Technical Notes from Ceshine Lee

Cover image generated by Nano Banana 2 TL;DR In this post, I introduce a simple Ansible playbook that manages scheduled tasks with systemd timers and provides an AI-friendly interface for running recurring jobs. It offers much greater flexibility than cron. As a bonus, I also present a Python-based orchestrator for Rclone sync jobs, which is useful for setting up automatic cloud backups and works well with the Ansible playbook. ...

Cover image generated by Nano Banana Pro Motivation Reading trending threads on Hacker News is one of my favorite ways to discover interesting stories and read (mostly) thought-provoking discussions. Since reading all the top stories would be very time-consuming, I use web apps such as Gemini, Google AI Studio, and Claude to have an LLM agent automatically fetch web pages and summarize their content for me. I then quickly browse the summaries and decide which threads I want to read in full. This approach has been quite effective for me. ...

Cover image generated by Nano Banana Pro Introduction I recently came across a course called “Multi-Vector Image Retrieval” by DeepLearning.ai. The course mainly introduces ColPali [1], a vision-language model that generalizes the late-interaction retrieval paradigm pioneered by ColBERT [2], extending it from covering only text tokens to covering both text and visual tokens. It also contains a few tutorials on performance optimization techniques using Qdrant’s Python SDK. It is a great introductory resource, and I recommend it to anyone interested in visual document understanding and retrieval. ...

Cover image generated by Nano Banana Disclaimer: A 50x speedup is not guaranteed. Actual performance depends on the nature of the dataset and the hardware on which the code is run. Please refer to the Benchmarks section below for more information. Introduction Recently, I finally found some time to learn the Rust programming language. I find its memory safety guarantee quite elegant, although it comes with the trade-off of a steep learning curve, especially when it comes to Rust’s ownership and lifetime system. It is very appealing to someone like me, who mainly uses a scripting language and who writes low-level code only from time to time. Writing C/C++ code can easily lead to unstable runtime behavior or unexpected results in such circumstances. ...

Gemini CLI Usage Analyzer Project Banner Introduction Last week, I developed a lightweight command-line tool for analyzing Gemini CLI token usage and open-sourced it on GitHub. You can find the project at ceshine/gemini-cli-usage-analyzer. This post outlines why I built the tool, the technical challenges encountered during development, and the solutions implemented to resolve them. Note: Currently, the tool focuses on single-project analysis. Unlike Claude Code, which centralizes logs (e.g., in ~/.claude on Linux) to analyze overall cross-project usage by default, Gemini CLI lacks a built-in mechanism for unified log management across different projects. Support for aggregating statistics across multiple projects is on the development roadmap. ...