Posts

Certified

First of, all really sorry for the absence. I promised that I would be writing a new blog post every week, but somehow haven't done that since the last two weeks or so I guess. The reasons I attribute for this delay are, partially because I was preparing for my AWS Architect Associate exam for like last month or so, partially because I got a bit lazy and partially because I didn't do something fun or crazy or worth sharing on this blog. I do have an article coming up on stress, social media, fake news and herd mentality coming up so do stay tuned for that. Major blocker for that being that I am confused whether to post that on this blog, or maybe on my personal blog or somewhere else. If you have any ideas for that do post them in the comments. But anyways lets jump back to the main topic. I got certified. This is a small post for memories and whatnot's. Felt like sharing and here I am. So I got recently certified as  AWS certified solutions architect associate. I know it i...

My Experiments with Pi (Part 2 of N)

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NOTE: This is the continuation of my first post about my experiences with Raspberry Pi 4. You can check out the first part here . Previously on .... In my last post I talked about how cool the RPi 4 looked and my motivation in buying it. Later I talked about Raspbian, Docker Containers and finally the need to move to a "64-bit" OS for "more POWER!!". In this piece I'll continue from there describing my experiences with other OSes. Also a friendly reminder that I was trying to do all of this on a headless setup, i.e. without any display. Since I don't have any working HDMI capable monitor and due to this ongoing pandemic, I simply can't go out and get one.  Thinking of Ubuntu Gentoo for Raspberry Pi 4B Raspberry Pi 4 has numerous (read more than one) 64 bit OS options available. Some notable ones being Arch based Manjaro , Gentoo 64 , Debian based Ubuntu, Debian based Kali Linux and many others. These are maintained by really talented p...

My Experiments with Pi (Part 1 of N)

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NOTE: This is not a review of the raspberry pi 4. This is simply a blog about my experiments with the raspberry pi 4. The It Looks So Cool Phase Pi 4 I was able to get my hands on a raspberry pi 4 4GB in August 2019. To be very honest I had no intention of getting the raspberry pi 4. I was actually looking for a good password manager, when I discovered Bitwarden . It's not like I didn't already know about it, in fact I had actually tried to host it on the free tier of Google App Engine, and didn't like the performance that much then. Besides I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work as intended. After going through the tasks of setting up the instance, the network, the forwarding and scripts, it worked, but there was a constant fear that it could crash any time, or maybe blow the free limits and shutdown for good. It was cool and it worked but I have always found some joy in running stuff on premise on real hardware that you can see rather than some ser...

Program of the Week 04 - Color

This has been a long overdue post. Thanks to my move and a lot of other things, despite trying my level best into putting out a post, I was not able to do so. This post would've possibly come in next week, but since you are reading this, it is coming out today. I just wanted to get one out so that I don't break my flow or more like I go back into the vicious cycle of okay maybe next week. With that said, this week again I'll be doing something with opencv. Not because I have planned it or anything, I simply had a small program ready. When I first got into opencv, after going through the basic open image, open video phase, I wanted to do some very basic color based object detection. It did start with basic detection of red color objects, green color objects and so forth. Slowly I started modifying it to allow me to select which color I wanted to detect the intensity levels and such. It had a whole bunch of controls on it. That time, I used to do it in C++ and EmguCV whic...

Program of the Week 03 - Motion Detection Using OpenCV

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So this week as promised last week I'll delve a bit into OpenCV. I've used OpenCV for object detection and facial recognition and detection in the past, but I would not like to go that deep into it for the time being. Today we'll take something much more simple, okay not as simple as opening up an image and changing some colors or say using grayscale or blurs and the like; I'll be doing a small program on motion detection using differences between frames and contours. Now contours are basically an outline that represent or bound a shape of an object. Contours will be used to pin point the motion happening in the image. This is a fairly simple example where I'll be using my webcam to basically detect some motion in the video feed. Before we do that, we'll apply some transformations to the incoming video frames and use these to detect motion. There are several programs for this already online, but I'll do this one here as a start. Code...

Program of the Week 02 - Unique Element

So initially I was planning to do a program on basic object / motion detection from video using opencv. I tried to find my old code for it but was unable to find it. So I thought rather than wasting time finding it, I'd rather find it myself. But since you are reading this long introduction and you probably have read the title by now, that ain't happening; this week at least. So what alternative I have then today, pretty sure there are a ton of programs for finding unique elements from a list or what not, and this one will probably join its ranks as well. A little bit of backstory for the problem / program at hand is that last week one of my friends went for an interview for a new job. He'd cleared many rounds before and was now in the technical round. The problem given to him was simple: "Given a list of elements, you need to find the non-repeating element from the list. The space complexity needs to be O(k) and...

Program of the Week 01 - Common Day Finder

I know the title of this post ain't that great and TBH I couldn't come up with something better. So what is this program about. A few days back a friend of mine celebrated his birthday. I was wondering how do I find all the years when, his birthday and mine fall on the same day of the week. It was not a great question, but it piqued me and I wrote a rudimentary program for it on my phone. While this is not the same code I wrote it is kinda similar. I will be writing it in Python as that is the language I'm most comfortable in right now. I'll be using the trusty 'datetime' utility in python for this task. Below is the basic version of the program: from datetime import datetime # Initialize the dates date1 = "15/02" date2 = "23/05" # Initialize the start and end years start_year = 2019 end_year = 2100 # Initialize a list for all results results = [] # Now loop in the year range and find the days for year in range(start_year, end_...