Tony is a Geek

 So, in todays episode of, "How can Tony waste his time doing some worthless task, he'll never get that time back y'know....", CLICK HERE TO WASTE SOME OF YOUR TIME SEEING HOW I WASTED MINE I give an update on the progress of the face detection / recognition code I scratch my head as to why the CPU usage is still so high? I figure out why the CPU usage is so high! I do a very quick explanation of HAAR classifier usage and hence the CPU usage issue I get bored and do some fun stuff with hardware - mainly hooking up SERVOs to a Raspberry Pi 4 I also get very irate with myself as I still cannot find the Wifi extender device that will allow me to play with my old 486DX40 Handbook (the worlds smallest "laptop" device) and get it connecting to the Internet - why?....why not!... I set it all up 6 years ago and I just want to see if it's still valid ... and okay, I might set it up as a cheeky web-server! CLICK HERE TO WASTE SOME OF YOUR TIME SEEING HOW I WASTED ...

As I said before, sometimes, in order to get a sense of direction forward we have to look back.  Not, "go" back, but go back to a time and place and observe a perspective of opportunity, hope, vision & direction and wonder where it all wandered off to.  Then sit back & ponder, there were some good concepts & idea's that got passed over or totally missed that could be introduced into the modern world to help make things a little better. Anyway, enough rambling, and yes, there are some "car" related items in here, but bare with it, enjoy the next hour or so....for a little look at the future from a 1939 perspective: So, it is quite well known (in the work environment) that I don't get along with the "younger" generation (currently in their 20-30s) and that I'm pigeon holed as "the grumpy old man" and I've become that stereotype... I guess my frustration with that age-range of people is that they have become so....."...

I wrote another PAGE to extend the original earlier POST as I received my Raspberry Pi 4 and decided to set it up and compare it to the Rock Pi X and RPi 3+ device. Well....that was an interesting exercise! CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT IN MORE DEPTH Old creepy eyes here, does do the job with an RPI 4 device... but not as outstandingly well as I had expected.   To see the RPi4 performance, check out the PAGE HERE . Well, it seems to be working okay...... CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT IN MORE DEPTH

As you can tell from looking back over previous Dec/Jan postings , I tend to get a little nostalgic for the good old days of working with computers.  I once had an entire bedroom (named the '8-bit room') that was full and I mean full of just Amstrad CPC related micro-computers and peripherals.  I even had all the modern gadgets hooked up to do a variety of things.  Why the Amstrad?  Well, that's what I received as an xmas present back in 1985 and sort of set me off on my IT journey.   I even taught myself Z80 assembler and wrote a computer game (in 2009!), I have the .dsk file knocking around someplace.  It was fun and something I never achieved as a kid.  Here's a couple of screenshots from the PiCade ( I still have the .DSK file, but I have no idea where the original code went or even how to compile/build etc... I think all that has been lost to time ).  I had to plug a keyboard into the PiCade as the genius that I am, I required you to pre...

I had to create a PAGE for this POST as it was a bit long and included quite a few photo's and videos - I know that hasn't stopped me in the past, but I shall be updating the PAGE when I get a new Raspberry Pi 4.... CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT IN MORE DEPTH So....what's it all about then?  Well, I have a 3D printed robot head and I have 2 web-cams inside the "eyes" and I wanted to get them hooked up to a device so that I could "see" through them and then detect objects and/or people and then react to those events. This set me down a path of exploring a couple of different devices, the Raspberry Pi (obviously) and the Rock Pi X (not so well known).  I thought I'd give the Rock Pi X a go, seeing as it is x86 based and is, well, just a bit different to the normal response of, "well, just use a Raspberry Pi" - was that what happened in the end?.... you'll have to read and see! CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT IN MORE DEPTH CLICK HERE TO ...

 seeing as it is the festive season, it is quite right that we should all put down our electronic gadgets and get back to playing some good old fashioned board games. here's one to raise an eyebrow or two: ENTANGLION The World’s First Open Source Quantum Board Game. Master New Galaxies in Your Quest to Construct a Quantum Computer! yes, yes it is for real.  you can buy a copy here or download and make your own - fun for all the family!

Stumbled over this funky open-source library that looks pretty cool for 39Kb! Does the basics...and it's not Google.  nice.      Go visit LEAFLET here . Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about  39 KB of JS , it has all the mapping  features  most developers ever need. Leaflet is designed with  simplicity ,  performance  and  usability  in mind. It works efficiently across all major desktop and mobile platforms, can be extended with lots of  plugins , has a beautiful, easy to use and  well-documented API  and a simple, readable  source code  that is a joy to  contribute  to. Yes, I am meant to be doing lots of "other" things... and I am distracting myself... okay, here's a very quick update on what I was doing last night in relation to getting multiple webcams to be detected at the same time and to analyse both a...

 Sometimes we have to go back, in order to go forward:  The amusing thing is - this morning I was watching a video about Natural Language Processing (yeugh, yes, with python), but it was using Tensorflow - anyway, the essence of the "new" video was basically doing the same as that chap doing the piping in unix!  So many little soundbites from the above video still have not been solved, even with all the "advances" we've made with technology. There are also a few phrases in the above video that have given me food for thought in relation to "How do we build a Quantum computer operating system?".

Okay, so a while back in Feb 2020 (that seems sooooo long ago now) I did a post about what I was going to do in my "week off".... as you can imagine, a lot of it didn't happen.  In fact, I think I just ended up spending the week working on my custom car. However, there was mention within the post of an "OLD" project that I'd been kicking around for a year or so named Project 'O'.  Here's the description that I gave then: https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-week-off-worksort-ofproject-o.html -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)  I can finally get my mindset back into Project 'O'.  Now that IBM and Red Hat have finally blurred into one, I can get to grips with what that actually means.  The big push is all about  OpenShift ...."what's that?", yep, that's what I wanted to figure out so off to YouTube I went...and then received mixed messages depending upon ho...

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/05/javascript_25_anniversary/ Funny thing is....I currently work with people who are younger than JavaScript.  Raises a smile and reminds me of when I was first introduced to JavaScript... Back in 1997-ish I was writing some simple little C code apps to do file/data transformations whilst working at Ford Motor Company.  I was also helping to design and implement a FOAK system that was basically eBay for Ford dealerships (FOCALpt / NDSDB), it was mostly based around Oracle (as that was Fords standard) running on SCO Unix.  It was Oracle on the bottom, middle and front-end... I recall going to an Oracle DBA course in Richmond for 2 weeks, after which I was a certified Oracle 7.3 DBA. yay!  what it taught me was that Oracle wanted you to write all your business logic inside stored procedures as that was "faster" and closer to the raw data and you can just up the spec of the Servers running everything as you need more performance....

Hello Dave, Shall we play a game?  https://www.ibm.com/security/digital-assets/cybersecurity-ops/terminal/ Go on, you know you want to :-) have fun!

 okay, so I've been a Raspberry Pi fan since v1 or v2 and have done quite a bit with them over the past 9-10 years. However, I just stumbled over this Pi sized SBC (Single Board Computer): It has one major difference, instead of an ARM processor, it has an x86 processor.  Yes, an x86. It also sounds like it will have an NPU attachment soon that will allow for AI/ML additions.  Now, that sounds interesting. This sounds like a nice little device that will allow me to build and compile C code and execute it on the source machine and this little device withou cross-compiling. Okay, so that's not a huge selling point, but it does start to give some options - with the added bonus that existing x86 based software will just run on this board, without the need to run emulators or simulators, which is a bonus. Check out HERE for more info . Of course I've just ordered one....will see how it works in a few weeks time....

 Fancy changing your UI in Linux or Mac for some futuristic sci-fi-eque screen.... that is also fully functional! Then check out eDEX-UI . Features: Fully featured terminal emulator with tabs, colors, mouse events, and support for  curses  and  curses -like applications. Real-time system (CPU, RAM, swap, processes) and network (GeoIP, active connections, transfer rates) monitoring. Full support for touch-enabled displays, including an on-screen keyboard. Directory viewer that follows the CWD (current working directory) of the terminal. Advanced customization using themes, on-screen keyboard layouts, CSS injections. See the  wiki  for more info. Optional sound effects made by a talented sound designer for maximum hollywood hacking vibe. Your inner geek knows you want to download this .

 So....some great sales person at Nvidia took a look in the warehouse one day and said, "how come we have so many GPUs on the shelf? who ordered all these? was it the same person who ordered all the oil drums in Half Life 2?...how the hell am I going to sell all these?" ...and thus, the AI/ML training requirement using GPUs was born. okay, so that could be a total fabrication of the truth (we'll never know) and I'm sure I'll get 1001 comments telling me the real history (pst: I really don't care and if you keep reading you'll figure out why ) I was at work the other day and the subject of training ML models came up and some very clever Data Scientists were telling me that to train/learn the things I wanted to do would require exclusively using Cloud servers as they have the GPU scalability that is required to do the training in a decent amount of time.  I wasn't convinced. Also, we cannot use the "Cloud" (ie. someone elses servers), we're...

I had a PIXYMON a few years back (it was very expensive at the time) and whilst it did do the job, once the power was removed, it "forgot" everything you'd trained it, so was a bit of a chore.  I still have it someplace.....  but now, the future has arrived and it's better (of course)  Purchase a HUSKYLENS yourself from DF ROBOT (or via Amazon ) What is it? HuskyLens is an easy-to-use  AI Machine Vision Sensor . It is equipped with multiple functions, such as  face recognition ,  object tracking ,  object recognition ,  line tracking ,  color recognition , and  tag(QR code) recognition . HuskyLens adopts the new generation of specialized AI chip Kendryte K210. The performance of this special AI chip is 1,000 times faster than that of the STM32H743 when running neural network algorithm. With these excellent performances, it is capable of capturing even fast-moving objects. With the HuskyLens, your projects have new ways to interact with...