McGarrah Technical Blog

A new to me but old laptop

· 7 min read
Upgrading from a 2016 ThinkPad T460p to a used T480 for $670 all-in: 64GB RAM, 4TB NVMe, WiFi 6E, and a GPU capable of running LLM models.

Buying a 10Gbps or higher network on a homelab budget

· 3 min read
Evaluating the options for 10Gbps homelab networking on a budget: DAC point-to-point rings, affordable MikroTik SFP+ switches, and the HP ProCurve 5406zl chassis — with no decision reached yet.

A long time between posts

· 2 min read
Resurrecting a technical blog after seven years away — migrating old WordPress archives, Google Blogger posts, and 1990s DarkMagic.org content into a new Jekyll site on GitHub Pages.

PhotoSynth Export and Visualizer

· 1 min read

I have developed something interesting for my graduate class in Computations Photography for the final project. As background, for the class we had an assignment in which we used the Microsoft Photosynth service to generate a 3D walk thru of an area by uploading several hundred photographs. On the back-end the Photosynth web service does feature extraction on all the photos and then related the photos in three dimensions to each other and the feature points. This generated a point cloud of related points between the photos.

PhotoSynth

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