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Cook 5000 amazing, healthy meals a day

Cook 5000 amazing, healthy meals a day

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Eatch has created a complete robotic kitchen that can cook up to 5000 meals a day – completely unaided. And the meals it makes are not simple, fast food type meals or all the same kind. It is able to cook complex, healthy meals from fresh ingredients. Steak and asparagus, vegetable and shrimp dishes, curry and Indian dishes, rice and vegetables. It not only cooks them, but also dishes them up, cleans itself, and can cook up more.

It’s a complete solution; and one that is likely going to become more and more popular. Automation happens when labor costs exceed the cost to automate them. Labor is expensive and it getting more expensive every day, despite experiments to change that. McDonalds already has an automated restaurant – and Eatch’s chef machine is just another example of this principle at work.

Here’s a great video of it at work. You can also see an even fuller demo on their website.

How to use all the features of a base plate Compass

How to use all the features of a base plate Compass

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The fellow from the Map Reading Company channel did something that I tried during my Mazamas mountaineering courses. He tried to find a video or document that described all the different markings, rulers, and parts of a standard baseplate compass and how to actually use them.

It turns out that he found what I found – a solid guide and explanation of all the parts didn’t exist. Even on the compass company websites. So he made this excellent video that shows how to use the different parts to set bearings, navigate, determine slopes, and use all the other hidden tools the compass provides you.

It’s worth stating that just having a compass and a map will do you no good unless you know how to use them. It’s like having a car but not knowing how to drive it. It is just as useless as not having one – or maybe even more dangerous if you use it wrong.

“I have a maps app on my cell phone” is something you read all the time from people that get lost and need to be rescued in Oregon. Why? Because it is surprisingly common to get into a spot with no signal or not enough signal to download the map. Some apps try to re-download the map every time you open it and greet you with a blank screen until it can re-acquire signal. Something you often don’t learn until too late – far in the wilderness. Beyond cell coverage, some canyon/bottom areas/cliff areas do not even have reliable GPS device coverage. Electronics have batteries that run out after you spend a few hours lost and using them – let alone more than a day or two. I lost a device when it started raining/snowing and the electronics got just wet enough to stop working/screen fogged up until it was dried out. Electronic devices can be dropped in water, or destroyed if you fall/drop it. Additionally, a surprising number of lost hikers don’t even have the basic navigation skills to understand where they are and how to get somewhere safely with a digital device or map.

Click this YouTube link below to see his great video on baseplate compasses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVf0v0TqoOg

Or Lensatic compasses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI7C8VlbYfI

His youtube channel also has lots of other videos about bearings, navigation on slopes/rough terrain/around obstacles, timing/pacing, etc that are definitely worth checking out.

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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Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields

Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields

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Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) produce some pretty beautiful renderings. A little like photogrammetry, it utilizes objects placed in a multi-dimensional volume (as captured from multiple viewpoints) and then when you want to render it from a particular angle, shoots rays into the scene based on camera location and queries the volume in order to get a screen coordinate pixel color at that location.

It does suffer from some shortcomings – such as largely only working well on static scenes, has trouble when there is missing or occluded portions, and most notably renders objects that lack fine details or produces blobby geometry common to volumetric rendering techniques.

But it doesn’t stop people from trying. Zip-NeRF is an example where these Google scientists demonstrate how ideas from rendering and signal processing yield better error rates and trains dramatically faster than previous techniques.

It’s always interesting to see what new things people are trying out these days.

Disturbing rise of colon cancer rates in young people

Disturbing rise of colon cancer rates in young people

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A study published in March by the American Cancer Society noted that that in 2023, 13% of the 153,000 people in the United States diagnosed with colorectal cancer would be among people under 50 — representing an almost 10 percent increase in cases in this age group since 2020.

There is a lot of speculation as to causes: obesity, binge drinking, increase in sugary drinks, changes in gut bacteria. Eating healthier diets (fruits/vegs over processed meats), maintaining a healthy weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, and especially early colonoscopy screening can save your life.

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AI generated Wes Anderson style Star Wars

AI generated Wes Anderson style Star Wars

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Welcome to the “Galactic Menagerie,” a whimsical and visually stunning fan-made AI generated fake trailer that reimagines the classic Star Wars universe through the eccentric lens of Wes Anderson. This mashup brings together iconic Star Wars characters with Anderson’s trademark symmetrical compositions, pastel color palettes, and quirky humor.

If you prefer, you can try out an earlier generated AI re-imagining of the cult movie Alien as a Wes Anderson film.

Or, you can take an AI generated film making course to make your own.

Is Intel’s fab strategy a good idea? AMD exec thinks not

Is Intel’s fab strategy a good idea? AMD exec thinks not

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I am putting this up as a different take on Intel’s recent strategy. I found the comment interesting since it’s a company that has gone the completely opposite direction. Time will tell who is right. 🙂

Asked at the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023 if Intel can succeed [on it’s fab-focused strategy], Darren Grasby, exec VP for strategic partnerships and president of AMD EMEA, replied emphatically: “Of course not.”

He hinted that the decision to embrace contract manufacturing could be a turn that Intel might come to regret.

“Intel has gone down these paths,” he said, “and if you think about the journey of AMD we had our own fabs many years ago and we chose to go fabless, and it was the turning point of the company that allowed us to invest those R&D dollars into the roadmap, and they’re the roadmaps that are bringing that product and leading edge technology to market today.”

Here

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AI Backflip

AI Backflip

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Animator Nikita Diakur thought it would be safer to have a digital stand-in do a backflip after he failed to do a backflip in real life. Maximilian Schneider helped him use machine learning tech to create a photorealistic avatar of himself, use a voice simulator trained for 15 minutes on his actual voice, wire the voice to the mesh on his face, and a few other techniques from the paper Deep Mimic. He then tried to train the avatar.

It’s an interesting way to tell a story – especially when he puts the avatar into his tiny apartment and proceeds to virtually receive what would be numerous serious head traumas, bone breaking collisions, and likely tons of broken furniture.