This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):
Continue reading “New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()”FTP-able server with correct Apache permission settings
If you’re setting a local server you may want some trusted admins to upload to, one good way is the vsftp server. DigitalOcean has a good tutorial on it, but there are some odd issues.
Continue reading “FTP-able server with correct Apache permission settings”SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important
Much has been written about the recent SolarWinds hack – “Almost a cyber pandemic” that we may not know the true extent of for some time.
Continue reading “SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important”Cleaning up Python – and old libraries
Newer Ubuntu releases do not even pre install Python2, and after an upgrade and installing latest Python3.x included in the release, you likely have some old ones there too. Since you most likely will not be using the python2 unless you use some very old library, you can clean them up, clear a lot of disk space and use the “python3” / “pip3” command instead.
Continue reading “Cleaning up Python – and old libraries”Building a Linux app part 8: Adding an options screen
As you may have noticed, the repeater-START app doesn’t currently have an option to change that internal km/mile calculation. It also does not have any option to filter the repeaters of VHF, UHF or your preferred band.
Let’s see how to add a new dialog, then store the options, and load them on your program’s start:
Continue reading “Building a Linux app part 8: Adding an options screen”Review: Linux in the Ham Shack Linux
Budgie Desktop is an interesting Linux distro which you can see is the base of Linux in the Ham Shack, downloadable here.
Continue reading “Review: Linux in the Ham Shack Linux”Injecting commands and debugging a running Python program, with Project Euler example
How often has it happened to you… you build a simple script to calculate something, run some bulk process, and coming back after an hour or so it just hangs with no output. Is it doing something or stuck? You could debug it, using WinPdb or Visual Studio Code debugger or GDB to run it step by step, but that would lose the time that it has been processing. Instead, you can use Pyrasite, a program for looking in to a running Python script!
Continue reading “Injecting commands and debugging a running Python program, with Project Euler example”Linux 5.9
Recently, Linux 5.9 was released! While folks are unlikely to see this in any distribution very soon, it brings some improvements that will be a clear reason that we will hear about it very soon (ok, enough ham radio jokes 🙂 )
Although it’s not something particularly recommended for your main system, but you could install it now – in fact with kernels of Linux you can generally switch it out and if it doesn’t work, just select the old one at the boot screen.
Human pose estimation with Python and Gluoncv
Human pose estimation is something useful for robotics/programming as you can see what position a person is in a picture. For last weekend’s Hackrithmitic I did an experiment for fun using computer vision pose estimation. To start with I found several possibilities with available libraries:
- Tensorflow js has been used to say, don’t touch your face, but it takes a massive amount of cpu.
- Openpose is a popular one, only licensed for noncommercial research use, and there is a Opencv example for it that doesn’t quite show how to use it.
- AlphaPose is supposedly faster and has a more clear license and possibility for commercial use – if you want that as a possibility. I checked out the install instructions and worked but for “python3” instead of “python”. It also misses obvious step of installing cuda for your Nvidia system before running.
- GluonCV is another, which seems more user friendly. This one I was able to get running in a few minutes with their example:
Matt Parker explains professional online videography
In the past few months due to Coronavirus many people have been working from home… live streaming or meeting from home, even live TV shows from home..? In this video, the famous Youtube mathematician Matt Parker shows some interesting tips on how one might be more professional at making videos.
Continue reading “Matt Parker explains professional online videography”