How To Train Your Robot - Page 2 of 7 - Machine Learning, math and other cool tricks

2020-10-262020-10-26

Better things to do this Oct 31st

This has been a challenging year for many of us, and while it may be tempting to go visit neighborhood houses for parties or candy, the extra sugar and staying out in the cold could possibly be a setback from healthy progress in recent weeks. Some say sugar worsens immune function. Instead you might consider activities including:

Reading, study
Watch some interesting Makerfaire videos, as most areas didn’t get a Makerfair this year 🙁
Build something on the computer and present at a hackathon – there’s a Tmobile hackathon, a Here Maps hackathon, Post COVID Hackathon, hack-or-treat going on.

2020-10-242020-12-12

Announcing Repeater-START Amateur radio app for Android

In the past weeks, I have noticed hearham.com repeater listing gets many requests from Android devices. Furthermore, many ham radio people already have an Android phone and are still waiting on their Librem Phone to ship. So I started an Android port of the Linux open-data repeater app, Repeater-START.

2020-10-232020-10-23

Machine learning SVM – the usefulness of kernels

If you’ve read through how Support Vector Machines work, you probably know the linear simple SVM might not work in all cases… but how does it fail? Let’s take a look at an example I tried like to my simple example… but change it to be a larger space than just 4, and separated with a region in the middle, and the region around it (positive, negative labelled areas to learn):

2020-10-192020-11-15

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:

2020-10-172020-10-17

Autocorrect Remover is now up on Chrome Web Store

The Autocorrect Remover was approved to be shown on Google Chrome webs store! Now all students or teachers can access the autocorrect remover that I built with a friend recently. One month after publishing, it appears no changes on Google Docs have broken it, which is a good sign 🙂

2020-10-082020-10-08

Slide rule enters the 21st century

Some time ago I came across this online tool in a newsletter article – this is a very cool slide-rule-emulator that will not just let you move two slides, but actually slide it for you as you run an equivalent digital calculator calculation to the right!

If you haven’t ever used a slide rule before, it works on properties of logarithms, and the principle that log(a)+log(b) = log(a*b). Now it wouldn’t be very interesting to just have two normal rulers together, as sliding and adding would just let you do problems like 5+5 = 10 or 50+50 = 100 if you scale the numbers. With logarithmic scale, the spacings are off and it allows you to do multiplication in adding the numbers.

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.

2020-10-03

Microsoft Math Solver review

Years ago if you wanted a program to explain steps in mathematics, algebra or other complex math as a tutor would, you would have to buy a specialized software package built for some specific operating system (I forget the name… it may still be around?) Of course there was always open source software like Maxima to do powerful symbolic (or numeric, or graphing) math, but to know what to do one almost needs a manual, and while extremely powerful it was not helpful for beginners. I recently found a similarly useful free math solver on Microsoft’s site, https://mathsolver.microsoft.com:

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”: