Sys. Admin. Archives - Page 6 of 8 - How To Train Your Robot

2020-11-232020-11-25

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:

2020-11-082020-11-11

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.

2020-11-022020-11-02

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!

2020-11-012020-11-01

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.

2020-10-192021-03-08

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:

2020-10-042020-10-04

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.

2020-09-17

Librem announces Anbox working on Librem 5 phone

Yesterday Librem announced in a blog post that the Android compatibility layer, Anbox, is runnable in the Librem 5 Linux phone. They reportedly had to fix a few bugs, and they show a screenshot of a listing of apps – it is odd to notice that most apps shown (Firefox, Music, Camera…) really should have a native Linux application that works.

2020-09-122020-09-12

Fixing Ubuntu Python-Pip

After you’ve upgraded your Ubuntu machine a few times, you might find that free disk space is low and some Python commands have issues. Programs like Bleachbit can help you clear old packages or cache that you don’t need, but sometimes you need a minor manual fix as documented here. As you may know, Pip is the main package management you’ll use to install packages you use, so this can be problematic.

After upgrading 16.04 to 18.04, I got an error on command line “pip”:

2020-09-072020-10-03

Easy VPN with DigitalOcean and ShadowSocks

If you are often in a cafe or library with shared internet, it’s best to go through a VPN so any unencrypted traffic isn’t detected by any local hackers – while there are many vpn packages, it is easy enough to make your own and connect to it with shadowsocks. This can give you good performance even on a $5/mo digitalocean server!*

2020-09-022020-09-02

Hacktoberfest is coming up!

Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:

Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
Tunesviewer
iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.

There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events