Merry Xmas 2018

It’s christmas again! I’ve been working in the Data Insights Research Lab for more than a year now. Most Taiwanese people are not Catholics nor Christians, but nowadays more and more people do celebrate the day as a day to spend time with the ones you love.

Nevertheless, we don’t have a christmas tree lying around in the corner of our lab. Buying an artificial plastic tree just seems to be an expense and not so environmentally friendly.

Excessive Hardwares

Well, what we have in the lab is a bunch of retired desktops and excessive monitors lying around. Since we refreshed some gears every year yet you cannot just throw official properties away before they have reached the designated years of usage, so we got a bunch of them lying in the corner as backup hardwares.

That gave me an idea.

Christmas Tree

So after an hour of moving, stacking, and wiring…

The unique christmas tree of our lab!

Let’s align the monitors according to their realworld alignment…

Wait… Just a pile of monitors is not unique enough to represent our lab… The workstations I used to output the 6 monitors on the “tree” has a Titan X Pascal, it would be a waste not to salvage the computing power.

Okay. Now we have a style transfer script running, continously converting daily photos of the lab, the institute, Academia Sinica into more “Christmas like” photos.

There you have it! Merry Christmas 2018!