Tony is a Geek

Coming on October 31st......    " 95 Theses " INTRODUCTION THESES "This website is part of a wider project in public engagement. My long-term academic interest has been in public understanding of technology, and in particular popular understanding (and misunderstanding) of the Internet and digital technology generally. I like the idea of using a ‘thesis’ as a way of starting off a discussion. Long ago, this was a standard way of conducting scholarly debates. I thought it would be interesting to try it again as a way of sparking public interest in what digital technology is doing to us . We’re in the early stages of a radical transformation of our information environment. It’s happening on a scale that has only been matched once before in history — when Johannes Gutenberg invented printing (or at any rate re-invented it in Europe). The print revolution transformed Western society and shaped the world in which — at least until recently — most of us grew up. ...

.......My creative brain has been going overtime the past couple of months (okay, I'll admit since 2001, but formulating since 2010....) and soon, very soon, it's going to over-spill into something awesome....... I'll share, when mind transforms into matter and reality.... until then here are some things to distract the mind .................................................................................... ....................................................................................

I do dislike hardware technology waste.  There seems to be a mindset trend of " well, that's 2 years old, it's out dated, chuck it away and get a new one ".  Apple does this a lot.  okay, okay, there are probably a lot of places that will recycle your "old" iPhone/iMac for you and you'll take the £xxx financial hit for the privilege of using the latest hardware version, but it still erks me that hardware that is still pretty decent gets thrown away when it can still be really useful. Read about the journey of keeping a PowerPC G5 iMac alive by installing Ubuntu Linux onto it - all, so I can use the machine to help build my new AI robots.... http://tonyisageek.blogspot.co.uk/p/dont-bin-that-powerpc-g5-mac.html http://tonyisageek.blogspot.co.uk/p/dont-bin-that-powerpc-g5-mac.html http://tonyisageek.blogspot.co.uk/p/dont-bin-that-powerpc-g5-mac.html

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/10/10/holodeck-design-lab-of-the-future/ 'Nvidia Holodeck' is a real product – and it's almost what you're expecting, though not intended strictly for Starship crew use: Oh and they've also built AI into it to.... "Holodeck is also AI-ready, meaning that you can train agents and deploy them in the virtual space to test your designs against anticipated real-world conditions, including virtual operators and incidental personnel and staff who might interact with any machinery or other objects being prototyped before they’re built." https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/10/10/holodeck-design-lab-of-the-future/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/05/10/holodeck/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/technologies/holodeck/

A few posts back I mentioned: Oh, I've also been making a Java Android Mobile application that uses Speech to Text, then calls the APIs of the IBM Watson Conversation Service translates that Text back to Speech and enables you to have a full blown conversation in voice instead of having to type and read messages ( also does it in 3 different languages at the moment ) - I'll create an article specifically to show you how to do this quickly and easily using the Watson SDK.  Then, "if" my arm gets twisted enough, I might look at porting it to run on iOS ( but as I still don't have a iOS device, it might be tricky!) Well, here it is.... CLICK HERE TO READ THE WALKTHROUGH ARTICLE CLICK HERE TO READ THE WALKTHROUGH ARTICLE CLICK HERE TO READ THE WALKTHROUGH ARTICLE Naturally, I'll be extending and growing this example of using Watson APIs beyond just the Conversation Service.  I think I might interface with the Watson Visual Recognition serv...

Just like buses, you wait for ages and none come....then they all start to come at once.  Same with these posts! Right, this is something very close to my heart (and brain - pun intended!).  I want/need to sign up to this as soon as I can be a donor. CLICK HERE FOR THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE Here is a TED talk on "ems" - machines that emulate human brains and can think, feel and work just like the brains they're copied from. Yes, copy of your brain.  This is awesome (well, probably scary for a lot of people thinking of the negatives), but I want to be Clone#7.  I digress. Economist and social scientist Robin Hanson describes a very possible (near) future when EMS take over the global economy, running on superfast computers and copying themselves to multitask, leaving humans with only one choice: to retire, forever! Come and glimpse a strange future as Hanson describes what could happen if robots ruled the earth. As I say, where can I sign up to trials ...

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...

Okay, so, if like me, you've had your interest piqued by the prospect of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) over the past year and a half and have even invested in Oculus Rift and/or a Samsung Gear headset (* other VR units are available ) and you've got yourself a copy of Unity or Unreal Engine and had great expectations about making this wonderfully great new VR world with magical spinning things and whooshy ( yes, that's a word I just made up ) swirls of rainbow goodness, only to the have to fire up Udemy or Coursera to find a course that teaches you how to make 3D models. Several weeks later, you've made a potato.  A bad looking potato.  It is kind of 3D, but has lumps in the wrong places.  It does NOT look like the prancing unicorn that you envisaged for your main character representation in your snazzy new VR world.  Come to think of it, the rocks, buildings, cars, <insert any other shape or object that you wanted to have in your landscape...

Roomba Inventor Joe Jones on His New Weed-Killing Robot, and What's So Hard About Consumer Robotics I've been toying with the idea of a GardenBot, for a few years now..... and many people have asked, "Why haven't you done it yet?". Well.....I'll let the "expert" explain why.  It's not as simple as it sounds. CHECK IT OUT HERE Although I am still in the process of making K9-RPi3_bot...so maybe that will evolve into my GardenBot at some point, we'll see...

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...