How To Train Your Robot

2020-05-042020-05-14

Online learning conferences

While many of us may not be going to favorite programming conferences, there are some interesting upcoming conferences to watch or watch the videos:

Digital Ocean TIDE – Going on now, a bit like the AWS free conference – a bit of an infomercial.

Knime – still a few upcoming live dates coming up on this one and the previous sessions are up, explaining this powerful machine learning tool.

May you go fourth and program!

Update –

200 OK conference – tomorrow, May 15th

Enthusiastcon – 10min talks June 6th

2020-04-282020-04-28

FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence

Today the Wordfence developers announced the new fastorslow.com tool, a handy tool for seeing how fast your site is in various parts of the world. The Wordfence folks build a quite useful plugin used by many sites – and this one – to keep reduce risk of attack.

This new tool however can be used to see the performance of any type of public site and recommendations on speeding it up. It also would be a much easier way to time requests to a server like in the World Network Requests Measurement post.

2020-04-142020-06-17

New England Repeaters added to Hearham.live Repeater Listing and Repeater-START

The Repeater-START app now includes repeaters imported from the New England Repeater Directory. This makes the app and repeater listing much more useful to those in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine! This expands the repeater-START app and any other applications needing an offline, fairly complete listing of amateur radio repeaters worldwide.

2020-04-01

Things to do while distancing or quarantined at home

With the recent increased cases of covid-19, many are staying home or quarantined. Here are a few ideas to productively spend some time…

2020-03-142020-03-14

Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests

In Ian Stewart’s book, Professor Stewart’s Casbook of Mathematical Mysteries, he writes about an easy way one might prove that the earth is not flat. His “easy” proof can be done by booking some flights and timing them… or, simply looking up actual flights from certain cities to other cities. If it is much much shorter for a certain flight from A to D while A to B to C to D in a nearly straight line is much longer, it’s effectively a proof you can go around the world without falling off…

2020-02-292020-03-06

Announcing Hearham live repeater listing

The new Hearham live repeater listing has been up for one week and now has hundreds of repeater listings up! If you’ve been looking for a database to use for your offline app, this may be it! Unlike other repeater listings this aims to be up to date and allow for timely comments to go out to all users of the repeaters to know about any outages or changes.

2020-02-292022-07-24

Building a Linux App part 7: Building an Installer File

There’s a big difference between having that quick python script set up with a GUI, and having a full desktop or mobile app ready to click install. In this post I’ll show the steps to build a Python script into an installable application.

2020-02-252020-02-29

Building a Linux App with Python – Part 6, connecting to the repeater listing!

It’s easy to start a Python project in one file, and then add class after class and function after function in the same file – as i have in the repeater-start project. This can get unwieldy after awhile. As I am adding a type for the open-source Hearham Live Repeater Listing, I will make a new node creator that will get the repeaters out of the api. So from what I had before, just one repeater code:

2020-02-102020-02-13

Google breaks all Google calendars for the public (Update: Fixed!)

As you may have noticed if you have Google Calendar anywhere on a public website, recently these went down – and are still down, for the general public. View a page with a Google calendar embed while logged out of Google (or try any other browser that is not logged in), and you will get a blank page. This has been reported with dozens of “me too” upvotes.

2020-02-082020-02-08

Speech recognition made easy

There are numerous howtos for Raspberry Pi and other portable computer voice applications, like this one, but generally they are using Google’s voice api. This may work… when the wifi or network is working, but not only is this sending your voice to google, it requires payment for usage over a certain amount. Users of your robotic application may be not so thrilled when they see it is sending audio samples to Google, and that it does not even work if there is a wifi hiccup! Instead, let’s go through a simple on-device installation that works fairly accurately with no external dependencies!