Tony is a Geek

Yes, we have top, htop, the other thing that I installed & forgot about - but what if I want "more"? maybe I've been ruined by using a Windows machine for a few days, who knows. Now, would it be great to have something like this that you could tap into for "reality"?* Anyway, here is an app called MissionCenter.  Check it out HERE:  https://missioncenter.io/ Rather than faff around, go get the latest releases from here: https://gitlab.com/mission-center-devs/mission-center/-/releases oooo, look: amd64 & arm64 versions - potential RPi5 version?! "so what?" Well, thanks to this nifty little tool, that does resemble the Windows Task Manager - it made me aware that I had a couple of background database services running that I'm not using, so can turn off, saving a bit of RAM. Also, "wow!", look at just how much RAM [Chromium] is taking up! nearly 4Gb - F*k me! When did simple web-pages get so frigging bloated? It's just some pixel...

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 "...

 Wow! just wow. I was using this sort of kit about 2 years ago for the nice sum of around £2,500 You can now get it between £350-£650 (depending on where you buy it from), or $249 (yeah, I'll let you work out that conversation rate chaos?!?!) What does it do? It is a wow! show-stopper.  CHECK IT OUT CHECK IT OUT MORE HERE: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-orin/nano-super-developer-kit/ Okay, I'll stop teasing & show you the SPECs: YES, you read that right, 1024 CUDA cores.... 1024.... in something that small.  Now, it starts to become something useful?!?! CHECK OUT the official 1-pager of info: https://nvdam.widen.net/s/zkfqjmtds2/jetson-orin-datasheet-nano-developer-kit-3575392-r2 I'd love to order one.  However, life unfortunately gets in the way, so I have to stick with paying bills first & such innovative advancements have to pass me by (for now). OKAY, so after checking this out - a DIRECT sale, I was a little surp...

Yep, I ordered it back in January 2024, it finally arrived...just before December 2024.  Apparently the 10-month delay wasn't a joke, it really does take that long.  Was it worth the wait? Yeah, I reckon so. The 32Gb SDCard that came with the device, I just stuck it into the device - it was Debian 11 Bullseye for Raspberry Pi 4.  It worked okay, for a day or so. I installed [node-red], it worked well, I downloaded [world-map] and got some markers appearing, it seemed to perform well.  I then started to think how I want to set this device up to use it.  I wanted [Arduino] too. That 4G adaptor - how do you get it to work? (using the Debian Bullseye install) Well, after putting in a SIM card, the instructions in this article worked a treat: https://github-wiki-see.page/m/clockworkpi/uConsole/wiki/How-to-use-the-4G-extension To summarise: $ uconsole--4g-cm4 enable This outputs that it is detecting the adaptor and then it says something like "success". Then what? Wel...

https://github.com/danielmiessler/fabric "Fabric is an open-source framework for augmenting humans using AI. It provides a modular framework for solving specific problems using a crowdsourced set of AI prompts that can be used anywhere." "So what?" Well, if you've gone beyond the "hey, I can setup and access an LLM and now I'm a genius" phase, you will have hit the valley of disillusionment (is that even a word?), decided that LLMs are crap, attempted to do "stuff" with them & then mentally accepted that they are not smart at all, it's all an illusion to "appear to be intelligent", but really it's just word pattern matching and spewing out garbage in response to your questions, or just plain bollox. Then you thought, "hmmm... I'm going to write myself some prompts, that'll make life better", then you wrote about 5 very long and convoluted one's that you think are great & will be used for pre...

A UGV Rover 6-wheeled robot with Raspberry Pi5, awesome camera (pan & tilt / stabilisation) and a LiDar - what's not to like?  Well, it's open-source too. However, it comes with a bit of an odd setup, it is running a Raspberry Pi 5 board, but to control the device itself it's also running an ESP32 board that controls all the components. OOTB the setup is "okay", it's a web-browser based access to all the bits you need, it even has the concept of a jupyter notebook style Python setup that allows you to control / access all the features.  Although, this soon becomes a bit limiting. I hooked up a mini-HDMI to the Raspberry Pi 5 and it booked to Bookworm (12, I believe), which allowed me to then install things natively, I installed YOLO and got some really good camera / vision analysis going on. However, I then had the addition of the LiDar D500 attachment .   Now, this is where the "fun" started.  The lidar component came with links to a Windows .e...