A very interesting dinner conversation happened tonight about how the internet works at home. My 11 year old son was curious why he can’t watch youtube outside of the house. I told him that the wifi network we have at home is not able to reach the outdoors and that is why he can’t watch…
Ready Player One and The Man in the High Castle
Both very good reads about dystopian worlds. One is set in the world of 60s Nazi USA and the other is in the future of global economic turmoil. Both show how humanity adapts to the world they exist in no matter how harsh their realities are. One deals with how humans hope for a better…
How to Win an Argument with Your Wife
For years now my wife and I could never agree what “cold” meant. She would always tell me that it’s not that cold and I should turn the heat down. Since the winter is upon us again, I’ve decided to settle this argument and finally prove to her that I am feeling cold because it…
Pi2-D2 Wide Angle Camera Upgrade
I decided to upgrade the sad, slow, fuzzy, old web cam that I installed in my Pi2-D2’s head back a few months ago. I had to move the raspberry pi zero w out of its body to inside the head casing. This ensures that the camera ribbon cable does not get ripped up when the…
I am an engineer for life. I will never be a manager – The Woz
When I was 10 years old I found the code for breakout in C++. This was a derivative of a game Woz wrote for Atari back in 1976 using discrete logic. Woz’s version was legendary for being optimized to a point that it was so difficult to manufacture and understand for most engineers at the…
Kidsplained: How Code Runs in Volatile Memory
The year is 2018. Ask any tech savvy 10 year old to restart a computer and they will look at you like you we’re a crazy person. My own child, someone who has a parent that took apart and put back together computers at his age, does not know how to restart a computer. I…
The Tale of Two Pis: AIY Vision Kit on a Pimoroni Pan Tilt Hat
Home alone with my vision machine learning robot friend. It thinks I’m sitting beside a banjo, acoustic guitar, fiddle or wine bottle. Runs off 2 raspberry pis. One controls the pan and tilt motor which houses the camera. The camera is attached to a movidius myriad 2 VPU for neural computing and another raspberry pi….
AWS Deep Lens Workshop: Building a Computer Vision App
I attended the AWS New York Summit at the Javits Center. It was a 2 day event that had some really interesting AWS service launches (SageMaker in particular) and some good updates on existing services I’ve used before (Rekognition, Polly and Lex). The biggest eye-catching story of course is how Fortnite runs on AWS managed…
Retro Pie: Make Some Noise!
Added a MAX98357A I2S amp with an 8 ohm speaker just under the screen. This allowed to have a smaller build as I was able to get rid of the USB hub and sound card from the back. I replaced it with a bigger external battery for much longer retro gaming goodness.
The Pimenator
I dusted off my original Pi Racer project that was at one point in time a Particle Photon Racer. Now I plan to turn it into a dual Raspberry Pi setup with a movidius myriad 2 VPU and a camera mounted on a pimoroni pan-tilt hat. I am running Google AIY’s vision ML on one…
Technical Insanities of a Mad Computer Scientist 