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Category: Technical

Chihuahua or muffin

Chihuahua or muffin

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Free code camp compares various AI-based image recognizers to see how well they can identify if a picture is a chihuahua or a muffin. It’s surprisingly harder than you think and has a history of being used to determine the quality of the recognizer.

The author compares solutions from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Cloudsight, and Clarifai. They also discuss the per-image cost as well as the quality of tags and other considerations. Definitely worth looking at if you’re trying to find an image classifier system.

Final results are on Topbots.

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Photogrammetry/NeRF/Gaussian splatting compared

Photogrammetry/NeRF/Gaussian splatting compared

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Matthew Brennan is not a computer scientist, but he takes 335 frames from a video and then processes them 3 different ways to compare the results. He creates a 3D mesh out of it for Photogrammetry, the processes it into a NeRF, and finally Gaussian Splatting.

What’s cool is that he shows how each works and how to process the data yourself. He also gives you access to the data to try it yourself.

Here’s the software he uses:

Humane Pin launched

Humane Pin launched

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[Update 1-10-2024: Things aren’t looking good. Humane layed off 4% of it’s workforce and the CTO has transitioned to an ‘advisor’ role before they have even shipped a single device (estimated March 2024)]

It looks like the Humane pin has finally launched at a relatively reasonable cost of $699. We finally have some details. I’m pretty sure it’s not a smartphone killer – Humane has definitely backed off from that original stance.

The translation feature is a really excellent usage and having a simple assistant that can let you check flight times and send text messages without pulling out your phone is pretty slick. But I’m not sure about a lot of the rest. Needing a $20 monthly subscription and not tethering with your existing phone plan is a troubling extra expense.

Having to interact with it with talking will definitely make it a bit awkward in social and public situations. I bet it would have problems at a dinner party or louder venue. Gesture recognition is a finicky technology (especially in strange lighting conditions, if you’re wearing gloves, etc), so if there are any issues there it could be very frustrating and you can only do so much with simple gestures.

The screen projection looks limited to high contrast basic information. You certainly won’t be reading lots of text – which is problematic if you want to read text messages instead of having them read aloud to you (and everyone else around you). I certainly wouldn’t want everyone to hear what people are texting me; but maybe they’ll allow blue tooth headphone tethering.

I think the biggest issue is that it didn’t live up to the hype. Almost all of these things can be done with your average smart phone – albeit with a little more fiddling. The AI just isn’t really delivering a unique enough set of features to live up to the promise of the device. It really seems to just be giving you a more vocal interface – which I’m not sure is enough of a selling point. The reality is people likely do not want to be talking to their devices in public. I could easily see the iWatch or smart phones integrating some of these features though.

The one thing is does do is make me start thinking of how we interact with our technology very differently. How would a truly smart AI assistant be like to interact with? What would a really functional assistant like this operate like? I’m glad someone is trying this out. Even if it’s not successful, it’s going to breed a lot of new ideas.

The reddit chat on the device seems to mirror a lot of the concerns. Also, it seems they only have about 100,000 interested folks sign up to purchase one. I’m one of those people who signed up, but it required no deposit/etc so it’s uncertain how many actual buyers there will be.

Final thought: The way you tap it makes me think immediately of Star Trek communicator badges. I bet it’s not long before someone mods one.

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Perfect code vs perfect products

Perfect code vs perfect products

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For one-shot things like games – focus on the experience above all else.

Update 2024/01: More proof that technical limits have little impact for making great games. Slay the Spire’s graphical glitches were there because the author only had two $70 monitors that were so bad he literally didn’t see the issues.

Undervolting your SteamOS Steam Deck

Undervolting your SteamOS Steam Deck

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SteamdeckHQ reports that the recent 3.5.1 SteamOS update also came with a new BIOS firmware ver 118. Located in the SteamOS preview branch, this new version’s only change appears to be adding undervolting to the BIOS menu. Undervolting was possible before, but it could brick your device if you were too aggressive. To help prevent this, Valve appears to have put in a safety net in the BIOS that should save a lot of Steam Decks. Now, performing a CMOS reset (hold down the Volume Down button, 3 dot button, and power button at the same time) will also reset the undervolt settings to defaults.

Why undervolt your console? If your system is stable, your Steam Deck will typically run cooler, keep the fan quieter, possibly maintain higher speeds longer, and most importantly – improve the battery life.

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FLUX at 2023 Signal Festival

FLUX at 2023 Signal Festival

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Signal Festival is a festival of artworks from light design, visual and digital art, artificial intelligence, as well as conceptual art. It occurs in several locations in Prague and has reached it’s 20th year.

FLUX was one of most cool looking entries for 2023. It’s a fascinating interactive light installation from Ksawery Komputery. The installation is 6 meters tall, 13-meter diameter on the ground, 4 high-speed cameras, 8-speaker sound system, 4 800 meters of LEDs strips, 144,000 pixels running at 100 frames per second, with custom software and hardware. As people approached the installation, it would display them on the strands of led lights.

It also made an earlier debut at Miami Art Week Dec 2022:

It reminds me a bit of the old Master Control Program from Tron…

Check out some of their other really cool works here: https://ksawerykomputery.com/works/ or https://vimeo.com/ksawerykomputery

Flux
concept/code: Ksawery Kirklewski
sound design: Arkadiusz Krupiński @random_orb
tech management: Jakub Kirklewski @elektrojakub

Update:

Here’s a video that covers a number of entries at the Signal Festival in 2022:

Oculus Quest 2 issues from sitting too long

Oculus Quest 2 issues from sitting too long

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Oculus is doing a black Friday sale for 2023. I have an Oculus Quest 2, but hadn’t used it in over a year. I plugged it in to charge it back up and browse the store. Unfortunately, the store app screen told me it couldn’t load the store.

I went to setting->Wifi and manually connected to my home network. Duh! (so I thought) Even after this, the store app was blank and would tell me it couldn’t display anything. Time to start debugging.

  • The wifi would connect and said it had excellent wifi signal, but limited connectivity.
    • I tested my other wireless devices and they had no trouble connecting to the wifi and could browse the net normally.
    • I unplugged the mesh network repeaters around my house in case it was picking up a weak signal from one of those. No change.
    • I tried setting up my iPhone with as a wireless hotspot and connected to that. I got the same strong signal, but limited connectivity.
    • I checked the IP address of my Oculus in Settings, and I could ping the device just fine. If I turned the headset off, I couldn’t ping it. It seemed like it was connected ok.
    • I tried unplugging other devices from my wifi in case there was an IP conflict anywhere. Same problem.
  • I tried connecting the quest with a USB cable but I still could not get updates nor see anything in the store app or main menu.
  • Despite not being used for 2 years, when I went to system->updates, it showed no updates available. Something is fishy, there had to be updates.
  • I opened the in-headset browser and it would tell me that I could not browse because the date was wrong. It was set to 5:00am Sept 17, 2037. Whoa.
    • There is NO way to change the date/time in the settings or anywhere else I could find.

It turns out, others have seen this issue too. Their Oculus fast forwards to the future mysteriously and then connectivity to the store/web/updates doesn’t seem to work after that. You need to get the date fixed, but there’s no obvious way to do it.

Solution: Factory Reset

In the end, I decided to do a factory reset (Hold the power and volume buttons while booting) because it had been well over a year since I used it last and I figured it would be good to have a clean start. However, there is the option of using side-loaded apps (see below).

Unfortunately, even the factory reset gave me a few headaches. First, the headset isn’t always obvious when it sleeps vs actually powers off. My first attempt I didn’t power off all the way and just woke from sleep and I didn’t get the reset menu holding the power+volume buttons down. I went to settings menu and shut the device down in the headset to be sure.

After that, I was then able to cold boot and get into the factory reset menu. I selected factory reset and waited for it to clean the device and the progress bar indicated the reset was complete. The screen went black (but still powered), but didn’t reboot. I let it set a few minutes, then decided to manually reboot with the power button. Fingers crossed.

The first reboot I got the meta logo, but shortly after that the screen went blank (still powered) but no reboot. I let it set for a few minutes then manually powered it off using the power button – again.

On the second reboot, I got the meta logo, and then it started animating. That’s a good sign. Then the welcome page came up and I could connect to wifi and start updating.

During the update phase (1/2) while the progress bar was moving, I took the headset off to read more instructions. When I put it back on to see how far it was, the display was a patterned garbled static. I took it off and let it sit for a minute, then tried again. The display came back up and the update phase 1 of 2 completed normally.

Sidequest

The bad part about a factory reset is you lose all your installed games. I had to go back in and start installing all of them again. What a pain, because it wasn’t a very fast process.

Another option is to load an app that will update your time via an alternate Oculus app store called Sidequest. Sidequest allows you to load your own apps – including an ‘Open Settings’ app that allows you to update your date/time.

ADB

The Oculus is really just an Android device underneath. This means if you have developer mode enabled and have the Android developer kit installed, you can use ADB commands. I haven’t tried this, but supposedly this will work:

adb shell am start -a android.settings.SETTINGS

If you have Sidequest loaded, you can use this:

adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.VIEW -d com.oculus.tv -e uri com.android.settings/.DevelopmentSettings com.oculus.vrshell/.MainActivity

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Building your own calendar display

Building your own calendar display

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Stavros decided to make a little e-ink display device that showed his outlook calendar and could sit next to his main monitor. He seemed to have a decent, basic understanding of programming, but had some clever ways of getting around things he didn’t know – namely – using CoPilot and sample code to hack together what he needed. I think it’s a great read to show how you can work through problems in a very pragmatic way – without re-inventing the wheel.

In the end, he struggled through finding a good quality e-ink display, an SDK that let him display on it consistently (running into many bad SDK’s and ones that left lots of artifacts), getting calandar graphics on the device, and 3d printing the case it was mounted in.

Most interesting to me was that instead of trying to interface with his calendar app and go through the difficult work of re-creating a properly formatted/sized and good looking calendar graphics – he came up with a much more simple and easy method. He admits he wasn’t very good at C++ programming and had some false starts trying to find a software package that let him render consistently to the display. There were many that didn’t work right, left lots of lines on the screen, etc.

He then took his C++ compiler and a block of framebuffer rendering sample code. Then, with the help of CoPilot, he stumbled through a method that simply displaying the calendar in a web browser, copy the screen, download the image file over HTTP, and copy the bytes directly onto the framebuffer.

He set up a sever-side script to generate the image along with a hash of the image so the device knew when an actual update happened to the image since he didn’t want the e-ink display constantly flashing if it didn’t have a real update for the display.

A clever bit of hackery – and demonstrates how simply things can be made if you are creative.

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