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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Much of the technology of your inventory system shares in common with Google Street View. Yes, like you were saying earlier. Again, I reiterate, because this is important! It turns out that Google Street View is a much more familiar computer application than video games. Why is that? Well, because Google Street View has some important business application uses, but video games are “opt-in.” That is, playing video games is optional, but the kinds of conditions that may prompt people to use Google Street View are much more “mandatory” in nature. You’ve got to get to this area that you are unfamiliar with for some political purpose of some important event that you are to attend, but you’ve never been there before. How does the place even look like? How do you know you’ve actually reached the right place? Well, it’s Google Street View to the rescue!

  • Google Street View is the biggest video game of them all.

    • It is more familiar than most video games, mostly because it seamlessly integrates with a business function.

Read on →

  • Fixing broken windows, computer security. Code habits.

You know what? I have been kind of disappointed the way management works at work. You know, it is always like we’re trying to work on a new project to make things so much bigger and faster, but we don’t really have culture that goes back and revisits past work that we’ve done and try to improve it. I think this is especially important in the case of past work that is still being used in an active production process.

Yeah, seriously, on my own time, I have very much developed the idea of practical organizational habits. Again, I reiterate, because this is important! How do you avoid wasting time organizing something that is short lived and will be deleted soon? Easy, you just allocate a fixed time schedule to organize the collection a little bit at a time. What will happen over long periods of time is that long-lived information will end up being very well organized, and short-lived information will only be partly organized before it gets deleted.

Read on →

So how do you visualize a 3D scan involving only a single perspective? Here’s the thing to realize.

  • Dominant eye, recessive eye. The dominant eye is used for the main 2D color data, the recessive eye is mainly used to match of features with the dominant eye to perform the triangulation computation. This depth data is then added to the 2D image primarily presented by the dominant eye.

HP ScanJet 5300C notes.

Okay, continued research on this machine. How have people got this scanner to work under GNU/Linux? After much research and a little bit of experimentation, this is how. Open up Simple Scan on Ubuntu (or any derived distribution), of a somewhat old vintage, say 10.04 LTS, Karmic Koala, or Hardy Heron, and just do a regular 300 DPI color photograph scan, no customizations involved. Then everything will just work. But, if you make any customizations or use a newer distribution, or a distribution that is too old, then it won’t work.

Note that you will also be able to get everything to work if you run the operating system in a virtual machine and have the guest OS use the USB device exclusively.

Oh yeah, and if you do mess up the USB device and need to reset it, here’s how.

20170417/DuckDuckGo linux command line close usb device
20170417/https://askubuntu.com/questions/645/how-do-you-reset-a-usb-device-from-the-command-line

Including the source code and instructions of that program here for posterity:

Read on →

You know what, it would be really interesting if I could stream data from the Raspberry Pi camera and process it in real time. It would also be interesting if I could do likewise with HTML 5 Web API. Guess what? You’re in good luck. On the Raspberry Pi, you can get live streams via Video4Linux2. Also, SimpleCV/OpenCV provides a wrapper to process live streams from web cams. Yes, so OpenCV is a good framework for you to work with, it just doesn’t provide the direct implementation of your needed algorithm. As for the HTML 5 Web API, it looks like you can only fetch a video in bulk, not process a live stream in real time. Anyways, that’s what that new media buffer thing is about in Web APIs, it’s to enable that kind of class of applications. Yeah, like a YouTube web page that makes it super easy to upload smartphone videos to YouTube.

20170416/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi process live video data
20170416/https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/23182/how-to-stream-video-from-raspberry-pi-camera-and-watch-it-live

  • Also covered were some fast and efficient means to stream video over the Internet. Use VLC client with V4L2.

20170416/DuckDuckGo mdn webcam api html 5
20170416/https://www.webcodegeeks.com/html5/html5-web-camera-example/

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What is 3DNow!

2017-04-17

Categories: media-prog  
Tags: media-prog  

I’m wondering, 3DNow! Interesting. Especially interesting is the LinuxJournal article that was published on 3DNow! back in 1999. They were using laser range data processing as an example! Yes, indeed, sophisticated people we have here on GNU/Linux. Yeah, so no wonder why GNU/Linux developers were so fast to pick up on the technology. It’s likely that one of the contributors was subscribed to LinuxJournal and wrote up the patches to FFMpeg.

20170416/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow! 20170416/http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3685

Okay, I am undeterred. Where is a good port expander I can get for the Raspberry Pi? Where is a good level shifter I can get for the Raspberry Pi? Interestingly enough, both of these and the necessary instructions are found at easy on AdaFruit. I guess that is the place to go if you want to go shopping for electronic parts to use in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino.

20170306/DuckDuckGo gpio port expander
20170306/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=113751
20170306/https://learn.adafruit.com/mcp230xx-gpio-expander-on-the-raspberry-pi/overview
20170306/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi level shifter

“4-channel I2C-safe Bi-directional Logic Level Converter - BSS138”

20170306/https://www.adafruit.com/products/757
20170306/http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/127606/simplest-uni-directional-level-shifter-3-3v-5v

Never fear, Raspberry Pi Zero has I2C.

20170306/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

Read on →

Important! For searchable information, how do you convert PDF and HTML to plain text so that you can just do plain greps with more ease?

20170306/DuckDuckGo unix convert pdf to plain text
20170306/https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/converter-pdf-files-to-text-format-command/
20170306/DuckDuckGo unix convert html to text
20170306/http://superuser.com/questions/673878/how-to-convert-html-to-text
20170306/https://linux.die.net/man/1/html2text
20170306/https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1527895

So, these are the available tools that I could find thus far.

  • pdftotext from poppler-utils
  • lynx --dump for HTML to text
  • html2text is another option