Disqus - Latest Comments for dalelane

Re: You Can Now Play a Fun Photo Guessing Game With IBM Watson

dalelane — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 03:57:23 -0000

The demo is fun but where it gets more interesting, for me at least, is when you train the Watson service for what you want it to be able to recognise in your pictures. That opens up a lot of interesting project ideas. Even my kids used it to try making an app able to play "Guess Who" with them. http://dalelane.co.uk/blog/...

Re: Webcam programmed to capture your face while playing Xbox: gauges your excitement, graphs ennui

dalelane — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:58:57 -0000

Getting shot, mainly. Every time I got in the lead I got wrecked by those damn shunts! :)

Re: Webcam programmed to capture your face while playing Xbox: gauges your excitement, graphs ennui

dalelane — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:55:39 -0000

I copied the labels from the API for the face.com classifier. "angry" is a pretty broad bucket that covers a range of expressions including frustration, determination, etc. I wouldn't read too much into the word "angry"... I'm not as rage-filled as the graphs might suggest :-)

Re: Webcam programmed to capture your face while playing Xbox: gauges your excitement, graphs ennui

dalelane — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:32:44 -0000

It's actually polling more frequently than that, but ultimately, you're right - sampling isn't going to be super accurate. As I wrote in the original post:

"I’m not doing anything complicated with video feeds. I’m just sampling by taking photos at regular intervals. You could reasonably argue that the funniest joke in the world isn’t going to get me to sustain a broad smile for over a minute, so there is a lot being missed here."

It was meant to be an idle bit of tinkering on a Sunday evening, so I wasn't taking it too seriously. That said, you can see the difference between playing a game and watching a comedy. Or watching a comedy and watching the news. So even in broad averages there is enough there to show the potential.

Re: Webcam programmed to capture your face while playing Xbox: gauges your excitement, graphs ennui

dalelane — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:06:44 -0000

Whoops, I hadn't spotted that. I essentially store the month as a number from 1 - 12. I forgot that JavaScript dates start from 0, so they count 0 - 11. The graph should've said April 2.
Well spotted :-)

Re: Webcam programmed to capture your face while playing Xbox: gauges your excitement, graphs ennui

dalelane — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 05:06:32 -0000

Whoops, I hadn't spotted that. I essentially store the month as a number from 1 - 12. I forgot that JavaScript dates start from 0, so they count 0 - 11. The graph should've said April 2.

Well spotted :-)

Re: Yesterday’s Authentication Bug

dalelane — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:24:03 -0000

"Remembered when the LastPass team found a little more traffic than normal. They immediately ask all the users to change passwords and send a mail explaining all the situation. No secrets."
True... but look how much shit they got for that.

The "OMG! LastPass security breach!" media coverage wasn't the best reward they could've got.

(Not to say that this isn't how companies should behave... just that the media could do more to encourage it)

Re: Nokia’s N9: The full release (you need to read it)

dalelane — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:05:51 -0000

I don't see GB/UK in the list at http://europe.nokia.com/fin...

Are they not releasing the N9 in the UK?

Re: The #1 Killer of Meetings (And What You Can Do About It)

dalelane — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:31:05 -0000

I think you're oversimplifying.

A good, engaging, articulate speaker is a good, engaging, articulate speaker - whether they use PowerPoint or not.

A dry, dull bore can still be dry and dull if you take PowerPoint away from them.

Blaming the tool is a distraction from the real problem. Saying stuff like "PowerPoint presentations inevitably end up as monologues" is a poor excuse. If your approach to presenting is to make a tedious monologue, then you need to review your approach, not try and blame your choice of software.

Re: My thoughts on Hack Days

dalelane — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:10:21 -0000

Agree with pretty much all of this.

I'm not as fussed about prizes or awarding, but I do think it's frustrating to try and do justice to something like 17 hours of work in 90 seconds.

As you say, it's obviously an understandable effort to avoid making everyone sit through hours of talks, but I like the idea of doing a showcase kind of thing.

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Future development plans

dalelane — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:30:11 -0000

I'm told (I've not tried it for myself yet, and the doc seems a little unclear at first glance!) that xxv plugin for vdr can do something a little like this

http://xxv.berlios.de/

It's a plugin which can send anonymized data from to a common web service. So you get, for example, "community features" like what are the "most programmed EPG events".

Something to try!

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Credits

dalelane — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:12:39 -0000

RE: suppliers
For the Play-TV, I just went to my local PC World. A quick Google shows that other stores were offering it at similar prices. (e.g. http://www.hotukdeals.com/i...
I got the Asrock from http://www.scan.co.uk/

RE: drivers
There is more info at http://linuxtv.org/wiki/ind...

The book is "Getting Things Done" by David Allen

Kind regards, D

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Future development plans

dalelane — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:52:34 -0000

Ooh... that's really cool. Thanks :-)

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Recorded vs Live

dalelane — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:03:12 -0000

can I get away with blaming my wife? :-)

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Future development plans

dalelane — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:46:30 -0000

Thanks very much for the kind comment.

Love the idea of linking to iPlayer - didn't know you could link to a specific time in programmes. I've programmed little scripts to buttons on the TV remote before, so it shouldn't be too hard to have a button that records a "love" or "share" event.

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Credits

dalelane — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:25:18 -0000

It was recommended to me by a friend who knows more about this stuff than me...

I've read in a couple of places that the Play-TV is a reasonably high spec tuner for the price, because Sony sell it at a low price to promote the PS-3.

Don't know how true that is, but at any rate, I have no complaints with it.

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Credits

dalelane — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:46:44 -0000

Yup - I'm using the Sony Play-TV. Works perfectly, and I got it for under £30.

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Recorded vs Live

dalelane — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:18:10 -0000

The main thing I watch live is the News... kinda makes sense. :-)

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Favourite programmes

dalelane — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:15:49 -0000

FIVE USA broadcast House every weekday afternoon, which I've been making the most of to catch up on the earlier series. So this will probably stay near the top for a while.

Top Gear and Doctor Who have both just finished their series' though, so I'm expecting the proportion for these to start dropping.

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Attention span

dalelane — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:12:40 -0000

It looks like I prefer to watch half-hour programmes...

This is influenced by the fact that I haven't added support for capturing DVD watching yet... as most of the films I watch are on DVD, not TV.

But even so... I think it's true to say that I prefer shorter programmes

Re: TV Scrobbling :: Channels

dalelane — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:11:08 -0000

It looks like the ability to record programmes means I don't often need any of the "plus one" channels. Is this unusual? Does anyone else find them useful?

Re: Twitter restored on Vodafone SMS: who cares?

dalelane — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:28:12 -0000

Really? My (admittedly vague and woolly!) recollection of how SMS updates used to work before Twitter pulled the plug on UK SMS was that you could go to your friends page and enable/disable SMS updates on a per-user basis.

If I'm wrong then... yeh, you're right - I take back what I said, and SMS updates would be more or less useless to me. :-)

Re: Twitter restored on Vodafone SMS: who cares?

dalelane — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:14:27 -0000

It's an interesting point... I wonder, though, if you might be underestimating the value of instant notifications - even to the sort of power users that you mention.

Sure, I wouldn't turn on SMS updates for all 400 people I follow - my phone would melt! But I could see me liking getting tweets instantly from the dozen close friends and family who otherwise sometimes get lost in my twitter chaff.

Re: Gareth Jones » Blog Archive » Passwords passwords passwords… again

dalelane — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:21:18 -0000

I think I'm still a bit cynical to trust an online password store. That said, the optimistic side of me is holding out for the day when everything uses OpenID and this problem sort of goes away .

I like password manager apps like SplashID (http://splashdata.com/splas... which let you sync your passwords to a smartphone - this means i've always got them with me, and they're not tied to a single machine.

Not sure what your options would be on Linux though...