Life plus Linux: April 2016

Posts

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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

Thursday, 28 April 2016

Problem with clipboard on Ubuntu

Clipboard on Ubuntu is "broken". Well, maybe not. But copy-paste is broken in a lot of applications on Ubuntu. Let me give you an example,

Open LibreOffice.
Write something and copy it.
Paste it somewhere else. It works as expected.
Now close LibreOffice and try pasting. It won't work.

This is a well known bug - Copy-Paste doesn't work if the source is closed before the paste; affecting a lot of applications on Ubuntu. And they are not so keen on fixing it, atleast not any time soon.

The reason for this is that these applications do not comply with the clipboard specification from FreeDesktop.

If a client needs to exit while owning the CLIPBOARD selection, it should request the clipboard manager to take over the ownership of the clipboard, using the SAVE_TARGETS mechanism. If there is no clipboard manager, or if the SAVE_TARGETS conversion fails, the application should simply exit.

Applications need to transfer ownership of the clipboard to clipboard manager before exiting for copied data to perisist after it exits. There is certainly nothing you can do about it, unless offcourse you are willing to modify the source code of each of these applications to make it comply to FreeDesktop specs.

Fix. Well.. workaround.

The reporter/ moderator of the bug report suggests that we should install diodon, klipper, glipper, parcellite or xfce4-clipman as a workaround for this issue.

Working of diodon

Tuesday, 26 April 2016

Ubuntu 16.04 won't wake up from suspend

I recently installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus on my Thinkpad E550. I honestly regretted it not just because it doesn't support AMD proprietary fglrx driver aka AMD Catalyst or AMD Radeon Software but because the suspend feature stopped working.

I initially thought that this had something to do with video drivers that I had installed on Ubuntu 15.10 which were now incompatible with 16.04. I realized that this was not the case as the issue persisted even on opensource drivers that it is compatible with.

Also on a closer observation I realized that it was not that my system was not able to wake up from suspend, but that it was not able to suspend at all. On suspending, the screen would go off but my laptop kept running, heating up and draining battery. This problem existed when I hibernate or shutdown as well.

Now the only possible reason for this is some problem in acpi which is not letting my system to suspend. Ubuntu 16.04 is shipped with kernel 4.4. A quick search on this issue on kernel 4.4 made me realize that this exists across several destros and mostly on thinkpads. So I upgraded to kernel 4.5 and the problem is resolved.

Installing kernel 4.5

32 bit

64bit

Then reboot!