlights them on both screens with unpredictable end placement on desktop
    • Fractional scaling breaks when using multi-monitor and launching games full screen
    • Sleep and then resume boots to a black screen with no icons or distorted text
      • It seems like it’s been going on for a while

Conclusion

I would love to switch over to Linux one day as my main operating system, but there are too many sacrifices and hurdles where I’m spending more time troubleshooting than actually being productive. I still revisit Linux every 5 years or so and hope enough progress has been made but unfortunately this year is not the year.

How To: Set Up Magic Mirror on a Raspberry Pi 3

After electron deprecated the Pi Zero 32 bit version, my magic mirror was unusable and hacking it to make it work wasn’t working anymore. I had a raspberry pi 3 laying around and decided to replace the pi zero. Here are the steps I used to get my magic mirror up and running again!

1) Install 64 bit Raspberry Pi OS with Desktop
Latest steps are listed here!
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/#raspberry-pi-os-64-bit

2) Install Magic Mirror
After you have your raspberry pi OS up and running and you have completed all the prompts, connected to your wifi and updated the OS you can follow the steps on this link to install the magic mirror manually.
https://docs.magicmirror.builders/getting-started/installation.html#manual-installation

3) For the background image slideshow to work
Once you have installed your magic mirror, change directories into the modules directory /home/admin/MagicMirror/modules and clone the latest version of the MMM-ImageSlideshow repo here.
* You can use something like FileZilla to SFTP into your raspberry pi and copy your background images into the exampleImages folder, deleting the stock images the module comes with.
* Use images smaller than your screen resolution, I use 1920×1080 because they fill my magic mirror completely.
* Also I would use darker backgrounds to keep the contrast of text to background, I like using images of space.
https://github.com/AdamMoses-GitHub/MMM-ImageSlideshow

4) Google Calendar
Go to settings of your google calendar and scroll down until you see the section below, DO NOT SHARE this link with anybody else or they will have access to your calendar! insert that link in the config.json file

5) Start Magic Mirror Automatically using PM2
Follow the steps here for setting up the mm.sh that running pm2 will launch at boot.
https://docs.magicmirror.builders/configuration/autostart.html#using-pm2

Other Tips
* I have an outlet timer connected to my LED screen and to my raspberry pi, it turns on at 7am and that turns on the screen automatically and the raspberry pi, then pm2 boots up magic mirror
* At 10:50 pm I turn off the raspberry pi by adding the command 50 22 * * * /usr/sbin/shutdown -h now to the roots crontab at sudo crontab -e this prevents the raspberry pi boot drive from being corrupted by the outlet timer suddenly shutting down.
* Lastly here is my config file, css, backgrounds I found and compliments json if anybody wants to check them out!
** the config file goes in /home/admin/MagicMirror/config
** the compliments file goes in /home/admin/MagicMirror/modules/default/compliments
** the CSS file goes in /home/admin/MagicMirror/css
** and the backgrounds go in /home/admin/MagicMirror/modules/MMM-ImageSlideshow/exampleImages