Tony is a Geek

This has been an interest and a concern of mine for quite sometime and it has been on my radar (pun intended) for quite some time to investigate some simpler or not so simpler alternatives. What's the problem?  well, GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite systems), otherwise known by the general public as GPS (Global Position systems) have a bit of a flaw in the fact that a particular country "owns" the satellites that are used, America owns one setup (GPS), Russian another (GLONASS), Europe another (Galileo), Chines another (BeiDou), India and Japan have their own Navigation Systems you get the jist. Interestingly it costs about $2Bn to keep GPS running and operational per year - however, it is "free" to be used by everyone. One of the BIG flaws of using GPS / guidance systems is the mass usage within drones - and the way that these signals can be blocked or overridden with false information - not a good thing :-( Now, imagine you wanted to "get off" the ...

Okay, so after wasting a LOT of time going around in circles? ( Which does make me wonder how far & how not-far (!far), we've actually come in the IT Industry, we seemed to have peaked in the mid/late 1990s/early 2000s & then seemed to have gotten stuck & repeated ourselves and gone in a downward spiral - wow, I really do sound like a Gen-X-er! which I am, so get over it )  I often confess I'm no genius, I just keep trying different positions to put the square block into the circle hole repeatedly, until I either wear down the sides of the square or I make the circle more square - such is life :-) What has this got to do with ROS2.  Well, I thought this was going to be a 10minute job, super simple & I could move onto the "good stuff" and do something useful with my time.  Over the years, I have learnt that I tend to spend the time between xmas & new year just doing "installs & setups", I rarely actually get to the point where I "...

Absolutely love this lady and what she says here I tend to agree with.... does she know what she's talking about? sure she does... she even has a Brilliant training course on Quantum , so yeah, I'd say she knows what she's talking about. The Quantum winter is coming / is already here: and yes, I do have an IBM Quantum badge , say no more.  maybe one-day someone will figure out how this technology can be useful - I've been scratching my head for a the past few years, wondering the same.

Well, the plan is to "finish" off the mess I made in the garden during Lockdown v1.0... but current snow & freezing weather conditions may put a halt to that, we'll see.... it might be nice to get outside for 4-5 hours per day, moving soil around and filling in the failed "canal" that I built.... anyway, if it does end up being a week of sitting inside with the heating on....I'll make sure I flick through this book: Although, that IBM PC 110 will always be winking at me from the background, wanting me to "do something" with them....we'll see...

 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!

Well.....to be able to use it, you need to be able to code for it... https://quantumzeitgeist.com/boston-based-quantum-startup-zapata-releases-orquestra-a-new-software-platform/ Despite skeptics having doubts about the ‘realness’ of the imminent field of quantum computing, there are many strides forward made even now. IBM recently released an ambitious roadmap that is hardware-based, and Zapata, a Boston-based quantum computing startup, announced its commercial release of Orquestra.  It is an advanced software platform used to create repeatable quantum and quantum-based workflows and algorithms and can be used across industries and cases. The process involves a quantum engine that systematically groups together information and resources even when they are spread across both quantum and classical devices. Orquestra is designed for quantum use cases such as writing, manipulating, and optimising quantum circuits as well as running these across various devices. These devices include qu...

Fancy running some Quantum stuff on a Raspberry Pi? Well, now you can....sort of, well, you can run a simulation, it's not going to be a proper Quantum computer is it?, it's a Raspberry Pi. Check out this original article here to find out more . Check out this video to see how you can use QRasp: https://github.com/ordmoj/qrasp

I've been here before, but I think I was a bit too early.... http://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2017/05/babies-first-computer-quantum.html However, I'm pretty sure that this is the place to start to move over into. If you think about the limitations we have today in relation to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, it's a bit like looking at the limitations of the horse&cart and having the vision to see the Quantum Sports car ( okay, not the best evolutionary step, but a vision none the less ) During my day job, I've seen a lot of people working away delivering various Machine Learning services, such as " chat bots ".  They are all super excited that they are going to really make a difference and help out their fellow human beings to "get things done". Then they release their baby into the wild and well, it gets a whole lot of abuse and gets condemned for being "dumb", for not being able to do the "simplest of thi...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ibm-and-mit-ai-partnership/ "This work is undeniably promising, but it’s a simple evolution of the hardware we have today. Another, more dramatic option is the use of a quantum computer  to explore the potential of an A.I. Such research is still in its earliest conceptual stages, but the enormous computational power of a large-scale universal quantum computer seems likely to inspire a major leap in our understanding. MIT’s lab will have access to IBM Q , the company’s flagship quantum project. Recently updated to a 20-qubit processor , an even more impressive 50-qubit version on the horizon – hardware that will surely be a real gamechanger when it’s possible to use it to its full potential. This avenue of research is set to be a two-way street. Machine learning will be used to help advance research into quantum hardware, and the results will help scientists push the boundaries of machine learning. ..... The MIT-IBM Wa...

There have been a few updates on the latest updates in the world of Quantum processors: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/ibm-edges-closer-to-quantum-supremacy-with-50qubit-processor https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/11/the-future-is-quantum/ https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2017/10/quantum-computing-barrier/ One of the problems with all this talk about Quantum computers is "How do I actually do something with it?".... https://www.qiskit.org/ Oh, guess what - you can write some Python code too: Here's the TUTORIAL guide

So...it has been noticed that I have been rather quiet on the technical front for quite some time... have I been doing exciting things? have I been doing boring things? have I been doing both and neither of those two things?  I've been doing all of them....and more. "That makes no sense!", I hear you say.  Well, as you may or may not know I've had a bit more than a passing interest in Mysticism, Cosmology, the Occult and Magical teaching of times gone by.  Yes, I do actually have a larger library than John Dee had back in the day.  Did I go off and become the next Gandalf  the grey  or Dr.Strange?  No.  Well, okay, maybe a little bit...... I was attempting to learn the techniques and learning practices of working with the mind, soul and the perception of reality of the world ( as you do ) and looking at ways that these teachings and practices can be applied in a Technology orientated world.  I like a challenge ;-) As you can imagi...

Totally blatant work focused sales pitch material alert.  But, c'mon, you've got to admit, this is pretty bl00dy awesome!!!  The one below, not the one above. IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science. While technologies like AI can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be found and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers. We invite you join us in exploring what might be possible with this new and vastly different approach to computing. IBM Q has successfully built and tested two of its most powerful universal quantum computing processors. The first has 16 qubits and is for public use by developers, researchers, and programmers via the IBM Cloud at no cost. The second is the fir...