Important! How do you automate VMware vSphere VM creation and snapshotting via Ansible? Answer: Use the VMware guest module. Beware as this is currently in “preview” mode which means that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed in the newer versions.
20170522/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/vsphere_guest_module.html
20170522/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/vmware_guest_snapshot_module.html
So you want to scan a book quickly and cheaply? Here’s how to do it. Open up the book and take pictures as you go through the book. Every 10 pages, take a “side-photograph” of the book showing the shape of the spine when the book is open. You can later use the contour line at the end of the page to uncurl the pages digitally inside the computer. Easy and fast, doesn’t require 3D scan assist to do uncurling.
The idea. Loaning objects? Distance equations, and use factors. Then what about a robotic warehouse? Wouldn’t that be the most competitive?
It would, but it is not a practical reality at the moment. Human-operated computers, on the other hand, are.
But still, it’s an interesting future vision. The idea that people would want to personally own less so that they can have the conveniences of the robotically automated management system.
And the living reality that this is already the case. The fact that people tend to buy things online or go to a store when they want something rather than realizing and using the objects in their immediate vincity. That there is in fact a strong market demand for this.
But also the reality that people put things in their local vincity and forget about them. Why did they bring them there? Because it would be more convenient for short-term use.
So also the potential there for new technologies. Ones that can better integrate with the robotically managed facilities.
My experience using the 2D environment mapping technology:
It’s like you have 360 degree vision, you can see thumbnail images of every single viewpoint of the object from a single screen.
It’s like you have X-ray vision, you can see all layers of the object all at once.
It’s like you have multipresence, you can exist in multiple different rooms at the same time simply by opening up multiple browser windows.
You do in fact have telepresence, since the experience is exactly the same both within the local vincity of the area and several hundred miles away from the area.
I’m amazed with how quickly you can navigate the environment, you can navigate this point-and-click environment considerably faster than you navigated the physical environment when taking the pictures.
This technique works excellently with “unstructured environments.” That is, environments that are not organized into labeled and ID numbered shelves and rooms.
New summary of why you should not make your hobby projects proprietary in order to get money. Answering the question of why someone should not expect to get rich off of fiction writing, for example.
First of all, if you want to make money, you should find career skills that are wanted by the economy, not work the other way around and try to make people want to pay for your interest.
Second, the greatest factor in determining the success of media is its marketing and promotion. Often times this hinges around having connections to the right people, not the content’s quality itself.
Yeah, I see the “creative possibilities” of 3D printers being advertised, but you know what the reality of the technology is? It’s just that the mass majority of work in the economy revolves around that of two-dimensional nature, hence it is unlikely that most people would end up having a 3D printer at home, despite the low costs. Not unless it can be used to competitively sell consumer merchandise through alternate channels faster, easier, and more convenient.
Again, I reiterate, because this is important! The reality of artwork. It hinges heavily around promotion and publication. Yes, there’s lots of artwork and other work available for much lower cost, it’s just that it is not promoted in a way that gets noticed by most people. Yes it’s there, but to find it invokes a little bit more human effort.
Now here’s a big problem with humans. We have observed that pure digital sales of books have done poorly, so paperback books are still in salesforce. But the problem with paperback? Yes, the advantage is that they take up more space so they are more political, but that is also what causes them to get lost so easily.
Also complaining about messy looking house pictures. Well, duh, hello? That’s what we have 3D scanning and object management technology for.
Is there an easy web index thumbnail generation I can download from the Internet? I don’t know.
20170511/DuckDuckGo generate http thumbnail image index
20170511/http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/apache-indexes-with-thumbnails-492452/
20170511/http://search.cpan.org/~gozer/Apache-AutoIndex-0.08/AutoIndex.pm
20170511/https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_autoindex.html
20170511/http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/thumbnails/
20170511/DuckDuckGo apache generate thumbnail index page
20170511/https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::Image
Okay, now I”m wondering about easing batch file upload to the server. Can a single input element upload multiple files? Short answer is no. Not until HTML 5 can you open up the file selection dialog, have the user select multiple files, and upload them all to the server. So there you go, it’s not possible using the earlier simpler web technologies of times past. You’d have to ask the user to use FTP or the like to get the graphical experience and mass drag and drop.
20170513/DuckDuckGo http upload form multiple files
20170513/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15726439/how-to-upload-multiple-files-using-one-file-input-element
20170513/https://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/multiple-file-upload/
20170513/https://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/multifile/
Now this is a very interesting observation. Privacy, from an analytical standpoint, can simply be viewed as a lack of information. Even without 100% information, you can stil do useful calculations on the data. For example, if there is an access controlled region that you cannot scan but you can scan all regions around it, then you can still compute the size of the access controlled region and use that to hypothesize what range of activities can go on in that region.
In fact, this works with a lot of other measurements too. For example, privacy in family metrics. How many children does someone have? What are their individualized interests? If the known parents only have a small number of children, then the “access-controlled zone” is small and very easy to predict from the public data.
Also, this brings in a very interesting reality, that privacy isn’t really effective if only a small number of people opt in. It is only really effective if it applies to a large number of people across a large geographic area. “Strength in numbers.”
So that’s why Google knows everything about who you are and who your children are. Even if they don’t know everything, at least they know what they don’t know and will proceed to search for that information and attempt to reveal it.
But, there are more practical applications of using this understanding of privacy as merely a limitation in data collection.
So why doesn’t everyone use a photographic inventory system? Short of complacency, people have no other excuses due to the sheer ease of using such a system and the dramatic payout from doing so. Especially the great degree of precision and short amount of time investment required. Well, it turns out that people are complacent, and very many of them so. They tend to be complacent except when a political force says that they must be more efficient or else. The unfortunate reality.
So that’s why you don’t see very good uptake of new technologies to improve productivity and efficiency among individual personal users.
Yeah, totally, like you don’t need to draw pictures every time you change something.
But hey! Come on! Again, I reiterate, because this is important! I cannot emphasize this enough. It is tremendously easy to photograph objects. Every single time I come out, I am amazed at the results that I can get out with so little effort put in.
Important! Random but historically useful Ansible documentation links.
On the topics of block-in-file, generating users and encrypted passwords, using handlers in playbooks, and the “fail” module for printing a custom error message under certain conditions. Block-in-file is one of the better features of Ansible, contrast to the great weakness of Ansible that it takes like 5 lines to “su to root.” “Fail-early” is the best practical use of the fail module.
20170510/https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/blockinfile_module.html
20170510/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/user_module.html
20170510/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/faq.html#how-do-i-generate-crypted-passwords-for-the-user-module
20170510/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_intro.html
20170510/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/fail_module.html
20170510/http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_windows.html