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Showing posts from August, 2022

Internet access and phone-mast signals

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As the weather is deciding to turn a little bit cooler / cloudier and not represent standing in the kitchen in-front of a fan-assisted oven with the door open, I decided that I would like to spend 1/2 a week (3-nights) working away from home, somewhere nice, somewhere near some water, like a lake, just somewhere pleasant that doesn't involve me driving the motorhome for 6hours.  As I've become a bit of a GIS mapping geek the past few months I thought I'd take a look at someplace local, not too far away that had an Adult camp site ( get your mind out of the gutter - I just don't like kids, just like I don't like Gen Z's , same thing, if I can avoid any contact or not be in their vicinity, I will take every measure - they annoy me - I am sure the feeling is mutual ).   With that in mind, I stumbled over this lovely place, right next to Chew Valley lake .  Okay, so why don't I just book in for a few nights and just bugger off there and keep myself to myself. 

2022 Avatars

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How technology has moved on (as it should) since 2017, which was when I was looking into using 3D human virtual avatars .  Back then it was EXPENSIVE and I mean expensive. Today, however, (as it should) it has dropped to an acceptable pricing. This company, based in London, UK, has a wonderful offering: https://www.synthesia.io/ https://www.synthesia.io/ The Personal pricing is shown below: What does a video credit mean? Well, 1 video credit = 1 minute of video.  So, for $30 per month you get 10 minutes of video per month.  10 minutes is actually quite a long period of time. Maybe it's time to make 1 minute videos using the Text to Video feature, so instead of writing text like I am doing now, I can still write the text; but feed it into SYNTHESIA and it will make an Avatar speaking the words in a video.  Okay, it's not rocket-science, but it is a novel approach that is way way way cheaper than the offerings I was looking at 5 years ago ( https://www.soulmachines.com/ ) Yes, I

Genetic Algorithms & training cars

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Okay, I'm not going to teach anything myself here, I'm going to share 3 videos that are rather interesting. I'll go back to stating "AI is not magic" ( there is a video of me with that title knocking around on a hard-drive somewhere that I keep teasing people with - I'll find & share it one day - okay that day became TODAY ) These 3 videos are a great tutorial introduction to show "under the bonnet" how genetic algorithms work and how they can be applied. The first 6mins or so are a great intro to how genetics work for humans/animals and this is key to understand in order to understand how the cars "teach" each other.  Spoiler warning: there is no teaching In order to follow along at home, you can either just watch the 3 videos or set this up yourselves: You'll need a copy of: UNITY 2021.3 & this starter car pack:  https://www.holistic3d.com/resources Within Unity, Open the race-track and then the car.  Turn the car on...  actua

It's summer and everything is BLOOM-ing...

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Okay, so this isn't about flowers, although I did just do some gardening and turned a sad looking area into an area of small beauty thanks to some hard-work and some considerate flower purchases - and yes, this was done in the week of 35+degrees of heat - but it'll be fine it's the UK, it'll rain next week and also I'm rigging up a rainfall driven automated watering system that will allow for trickle feeding the plants with water - with no technology, well, an Arduino might get in on the equation soon. The BLOOM that I am referring to, is in relation to A.I.  It's not your normal library of pre-trained models and it has stayed pretty hush-hush, considering it is the equivalent of a $5m system, available for FREE. Yes, I said FREE and I meant FREE. What's it all about then? https://towardsdatascience.com/bloom-is-the-most-important-ai-model-of-the-decade-97f0f861e29f ( I'll snippet some text from that article below, if you're t

Solar panels, not for motorhome, but for garden use

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Now, I bought these solar panels, the controller and the leisure battery about 3-4 years ago when I had a wonderful little Japanese Kei-car van: It was a great little 660cc powered van that we used to ferry around the basset hounds in - my plan was to fit the 2xsolar panels to the roof and allow us to have proper electricity in the van for making cups of tea / coffee and maybe have a small induction cooker or something.  However, the basset hounds passed away  ( they did make it to a glorious 12years ) and the solar panel kit moved from the back of the garage into the kitchen; where I then hooked up the solar panels onto the top of the wooden pagoda things outside the backdoor of the kitchen.  I t really was more of a "test" setup to see how it all worked.  The panels did their job, the controller did its thing, the battery got charged and I used to use it to charge the PS4 controllers and the odd phone every now & then.  Then we had a huge storm hit us called Storm Eunic

Space.... the next frontier

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something "fun" to take a look at shortly when I get some time https://www.orekit.org/ https://gitlab.orekit.org/orekit/orekit " No-one can hear you scream " I was just reading this article:  https://spectrum.ieee.org/mapping-unchartered-waters and it got me to wondering, if the process of 3D underwater mapping can be used in space? Now, there will be a few of you, crunching your foreheads and squinting your eyes and saying, "But Tony, space is a vacuum, how would that work?...".  Well, who says it is a vacuum?  Have you been there to check? are you not thinking of the Hollywood 007 movie where they show the pssshhh pssshhh device that use a little jet of air to move astronauts around in space - please, point me to them... actually thinking about it, you could use airjets in similar ways to how you would in a pond or lake of water - although I do not believe they use oxygen, but nitrogen as explained here, they were called MMUs and were used once in 198

Flutterviz.com

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Now, I know I have posted about Flutter before, but here's just a little update about a cool web app I stumbled over called FlutterViz: How many time have you thought, " you know what, I'll make a really quick and simple little app for my phone that won't take me days to code / build" , (no?, just me?), anyway, just something quick and easy, well, first of all, you go and visit here: https://flutterawesome.com/ and do a quick search of existing templated github available apps to, you know, give yourself an accelerated boost... I wanted to make "kind of a todo list app, but not really". I actually wanted a motorhome checklist app that I could run through, whilst setting up / packing the motorhome; before departure checklist of items to go through and once arrived and parked up a checklist of items to make sure I have everything setup and ready to use; also potentially a checklist of items when leaving the motorhome to go for a walk. Now, these items in th