Tony is a Geek

 From darkness into light OR light into darkness.... I'll let you decide. btw - a lot of people have been working from home during the 2020 covid-19 lockdown, unfortunately not me... I was still working onsite, today, however I get to work from home!  So, it was time to tidy-up (happens every few years) and now I have room to actually "see" the desk and have place to put my elbows! (panoramic image)

 Sometimes life / universe throws lemons at you.  So what do you do? Stand up straight and accept a lemon or two to the head / leg / knee-cap and move on with life, or, curl up into a ball get lemon juice squashed all over you? No, I have no idea what or why I'm talking about lemons either. What I wanted to post was that I had a mechanical failure occur in my (very expensive) custom car.  It did not "look" like a lot of damage, but as with most things in life, looks can be deceiving....  The infamous quote of, "it could have been worse" is not helpful and for an analytical brain that goes off pondering all of the potential outcomes of actions, this is really not helpful at all. Here's a photo of the aforementioned car on a recovery truck (that I REALLY want to purchase!), as you can see it is awesome on so many levels, not only can you load one vehicle onto it, you can load another one underneath...... OR, you can hoist one vehicle up in the air and do inspe...

 Yep, it's finally happening.  The "need" to have PhD, Master degree'd geeky / expensive mathematical statistical analysts to do your Machine Learning models looks to be fading away. Okay, so the reality is it won't happen overnight.  It will happen though, slowly at first and then as these products mature further, we'll end up with a lego-brick concept of plug-and-play Machine Learning modules that will get used / re-used as needed.  All without the need for the geeky glasses and white coats. https://www.udemy.com/course/no-code-machine-learning/ The above course takes you through using products from a couple of the BIG IT companies: Build Powerful Machine Learning Models w/Zero Coding!  Master Google Vertex AI, Microsoft Azure ML Designer, & DataRobot Now, this is something that I'm very keen to see progress and improve. Of course I've signed up to the course and yes, it is out of my own pocket and no, I don't get any kick back for promoting ...

 In continuing with my love / obsession with all things technical and laptops / palmtop related, I managed to get my hands on an IBM z50. "What is that?", I hear you say... well, it is a very rare device that IBM made for 1 year. ...and YES, it can run Linux if you want it to :-) As it states in the above website :  https://www.hpcfactor.com/reviews/hardware/ibm/workpad-z50/ This is a bit of an oddity, as it's not really a laptop and it's not really a palmtop and it is not really a PDA, but it runs Windows CE. Now, I used to write code / apps for Windows CE, back in the early days 2000-2008 for a huge variety of customers and I still have CD-roms full of PDA specific software, I even still have an Embedded C++ for Windows CE cd-rom in a drawer about 4 foot behind me.  Actually, I wonder if I should install that onto my Elonex P1 PC, just for some amusement and write an app or two. Well, as I say, I managed to acquire one of these devices and it is in REALLY good condi...

 Vodafone and TOBi chat bot https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56969347 Interesting headline at the top of the article....somewhat slightly mis-leading, but hey-ho Google... Took me back a bit though, not in shock, in time! Although I do very much like the fact that the reporter / Vodafone were honest and did explain that IBM Watson invented TOBi chatbot back in 2017 - I thank you very much, I will accept this and will take a bow..... Yes, I very much helped to make that a reality and then moved on.... That's what FOAK projects are for.... (First Of A Kind), you do something new, lay the foundations and then move on and then others come along and take it further... Hmmm... 2017, that seems soooooo long ago now.

 I am often baffled by the external perception ( ie. people who don't work with this stuff everyday ) that is portrayed about A.I.. I also have issue with the usage of the term A.I. - as far as I am aware, we / humans, have not yet successfully created an Artificial Intelligence.  We have created human children, that have somewhat of a limited intelligence, but we have absolutely and genuinely no idea "how" we created the childs intelligence, that is a mystery.  Before, b!tching at me that we are the all knowing masters of the planet Earth and we are far superior, we have scientists and we know how everything works.... we don't. fact.  We can sit down with pen & paper in my garage and draw out exactly how the cars in my garage work.  We can pick any piece, strip it down, figure it out & rebuild it.  Because we have an understanding, we potentially can even improve certain elements, such as carbs or fuel injection manifolds. However, we ( mad scienti...

 Now, here's a thing of joy that won't break the bank.... Well....£245 isn't "cheap", but it's about 10 times cheaper than they were when I last looked! https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1461.html I wonder if I could stick it on the roof of my 1959 Austin A35?..... now that could be interesting.... Well, these people have a slightly more expensive LIDAR and stuck it on top of a 3D Printed (?) vehicle - again, it's all about the software behind the hardware:  https://nuro.ai/product

Last week, I republished my "old" article on IBM developerworks as it had defaulted into "draft" mode as I hadn't kept it up to date.  So I make a few tweaks and republished it. https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/tutorials/create-a-3d-digital-human-with-ibm-watson-assistant-and-unity3d/   I then noticed that I could potentially use it for the content of an internal IBM badge for Intellectual Capital, so I applied for it and got the badge. https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/b851fb86-d554-4d56-ba80-dc37199a8b94 Then I was asked by the reviewer, James Belton, if he could publish on LinkedIn / Twitter about the article as he was genuinely impressed and was actually going to follow it himself this weekend: This got me thinking.  Maybe I should do a refresh, start again article, seeing as this article originally started life in early 2018.  I mean technology has moved on soooo much since then, hasn't it?.... .....well, apparently not!.... An internal request came u...

  Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator lets developers create realistic digital humans within minutes Why is this relevant?  Well.....way-back-when....I was looking into having Digital Humans as an interface for things such as Chatbots etc... and to be honest, the technology was at 2 extremes.  You had the likes of Soul Machines that would ask you to part with a few million quid for an awesomelly realistic digital human interface or you could use the Open Source version that was, well, let's just say, a bit 1995 PS1 style , but it would kind of do the job. Well....now, you can create that Soul Machines level of Digital Human and not only that, you can do it pretty quickly too. I might have to go back and create a new updated developer article using the new technology. https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/10/epic-games-metahuman-creator-lets-developers-create-realistic-digital-humans-within-minutes/ https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/10/epic-games-metahuman-creator-lets-developers-cr...

As an amusing piece of BBC News, this story came out after I published the info about it being BBS time, well, I was writing it for what seems like ages, so maybe it was 10 mins before or after, whatever.... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55908193 The funny thing is.... he's a multi-millionaire sitting on a tax haven island someplace getting bored - yes, read how much he sold the Bebo site for,........twice!  Yes, I fully appreciate that he had to put the "hard work in" in the first place to make it happen, in essence fleecing people for their details and then flogging all that data to a company who was going to try and find a way to exploit it and/or sell it to others.... That's not what I wanted to focus on though, what I was amused by was the fact that he is sitting there, bored stupid (island or no island) and he's fed up with Social Media sites ( as I was eluding to in this Page ), and was no doubt thinking to himself.... hmmmm.... what the world need...