Life plus Linux: May 2014

Posts

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Magic Cauldron: Harry Potter Themed Gender Reveal Party - #Aurdino
Earlier this year, we had a very fun filled Harry Potter themed gender reveal party. For the reveal, I built a Magic Cauldron which would reveal the gender. Check it out for yourself! For this I needed: A Cauldron. WS2812B LED array. Aurdino UNO. Bread board and jumper wires. Dry ice. Kasa Smart bulbs I will go over in the following sections The Mist.
Kakashi: The Copycat Robot - #Aurdino #image processing
In this post, I want to share about "Kakashi: The Copycat Robot"—a fun side project I built a few years ago. The name is inspired by the famous character from Naruto, Kakashi Hatake, also known as the Copycat Ninja.The goal of this robot was to mimic Kakashi's ability to copy movements—though, of course, in a more limited way. Check it out for yourself!Here are the things I used to build this:
Neural network inference pipeline for videos in Tensorflow - #Deeplearning #Tensorflow
Just as we saw a huge influx of images in the past decade or so, we are now seeing a lot of videos being produced on social media. The need to understand and moderate videos using machine learning has never been greater. In this post, I will show you how to build an efficient pipeline to processes videos in Tensorflow.  For simplicity, let us consider a Resnet50 model pre-trained on
Finding Where's Waldo using Mask R-CNN - #Deeplearning #ML
When I was a kid, I really loved solving Where's Waldo. There were few books (it used to be called Where's Wally) in our school library on which I spent hours finding Waldo. For people who do not know what it is, basically Waldo - a unique character is hidden among hundreds of other characters and you have to find him in all the chaos in the image. Now that I am too old to be solving it and
Higher level ops for building neural network layers with deeplearn.js - #Deeplearning #javascript #ML
I have been meddling with google's deeplearn.js lately for fun. It is surprisingly good given how new the project is and it seems to have a sold roadmap. However it still lacks something like tf.layers and tf.contrib.layers which have many higher level functions that has made using tensorflow so easy. It looks like they will be added to Graphlayers in future but their priorities as of now is to

Friday, 23 May 2014

Password protect files on fly using crypt-editor

I always wanted an editor which can help me edit text securely with password protection using which I can easily create, save, edit files on fly. I am sure that there are some editors which can do it. However I felt that instead of an editor, it is better to have an interface which will allow me to edit files using my favorite editor while password protecting it. So I wrote a script called crypt-editor which uses gpg/mcrypt to encrypt and decrypt files enabling users to edit files using any editor.

Fork me on Github

Usage

Say you want to create/open a file using gedit:

crypt-editor gedit [filename]

You will be asked to enter the passphrase. Then gpg/mcrypt decrypts the file (if already exists) and opens it with gedit. On closing the file gpg/mcrypt encrypts it back and deletes the decrypted file.
If you do not specify the editor, the file is opened in vi editor (my favorite so it is default :P)

crypt-editor [filename]

Complete option list of crypt-editor:

crypt-editor -help
crypt-editor [filename]
crypt-editor [editor] [filename]
crypt-editor [-k key] [filename]
crypt-editor [-k key] [editor] [filename]

To create new file with mcrypt instead of gpg use -m option
crypt-editor -m [filename]

Examples:

crypt-editor passwords
crypt-editor gedit passwords
crypt-editor -k pa$$word passwords
crypt-editor -k pa$$word gvim passwords

Installation

Setting up crypt-editor is simple and straight forward.

git clone https://github.com/alseambusher/crypt-editor
cp crypt-editor/crypt-editor /usr/bin

If you want to use mcrypt instead of gpg, you have to install mcrypt.

apt-get install mcrypt

Say Thanks to birthday wishes on Facebook automatically

One of the main reasons why people turn into computer geeks is because they are lazy :P Yesterday was my birthday. Again, thanks for all the wishes :) However I was lazy to manually thank each and every post on my Facebook wall. So I wrote a simple python script using Facebook graph API to say thanks to each of them. I didn't stop there. I am aware that many people think that thanking people manually is something that has always been very tiring. So I searched for all the simpler alternatives available to do this task and found that there was a Facebook app called "Say Thank You". It is simple and neat. However, it requires people to give access to post, like, get friend list..etc. Well, that is a mini privacy invasion :P. So it is a not a good alternative. Also in future Facebook might think that it is doing something against their policies..blah blah blah and bring it down. So not a permanent solution either.
Hence I decided to rewrite the script I had written in python to javascript to make it accessible online. Well, here it is:

http://alseambusher.github.io/say-thanks/

For this you will need to get the access token. Getting access token is simple:

Go to developers.facebook.com.
Under Tools in the menu, go to Graph explorer.
Click on Get Access Token if access token isn't there already.

Note that as this runs completely on the client side, users can safely use it without giving access to anybody (Although it requires you to give access token, it is not stored anywhere. See source ). And access tokens expire after sometime.