More than half of your Internet traffic is ads and trackers [My Internet log analysis]

By Michał 2 Dec, 2018 Leave a comment

I sincerely hope this article will be an eye opener for you. Recently I have installed a Pi-Hole at home. To keep it short, this lets me see the home internet traffic live and, if needed, block unwanted requests. The list of ads and trackers has been taken from open source repos like this. Equipped with this combo, I have decided to turn off all of the privacy add-ons that I use and browse the polish internet just like a layman for 20 minutes. Websites I have visited include popular news portals, facebook etc.

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Setting up Azure Key Vault

By Michał 15 Oct, 2018 Leave a comment

Key Vault is an Azure module, which lets you safely store your secrets/keys. This way your developers do not have to store credentials or connection strings in the code, but can simpy ask Key Vault to provide them. The application will be handed the password and will be able to log in without the developer even knowing it. Let us create a key vault!

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Developing AI camera image recognition system in an hour

By Michał 27 Aug, 2018 Leave a comment

Cognitive Services from Microsoft offer pretrained networks that allow citizen developers to quickly develop e.g. image recognition algorithms. This short post is to show how it is done and how I have created a real-time people recognition system. The goal of this solution is to recognize people in our office and possibly inform our beloved founders of this. What I used was: a python script and a FullHD webcam + Cognitive Services Custom Vision API.

artykuł_10_person detector

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Do we have high taxes in Poland?

By Michał 24 Jul, 2018 Leave a comment

Recently, a lot is heard about some additional fees that our government in Poland wants to introduce. This, combined with a discussion among my friends about, among others, income tax threshold, prompted me to check how high the tax burden for employees in Poland and Europe is. I have included everything in one Excel and I hope that you will help me improve it.
I have chosen arbitrarily a few countries from Europe: the Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden and the UK. These are the countries, to which many people migrate and often seen as countries with a higher standard of living, as compared to Poland.

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Accumulating lists in Power Query using… List.Acculumate()

By Michał 13 Jul, 2018 4 Comments

List.Accumulate is a very powerful function that is often overlooked, when doing Power Query transformations. Its basic behaviour is explained in the reference. How this function works is accumulates a result from a specified operation (accumulator function) starting from the initial value – seed – and going row by row till the end of a specified list. Radacad greatly explained the possibilities of the function. I treat List.Accumulate as a function that lets me access a previous row. Something that is very often expected by customers using Excel sheets as data sources. This enables me to e.g. detect a change in ID or date – from my experience 90% of the cases.

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