Sys. Admin. Archives - How To Train Your Robot

2021-10-02

Hacktoberfest 2021 is here!

It’s been one year since the spammageddon of Hacktoberfest requests and issues with contributing to only accepted opted-in repositories – but this year there are some good changes:

You can now use Gitlab for PRs.

Monetary donations are also encouraged for open source projects.

You can either get a shirt or plant a tree, for completing 4 PRs with improvements to participating open source projects.

Also, of course if you have a project yourself you maintain, you can add “Hacktoberfest” tag to get participants to find your repo. 🙂 What are some of the projects you might consider helping?

2021-09-032021-09-03

Turning a normal SVG into an Android Vector (Updated Repeater-START!)

If you have tried at building an Android app recently you might notice that there is a new icon shown on newer Android Oreo, Android 10, Android 11 devices… it shows the Android antenna head instead of the normal icon. The odd thing is that the “design” area of the .xml file will display it but not let you actually design and draw in it like you can change layout xml. You can however use Inkscape or your favorite .svg editor and convert that file to this Android format:

2021-08-28

Let your voice be heard for Librem Phone/Pinephone Apps!

As you may have noted if you have recently upgraded to Pinephone or Librem Phone, there are currently some missing spots as far as good and well built mobile apps for the platform. While this affords great opportunity for the first folks to build apps to profit from this growing segment, we also should encourage local app makers to fix their apps to work on Linux/Librem Phone!

2021-08-212021-08-21

Chrome 93 brings a different way of thinking

If you are using Chrome 93, you may have noticed recently the “Your connection is always secure unless Chrome tells you otherwise” in the location bar. This raises an interesting question – should the system be telling you that any site that you visit is secure? Should we be trusting Chrome in this regard?

2021-08-132021-08-15

Zipf’s law, Kleiber’s law, and finding interesting patterns in browsing history

In the chapter The Long Tail of the Law, in Alex Bellos’ book The Grapes of Math, he shows some different statistical patterns that share the same properties:

2021-07-082021-07-09

Pat 0.11 Review and setup… the long awaited update!

If you have used Ham radio and are on Linux, you most likely have used the Winlink program Pat, an open source interface to use Winlink over internet (and some radios if you have that set up). The long awaited new release now includes the forms feature! and other improvements! If you haven’t set it up here is a quick review:

2021-05-302021-05-30

PyImageSearch Review

If you have been doing OpenCV or Python machine learning, you have most likely come across PyImageSearch. If you come across a sale for this service I would recommend trying it out if you are learning some machine learning. This past week they have run a free promo 7 day trial, which gave me an opportunity to browse these.

2021-05-262021-05-26

Keeping a process running with a 3 line Bash script

While you are running a long running process, you may want to run it again if it stops or is watching some process that should be running all the time. At first look at this might seem best to…

Create some cron running a script that checks output of “ps aux | grep myprogram”, run it if it is not running.
Wrap some other Python script calling it and at the end wait and try running again.
Check in on the process and see what might be wrong. (Not great, if it is a process you want to be checking errors in you should be using Sentry anyway)

2021-05-22

Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP

Chances are you have seen a movie or book recently covering the topic of an EMP – an Electro-magnetic pulse from a faraway nuke that could cause outages and damage. While most of what you hear will either be dismissive of the possibility, or a horror story of years of electronic wasteland, the reality could be more in the middle and is something folks can prepare for, according to a US government publication linked in the documents section of the SHARES site.

The SHARES system is a HF long range ham radio service but there are several recommendations in the document that just about any civilian should be considering, not just radio maintainers and organizations:

2021-04-272021-04-27

In search of the best scientific calculator for Librem Phone/Pinephone

While many apps do run on Librem 5 phone, there are many yet to be fully working on the small screen. In this post we explore the various calculator apps for Linux and see which might best work as a student/engineer’s go-to calculator: