Solving Your Technology Needs

In November 2022, I realized that my webcam had stopped working. I took it down from above my door mount in order to troubleshoot closely. The unit would power on with a steady white lighting around the front but I was used to seeing green. When I press the button to reset it, it would reboot and start flashing different coloured lights but when I release the button, all lighting would stop.     I looked at Logitech’s support site to find out how to properly reset it. It was simply to hold the button a few seconds until lights start blinking, which is what I have been doing. I had the wired model so I plugged in the unit via USB to my Windows computer to attempt to connect to it. I had a hunch that there was a firmware update that it automatically tried to download and run, and that update caused this. I was right. A few other users on the Logitech forums reported the same symptoms I was experiencing with my Circle 2 webcam. Here was one specific post that I responded to:...

The "Wall of Graduates" is a Google sites page showing a profile list of students who graduated from the Udacity AI Product Manager nanodegree. We were asked two questions to include in our profile and there are those two questions.  What obstacles (big or small!) did you face during Phase 2 & how did you overcome them?    I think the biggest was time constraint. I was also doing my Georgia Tech course in the spring and this fell on the same timeline. The other obstacle is that the course material was not technical but more for product managers. This meant a lot of time was spent networking in slack participating community-driven initiatives. I did learn Artificial Intelligence concepts but it didn't need to last from December 2020-December 2021.  How are you making use of your newfound skills?  I don't use AI at work but it has allowed me to open my eyes to possibilities. We recently implemented MS Azure Cognitive service utilizing text translation. Althoug...

This was my proctored-exam transcript last night when I took the AWS Solutions Architect exam (SAA-C02) as part of my recertification because it expires every 3 years. This was a remote proctored exam through PSI and should have been easy because this wasn’t the first time I used their service. For whatever reason, last night’s experience was so bad  that an exam that started at 10:45pm didn’t finish until early morning 2:15am.  Some things that you could do to avoid what I went through: 1) Test your computer 24 hours before start time This was my fault and I should  tested sooner. I did start preparing foe the prerequisites as early as 8pm and thought I had enough time to complete everything as it was the same computer I used three years ago when I got certified with AWS. However, I found that since the last time I took this exam, my hardware changed (different web cam, different speakers) and I installed more software like Docker that the proctoring software (PSI Secure...

I applied and was recently awarded a Cloud-native Application Architecture scholarship by SUSE and Udactity. There were about 12,000 scholars all over the globe who took part in the course made up of 5 lessons in 2 months, with phase 1 ending August 2, 2021. One of the exercises was to run Docker Desktop on my Windows 10 computer and build a docker image alpine:golang which will run a web application and display the infamous Hello World. I uploaded this docker image to my Docker Hub registry for use in a Kubernetes cluster. We needed to install Oracle VirtualBox, Hashicorp Vagrant, and run Kubernetes k3s cluster https://k3s.io/ to host this docker image. This worked well on my computer but I wanted to try the same exercise on my RPi which had a lot less resources and wanted to see how well it worked there. I have a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspian OS with 32GB of disk and 4GB of memory. I connected the RPi via wifi on my local LAN and have opened up an SSH session to it. First I install ...

We were recently approved to setup Google Adsense for a few websites. I was so ecstatic because I hadn't been able to get this going for a while due to some accounting errors. I assume there was a time duration where that token expires and am now glad to be able use this product. During the setup on our blogger sites, I ran into some technical errors pointed at fixing ads.txt otherwise it may impact ad revenue, i.e. "earnings at risk you need to fix some ads.txt file issues to avoid severe impact to your revenue".  To summarize the steps needed to enable Google Adsense on your site, you would simply need to do the following:  1) Create an ads.txt file in the root of your Blogger site like example.com/ads.txt by going to Settings > Moentization > Enable custom ads.txt slider;  2) Add your publisher ID to the ads.txt file in Blogger using string "google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0" where pub-0000000000000000 is your personal publisher...

I applied and was recently awarded the Bertelsmann Technology scholarship where a group of students take part in an Artificial Intelligence track made up of 5 parts to be completed in 3.5 months.    As part of taking the class, we have to take part in a slack channel where we post our daily studies for 60 days reflecting on what we have learned. This is a transcription of those 60 days. The public github wiki is located here https://github.com/chromilo/udacity-bertelsmann-scholarship/wiki  Day 1:  I am in p3  (Datasets) doing the xray annotation project. I have created the appen job using the "Image Categorization" template. I uploaded the xray image data and modified the CML to make the  questions specific to checking for pnemonia. Also updated the Examples section. I am still working out the usage of conditional only-if in checkboxes to determine what other smarts to include when annotators go through the page. Created one Question so far and will co...

The most under-appreciated AWS service is the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). This service provides SSL/TLS certificate for your custom domain as long as you subscribe to any ACM-integrated service like Elastic Cache or Cloudfront.  I had been using Wordpress to host my website https://aminsolutions.com for some time on a free web hosting provider. In order to provide SSL/TLS web encryption, I would have to buy a public certificate from an SSL provider and have that in front of my Wordpress content management web site. I found there were many limitations with that including installation of a public certificate on a free webhost subscription.  I would have had to start a paid web host subscription and in order to install a paid public certificate on a Wordpress website that wasn't getting a lot of hits. Regardless, it had to be secured via SSL web encryption so this is where AWS Cloudfront came in. Using AWS Cloudfront integrated with ACM, I can get a free public SSL web certifi...