geek

I recently installed Ubuntu on one of the Pi’s are home and installed Podman - which I hadn’t heard of until recently and is a container engine, similar to docker but doesn’t have a daemon. When trying to get a basic alpine test image running I got this error: Error: error creating build container: short-name "python:3.7-alpine" did not resolve to an alias and no unqualified-search registries are defined in "/etc/containers/registries.conf"...

If you are like me, and don’t really have your work saved in the “%USERPROFILE%” it gets annoying after a time, to keep changing the directory. If there is one specific folder that you prefer, it is an easy configuration change in the profile setting - add a setting called “startingDirectory” and point it to the path you want. For example, I have a root folder called “src” where most of the code I am working on sits, and that’s where I wanted to default the terminal to....

One of the key advances in the latest version of Windows 10 (2004) is WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux v2) - and whilst a version bump, it offers so much more. This allows us to run with near-native performance linux binaries ( ELF64 ). Before we get into the steps outlined to install WSL2, I also recommend installing Windows Terminal , and winget . Although not required, it does make it simpler to use and a better (dev) experience - especially when setting up a new workstation....

If you have butter fingers like me, and over time end up with a lot of old commands with typos in your Windows run box that get annoying - deleting them is a simple. All you need to do it remove the following registry key. 1 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU Now every time one plays with regedit, it can be dangerous - you can also save this commend as a .cmd file, and then run it with admin privileges - essentially does the same thing....

As my experimentation continues, I wanted to get Visual Studio Code installed on a mac, and wanted to use python as the language of choice - main reason for the mac is to understand and explore the #ML libraries, runtimes, and their support on a mac (both natively and in containers - docker). Now, Microsoft has a very nice tutorial to get VSCode setup and running on a mac, including some basic configuration (e....

I am writing this on a Microsoft Surface Book, running Ubuntu natively, and there isn’t any Windows option - I blew away, the Windows partition, and there isn’t any other OS on it. Why some of you might think? Well, why not. :) For me the motive is two fold: one am a geek and love to hack what works and cannot work - how else will one learn? And two, explore and see which AI frameworks, tools, and runtimes works better on Linux natively...

Wait. I have how many tabs open? I can’t count more than fingers I have, so not sure if this is accurate. Maybe time to reboot. 😄 PS – Yes, I can count using more than 10 (toes, remember?)

Some time ago, I talked about my Tesla Model 3 “keyfob” which essentially uses a Amazon IoT button to call some of Tesla API’s and “talk” to the car. This for me, is cool as it allows my daughter to unlock, and lock the car at home. And of course it is a bit geeky, and allowing one to play with more things. :) Since publishing this, I was surprised how many of you ping me asking on details on how they can did this for themselves....

Often once hears are Lines of Code (LoC) as a metric. And for you to get a sense of what it means, below is a info-graphic that outlines some popular products, and services and the LoC that takes. Always interesting to get perspective - either appreciate some home grown system you are managing, or worried about a stinking pile you are going to inherit or build. 😄

Inspired by a few folks on a few forums online , I took the liberty to extend their idea using a IoT Button, that acts as a simple “keyfob” for the Model 3. The main goal was being to allow my daughter to lock and unlock the car at home. She is too young to have a phone, and without a more traditional fob, this gets a little annoying. I extended the original idea, to understand the different presses (Single, Double, and Long press), and accordingly called the appropriate API to lock the car (single press - think of it as a single click), unlock on a double press, and open the charge port on a long press (when one presses and holds the button 2-3 secs)....

If you have a Tesla, and are using (or wanting to use) 3rd party tools or data loggers, the one think they of course need is to authenticate your details with Tesla. A simple, but insecure way is to use your Tesla credentials - and surprisingly many people just happily share and use this. I wasn’t comfortable doing this - after-all, they have access to your account where you can control a lot of things....

If you were trying to pull the latest source code on your Raspberry Pi for donkeycar, and get the following error, then probably your clock is off (and I guess some nonce is failing). This can happen if your pi had been powered off for a while (as in my case), and it’s clock is off ( clock drift is a real thing) :). fatal: unable to access 'https://github.com/wroscoe/donkey/': server certificate verification failed....

When seeing this #CosmosDB is the first thing that comes to mind :)

This wired article titled If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet , is an old one - from 5 years ago, but it is still an inspirational read. So many things lined up for Google, to be where they are today. I still get goose bumps reading that article - but then I am a geek, if that wasn’t obvious. Whilst, grid computing with GFS, MapReduce, Hadoop, are still very much relevant and great (and most others still trying to use and understand it); Dynamo (from Amazon) and BigTable lead to NoSQL which is great and still worth spending a lot of time learning, playing, and, experimenting - I would love to hear on what they are doing now with Colossus (think of that as GFS vNext), Caffeine and, Spanner ....

I have talked to a few folks recently, and they still don’t believe bash on Windows (RS1) is ‘real’ and think it some kind of a VM. No it is not. It is the ‘real’ user mode running on Windows. It is not Cygwin, and it is not a VM. It is essentially all of the user mode (I.e. Linux without the kernel). The kernel in this case is a wrapper around the NT kernel that translates the Linux commands to Windows and then things run....

OK, now this is cool - not only is bash on fire, but I can miracast directly from Windows to another device. The first video shows a few basic shell commands and then catches fire! There should have been a video here but your browser does not seem to support it. And this second video - essentially miracasts the same video you just saw on my TV without any special adapters....

#Love is … staying friends throughout a holiday with no WiFi. ????

Got this tip via Jay Doscher at work. Right-click on the desktop Select New ==> Folder. Rename the new folder to this: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} You should now have an icon labeled GodMode and the icon changes too. And as you can see there are many things in there: PS - this also works in Win 7 and 8.

Don’t know how many folks know, but I got a google glass recently and only now have had some time to start playing with it. There were a few challenges but I finally got Glass ’talking’ to my Windows 8.1 machine and can now replicate the glass display (that is a post for another time, but it did take me some hit and try to figure out what I was doing wrong)....

Interesting read for any parent!

I have seen this a few times now so I know it is not a one off, but it seems that the sleeves of my shirt seem to throw off the Leap Motion sensor and it detects it as another hand - and ends up showing three hands. I thought it was my watch which might be causing some issue, but that was not it. It goes away when I am wearing a t-shirt, but the tracking is quite off when wearing a full sleeve shirt....

I was cleaning out my old papers (finally!) and came across an old paper I had titled “ Compiler Writing Tools using C# ” which essentially shows how you can write a number of tools like lex and yacc but instead of C/C++ on Unix, you use C# and .NET. This paper covers the tokenizer, grammar , DFA , NFA , etc. I think conflicts and precedence is one area it would need a little more work....

I am giving a presentation next week on NoSQL and as part of that I wanted to create a Word Map, similar to the ones I have seen in the Guardian over the years. After searching a little, I came across the following two sites which do an excellent job of this. Both of them allow a number of options to customise the output and I think are very cool!...

I have been doing some research on MANETs and UAV’s and this TED talk is a great example of how a number of nodes operate in a MANET and implement some predetermined algorithm, which in this case is the Bond Theme Song. Worth watching. :)

Microsoft recently release the Kinect SDK which allows you to implement a Natural User Interface and program against it! There is a lot of interest around including claims on how Robotics will change to how you can integrate a light sensor. You can use Visual Studio (C++, C# and VB.NET supported) and get quite interesting results. Here are a series of links below which will help you get started. Download and install the Kinect SDK Download and install Quickstart Samples and Slides (zip file) Understanding the Kinect hardware Setting up your Dev Environment Understanding the basics of skeletal tracking using the Kinect sensor Understanding camera fundamentals Understanding the audio fundamentals Playing with the Coding4Fun Kinect toolkit and seeing how one can build cool apps such as: Kinect Paint (which uses skeleton tracking) Kinect Mouse which uses your hands as the mouse cursor Keep and eye out on the Coding4Fun Kinect blog ....