I often have conversations with friends and colleagues about their careers. And many times, i point people to a great blog post by my colleague Liz Aab, about the “7 Ps”. But i always find myself adding two to the list, so i thought i’d just post it here. There are lots of factors…
Some repos, such a the one for the Unifi Controller, use different ‘field’ values to tie a release and require manual updates. For someone like me who has a standalone, automated controller setup designed mainly to keep the firmware up to date without much intervention, this is a hassle. It looks something like this:…
I was connecting from my macbook to a SQL Azure Database when i hit the following error: The solution was to install the ODBC driver, following the instructions on the Microsoft website:
The ZFS Pool on my server was showing degraded state. After checking the SMART status of the constituent drives and finding no problem, I discovered that there’s a bug in Solaris 10.5 where the system reports a growing number of errors and eventually fails the pool. dmesg shows an error unable to kmem_alloc enough…
For various reasons, not least because I wanted to play with it, we have a Yale Keyless Connected Smart Door Lock with a Z-Wave module (we have the v1 module which works fine). This lock has a couple of key features that we liked: You can grant or revoke access using RFID tags or cards,…
Hybrid peer-to-peer/5G vehicle communication technology, C-V2CX ("cellular-vehicle-to-everything"), has evolved since it's 2016 debut, with recent demos showing how it helps vehicles "see" threats and obstacles out of sensor range (such as cars coming around corners, traffic lights and so on). But it's not the only protocol on the block – Toyota, the world's largest car manufacturer, and GM, prefer a competing protocol based on wifi. The winner should start to emerge later this year when 5G trials begin.
https://rob.al/2N03G6n
C-V2X enables vehicles to communicate, which should reduce accidents and aid autonomous driving.
Is AI the hot topic of the moment? Well, tickets for one of the foremost conferences for academics, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, sold out in under 12 minutes…
https://rob.al/2QbhPeR
The conference has become the one that everyone working in the field of artificial intelligence wants to attend.
Ever thought of becoming a bug hunter? The pay's ok – not great, just ok. For Evan Ricafort, in the Philippines, it's enough to make ends meet – in a typical month, Ricafort earns roughly average salary, sometimes more. Free t-shirts and tours of the US Capitol don't pay the bills…
https://rob.al/2QdpOrC
Independent cybersleuthing is a realistic career path, if you can live cheaply.
IBM is testing a paper test strip which, when analysed with an app on a standard smartphone, could reduce the time and cost for farmers trying to work out how to prepare soil for planting, treat water, or maintain optimal growth of crops. The card is about the size of a business card, and changes colour in specific patterns to measure pH, nitrogen dioxide, aluminium and other chemicals necessary for (or best avoided) for healthy plant growth. The app allows immediate, precise diagnosis (the camera is more a accurate colour sensor than the human eye), and aggregated data can help governments monitor fertilizer/chemical use.
https://rob.al/2MZR7b2
The IBM AgroPad is a paper testing strip that, when combined with a mobile app, relies on machine vision to measure the precise amounts of chemicals in samples of water and soil.
Prof Jim Al-Khalili, incoming president of the British Science Association, will say in his presidential address that without both increased transparency and public engagement, AI could become uncontrolled and unregulated, in the hands of the powerful for the benefit of the few, or being seen as sinister and scary by a public which doesn't understand what it is or how it works. More public engagement, he says, is necessary to ensure that leaders and governments properly design regulations to ensure the technology is used in ways which does not increase inequality in society.
https://rob.al/2NXNX49
Without greater transparency AI’s full potential may not be realised, warns British Science Association’s incoming president