Wilfed Githuka

I have been in Voi town for over a week now and I believe its wise to jot down a post about this relatively remote town along the Nairobi-Mombasa Highway. Am down here on assignment with AVIC Kenya at Coast Institute of Technology where we are conducting a training for various TVET teachers in a Mechatronic Engineering course which is being offered in Chinese by Chinese teachers. This training has been running for the last 3 months so am just here for the last 1 month or so as an interpreter for Chinese–English and vice versa. [Read More]

External Operation of a 3phase Motor Using Mitsubishi D700 Inverter The Mitsubishi D700 Inverter is a very handy variable frequency drive for the electrical engineer. This model, though discontinued has been used in a variety of connections for different types of loads. In today’s experiment, I want to show you how to control a small 3phase motor using the D700 to make the motor run in 3 different speeds, and change direction. [Read More]

The first time I held an STC microcontroller was today morning when we were preparing the lab ahead of the class experiment for tomorrow. I decided to assemble my own board from the components given. The boards were packed tightly in bulk so it was quite a task to set them up. The boards which I later came to learn were designed by one of the Chinese’s lecturers students back in China. [Read More]

The Marantz Pro MPM-1000U is a USB condenser mic for DAW recording or podcasting. It comes in as an entry level mic.It comes with a USB connection which was one of the feature that I wanted. This mic is designed to work on any PC with a descent USB interface and a software like Audacity. While thats good, I wanted to try out recording on termial and this is how far I have come in doing so. [Read More]

Today was the last meetup of Nailug - Nairobi Linux User Group. As usual for the past few months, the meetup was held at Ona who have continued to support us bu giving us a space to hold our meetups. Today’s talk was about HTTP/2 which was presented by Kenneth Gitere from Ona. The topic was - HTTP/2 to be or not to be. Nailug, also written as NaiLug is a not-for-profit community dedicated to GNU/Linux, Free Software, Open Source and related topics. [Read More]

“An étude (a French word meaning study) is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, of considerable difficulty, and designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill.” — Wikipedia This project contains pytudes—Python programs for perfecting programming skills. Some are in Jupyter (IPython) notebooks, some in .py files. You can view the files here, or clone the project, or run the notebooks online by clicking this button: [Read More]

Ranger, developed by Roman Zimbelman is an ncurses based powerful filemanager for UNIX-like systems. Its free relased under GNU GPL Licence. It can do what most GUI file managers can do with less effort. It was first released in 2010 the latest version is of 2017 February. And its written in Python. The coolest part is that its 260KB only, how about that :-) And yes I know that the photo above has no relation to Ranger, its the Nairobi National Park and I think it looks cool. [Read More]

The IBM Selectric typewriter a machine that was as a result of “Seven years of research” was one of the best machines ever sold back in 1961. The Selectric was so popular that it captured 75% of the american market. It was only replaced by the electronic one which IBM later made. The great sound of this machine can be relived in spacemacs through a cool layer that was developed by Sylvain Benner. [Read More]

Ever since I went deep into Linux in 2015, I have heard of emacs being mentioned as the holy grail of Linux text editing. I must admit but it looked messy and had to grasp. Early this year I came accross Spacemacs and it looked interesting but just like emacs I gave it a glance and planned to give it more time. A month ago I saw my pal Raymond navigate his Linux box effortlessly using a similar software appearance quicly editing and opening files in what seemed like a spectactular fun. [Read More]

Today is one of the best days of my life. When I saw the email from Udacity that I have bee accepted for the Udacity Self Driving Car Nanodegree Program, I was elated. This is an online program that teaches one how to develop the necessary software and skills that a self driving system uses. I learnt about the Nanodgree back in Dec of 2016 when I was starting to learn Python and this was the goal of that project. [Read More]