Baby Don't Hertz Me

Reference For Me, Reference For You? I often find myself using certain commands on semi-regular basis. Not regular enough to remember but enough to know what I am looking for. This is my list of snippets that others might find useful. I will do my best to update this from time to time. On a side note, I primarily use Ubuntu 18.04 (20.04 upgrade will likely happen when it comes out). I occasionally use distros other than Ubuntu but they are typically Debian based. Variables that you want to alter will be denoted as $VAR_NAME. Photo by Kevin Horvat on Unsplash Connecting To Wifi Using CLI - This uses the command line version of NetworkManager (nmcli) - Obviously you need to know your network name and password - Determine your network interface with ' nmcli device status '. Four columns will be displayed. Find wifi in the Type column and then the associated Device name is the interface name. Commands:  nmcli d wifi connect $NAME password $PASSWORD iface...

  Since starting grad school I have gained a whole new appreciation for linux. Ubuntu has been my primary OS since 8.04 (Hardy Heron) but I hadn't really looked much at how to really streamline and optimize my workflow until this year. At my university, all Windows computers run an antivirus program that kills performance. It runs ruthlessly and suck up a lot of computer resources. This has only reinforced my choice to use linux as the IT guys will not provide any support and will not install anything on your computer, thus allowing complete freedom. Not all workplaces may allow for this but it does make things much easier if they do. What is SSH? SSH is a cryptographic network protocol that allows for secure network operations over a non-secured network. What this means is that users have the ability to securely login to remote systems on almost any network. Why should I use it? I have known about SSH for years but never used it extensively. It has only been this year...

Audio Some of the earliest uses I found for my personal computers was recording audio. Though these recordings were generally low quality, in both content and equipment, I did get the "recording bug". For the first era of my creativity, I was stuck using the family computer. In order to record, I would have to lug my synthesizer over to the family computer or the family computer to my upright piano before I could begin. This made it tedious for not only myself, but my four older sisters as the family computer would then be locked down by yours truly for hours on end. Shortly after this, my father agreed to let me have the old family computer, an old Pentium III that we installed Ubuntu 8.04 on. I remember the first recording tool I used was Rosegarden. It hasn't changed much even after 10 years but as always is a polished piece of software. After a few equipment changes I had a beastly computer and a full digital workstation (Roland RD-700GX and various perip...

This May I started my Master's in Electrical Engineering. My supervisor is very supportive of me reading anything that might be related to my research but also things that interest me. One of my favorite things is his insistence that I read at least one paper a day. I generally end up reading more than one most days as well as reading chapters from numerous textbooks. I enjoyed most of my undergraduate degree but found that the purpose of it was to follow a curriculum. My experience with grad school so far has been nothing but self-guided learning. In the Fall and Winter semesters I am taking some courses that are required for my studies but for the most part my learning will be managed by myself and guided by my supervisor. Due to a number of professors in department getting to take their sabbaticals in consecutive years, I will miss out on taking a few courses that I really wanted to take but my supervisor has given me access to all the course notes so I can teach myself. ...

Despite all the woes around internet accessibility and net neutrality occurring in the USA in recent times, the internet remains a modern marvel. Sure, there is always the risk of your data being sold (if it isn't already) but in exchange you gain access to the majority of humankind's knowledge. All of our joy, sorrow, science and math. The internet is an endless supply of data and learning. It isn't all about making pretty graphs like you might find on /r/dataisbeautiful but amazing stuff can be done regardless. The massive amounts of data accessible on the internet will allow for the identification of the driving forces of certain actions. As can be seen below, Bitcoin prices correlate very nicely with Google searches relating to it. From /r/dataisbeautiful and /u/DeanLa As my second last semester in university wraps up I realize the true power of data. In a course I took about pattern recognition and machine learning we got to see first hand what can happen wit...

Writing register level code is something I have always viewed as both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is absolute control over almost every aspect of the system while the curse is trying to understand all of the system requirements at the lowest level. As I have previously mentioned I am working on a micro-satellite prototype for my senior electrical engineering design project. My role in the project is the communication system. I was required to select and setup the hardware and software to be able to transmit data from the satellite to the ground station with handshaking and error correction.  HopeRF RFM69HCW Transceiver Module This is the transceiver chip that we decided to use. It is surprisingly inexpensive considering the features it includes. The version we are using is the 915 MHz model (ITU ISM band in the Americas) to avoid having our own spectrum license or to have to request usage of an amateur radio band.  One of the instructors in the course ...

Canada is a wonderful place to live. Hot summers, beautiful trees in the fall, and snowy winters. As December raced away, Mother Nature decided to turn the thermostat down to -15°C. The ground was covered in a blanket of snow and going more than a few days without snow was rather shocking. Several of my siblings live on the other side of Canada. My parents were gone to visit for the holidays. As the only child still in town, house sitting naturally was my duty. This job does come with its own perks. Instead of living in my relatively small apartment I have access to a large house and two cars. The only downside of the house is that it is across the river on the other side of town. So the day my parents were leaving they planned to drop their SUV at my apartment building and then take a cab to the airport. I had an exam that morning and driving my parents to the airport at 3 AM was definitely out of the question. I get up in the morning and get ready to go write my exam. On my way...

Humans have an enormous variety of ways to interact with the world around them. Touch, smell, taste, hearing, but most important (in my mind) is vision. Computers are presently limited in their interactions with the world. They are allowed to crunch numbers, post a Facebook status that none of your friends want to read but ultimately don't get to touch, taste, smell, or see the world around them. One thing that I find fascinating is object recognition using neural networks. I am currently taking a class with a focus on pattern recognition and machine learning where we have to do a project of our choosing. My classmate and I are comparing performance of traditional classification and deep learning for object detection (in our case an orange hockey ball). I was extremely happy when our prof approved the usage of deep learning despite the focus of the course being more on traditional classifying techniques. The project work division is that my classmate is developing the traditional...

Every 6 months I get excited. REALLY excited. My friends and wife may roll their eyes as I approach fan girl screaming over the latest Ubuntu release. I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS since Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). They may no longer play their beautiful login sound (listen here ) but all around have dramatically improved. 17.10 is a big release. It is one of the first major change to the operating system since Canonical changed from Gnome 2 to Unity. This release has Canonical swapping Unity for Gnome 3 and I am not quite sure how I feel about it so far. I realise there will always be the "it is new just give it a try" but the new GUI just feels a lot more clunky to me so far. Out of the box I find 17.10 to be much clunkier than any recent release. At least there are some ways to improve. 1. Install Updates! I used to get annoyed when every list ever said to update. For a young release this is really important. Normally Canonical releases really well mad...

UBUNTU 17.10 IS COMING OUT SO SOON! Short post today but I will do a longer post next week focusing on the beautiful new operating system that is getting released. I am really sorry about the posting dry-spell of late. I have been immensely busy with school work and training. You could go so far as to describe my life with the following pseudocode: > location = &Alex; > self_approval = 0; > > if (location == school) || (location == judo); >     self_approval = 1; // hooray! > > else >     self_approval = 0; // GET BACK TO WORK I finally have a course at school where I get to formally learn about Artificial Intelligence. My university has graduate level courses that are about AI for electrical engineers but until this year had no undergraduate courses for ECE students. The course is looking at pattern recognition and data processing and so far it has been fantastic. AI has been an interest of mine for a while but I ...

The arrival of fourth year for many engineering students at my university is either loved or loathed. Senior design is a large project that all engineering students must complete to graduate. The scale of the project is one that will be larger than any previously done for academic purposes. My group and I have a rather lofty project idea. We are going to design and hopefully build a CubeSat. What is a CubeSat? A CubeSat is like almost any other satellite simply much smaller. The size of typical satellites can be anywhere from a dog all the way up to a car or bigger. CubeSat sizes go the opposite direction. The sizes of CubeSat are referred to as 'U'. 1U is a 10x10x10 cm size satellite while a 2U would be simply two 1U stacked making 20x10x10 cm. Our target as of right now is to design a 2U CubeSat. The potential scope of the project is enormous and since time is limited we may not be able to complete and entire CubeSat. This being said, we are going to try our best! It...

Several weeks ago, the professor who is supervising me for the summer and I were talking about technology. This is to be expected since he is an ECE professor and I am an ECE student. It started as a run of the mill conversation until we somehow managed to get on the topic of why my supervisor always needed to have an RSS feed on his mobile devices. He insisted on the RSS feed to have easy access to Slashdot. When my supervisor first mentioned Slashdot I wondered what it was. A quick google search and some reading showed that it is the eloquent sibling of Reddit. Not to bash Reddit too hard but it can sometimes be hard to wade through the heaping pile of garbage that can be collect in a Reddit thread. There isn't an up/down-voting system but the content is definitely of a higher quality than Reddit. You can usually tell a post is of a higher quality by the number of comments. The comment counter takes the visual place of the up-vote counter on Reddit. Slashdot may have a g...

As the ranks of embedded system developers swell with the hobbyists and amateurs, the question of simplicity versus precision is coming up more regularly. Should we learn to use Arduino? Should we learn to use ARM? My simple answer would be learn both but as with most technological dilemmas the answer is never that simple. In my education I have been forced to use an ARM based micro-controller. Being tossed into a complex development environment was really great for me as a developer. I have always been enchanted by embedded systems and this experience allowed me to sink my teeth into a design problem. Designing a hardware and software solution in one clean package is satisfying. Before beginning this comparison I would like to say that I am not looking at advanced tools for ARM like NXP's Processor Expert or other tools that simplify the design process. We will be comparing unassisted development of Arduino vs ARM. Simplicity Arduino UNO, one of the more commonly ...

Despite usually being an auditory experience music can also come with an equally wonderful visual experience. With everybody and their dog trying to make it big on YouTube there has been a massive emergence of beautiful music videos. There are some fantastic live-action videos but for this list I am looking at animated videos only. I even decided to save you all the convenience of having to search for the videos or going link by link and made a YouTube playlist. IF you do want to thank my just comment your favourite video. You can find the playlist here . I will also link the titles of the videos to their respective clips. 10. She Wants Me Dead by Cazzette This song makes it on the list but just barely. I like the song and the music video is pretty good. I remember some kids shows I used to watch having a similar art-style.  9.  Jenny by Studio Killers This is the song I found to discover the Studio Killers. I like some of their other songs but this one ha...