Please join me on Saturday August 25th @ 2PM for an afternoon spent poolside, eating burgers & pizza and of course having a few beers with your peers, friends and colleagues.

Anyone within DoIT is welcome and of course so are significant others and your kids. I’ll also be inviting some of my IT Partner and University side friends, if there is someone you think should be on the expanded invite list let me know and we’ll get them added.

I have a big backyard, with a pool and plenty of space for everyone.

It’s been awhile (like a year) since I’ve organized a “Beers with the Baron” and several people have been dropping hints =)

So, please join me on Sunday September 3rd (Labor Day Weekend) for an afternoon spent poolside, eating burgers & pizza and of course having a few beers with your peers, friends and colleagues.

Anyone within DoIT is welcome and of course so are significant others and your kids. I’ll also be inviting some of my IT Partner and University side friends, if there is someone you think should be on the expanded invite list let me know and we’ll get them added.

I have a big backyard, with a pool and plenty of space for everyone. FYI I also have two dogs who may be crashing the party.

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-build-your-own-amazon-echo-with-a-raspberry-pi-1787726931

How to safely shutdown or reboot your raspberry pi

https://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/getting-your-raspberry-pi-to-output-the-right-resolution

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt.md

http://elinux.org/RPi_Powered_USB_Hubs

—–

Installing apache https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/web-server/apache.md

Open chromium on start: http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/38515/auto-start-chromium-on-raspbian-jessie-11-2015

*Loaded Chromium-browser for Raspbian Jessie based on this site: –https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=121195&p=818455

*And got the Chromium “boot to fullscreen” from this guidance: site: http://www.0atman.com/auto-start-full-screen-web-page-on-raspbian-jessie-startup.html Create a file called ~/.config/autostart/chromium.desktop with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Connect
Comment=Checks internet connectivity
Exec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser -incognito --kiosk YOUR_WEB_ADDRESS

——

Turn on/off screen at certain times: https://github.com/wireload/screenly-ose/issues/26

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=7570

Please join me on Sunday, August 21st at 1PM at my house (120 Rider Avenue, Patchogue) for a poolside afternoon of BBQ, Beer and fun with the “IT Crowd”.

Anyone within DoIT is welcome and of course you are welcome to bring your spouses/significant others and kids! Please help me spread the word among your teams and groups. I’ll also be inviting some of my IT Partner and University wide friends, if there is someone you think should be on the invite list I just ask you to let me know so I have a handle on who’s coming.

I have a big backyard, with a pool and plenty of space for the kids and you to run around.

I’ll be cooking up the usual BBQ food: Burgers & Dogs and will have a cooler of beers and soda, but I’d like to make this more of a potluck affair, so please bring something to eat and/or drink. Oven, grill and cooler space is available.

Check out the video from last year! Thanks to Patricia Aceves for putting this together!

I’m not sure when this feature was added, but GMail now supports the ability to delay sending of e-mails, up to 30 seconds. This is useful if you remembered that you forgot to attach a file — but really, who does that?

This doesn’t work in the GMail mobile app — but it has a setting to confirm sent messages.

This past weekend I participated in my first (and hopefully NOT last) hackathon. The event took place and was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and consisted of about 150 hackers from across NY and beyond.

The hackers assembled for the first time on Friday November 20th where they were introduced to a wide array of dinosaur related technical challenges that the museum and its researchers are hoping to solve. Challenges ranged from creating educational experiences/games, transcribing various datasets and developing methods of collecting and presenting existing/new data. 

I hoped on a team consisting of two employees of NYPL who were also interested in working on a solution of crowdsourcing the transcription of handwritten digital assets. NYPL had previously created a framework called ScribeAPI which they are using to do a similar project relating to real estate records for NYC (http://emigrantcity.nypl.org/#/). We met back up Saturday at 3pm and began hacking away on a 24 coding binge. Once the museum closed to the public we were allowed to fan out and work in the dinosaur wing. Participants were allowed to sleep over and among the exhibits. I chose to curl up underneath the megalodn jaws in the marine exhibit.

The ScribeAPI framework gave us a solid platform to start with and we were able to quickly scaffold a working prototype that addressed two datasets the museum was looking to transcribe, one pertaining to a card catalog / fossil inventory of about 400,000 cards and another dealing with shipping records from the Frick Fossil Collection about 200,000 cards.

Using our system users can choose to participate in one of three tasks: Identifying regions on the card that contain specific data points (i.e. Description areas, Catalog Number Areas etc.), transcribing data from regions that have been marked or verifying transcriptions that have conflicting data. Each card gets transcribed by multiple people and when a configurable consensus (75%) agrees on what is listed the record is marked according. Cards can also get put into a contentious state if a consensus isn’t met within a certain threshold (10 transcriptions).

The project exposed me to Ruby on Rails, ReactJS and MongoDB and provided a fun excuse to really dive in headfirst and explore/tinker with the languages.

Our team wrote additional tools to pre-process the cards and to also potentially expose regions out to a OCR component (not developed) so that an automated process might provide a good initial pass, though w
e feel that for most of the data OCR just won’t cut it due to the contextual nature, inconsistent formatting and handwritten nature of the dataset. I wrote the framework of a leaderboard that would publish the main contributors to the project and might help “gamify” the experience to help drive further use / competitiveness.

In the end teams presented their tools and I was genuinely impressed with what was developed in a 24 hour period. The hackathon represented a total of about 3600 man-hours and while time will tell how much of our projects will be adopted I think its safe to say from atleast a R&D prospective the hackathon was a great success.

While the project only consists of sample data you can check it out at: http://crowdsaurus.herokuapp.com and http://frickfossils.herokuapp.com

Please join me at the next Beers with the Baron: Friday November 13th at The Bench.

Help me spread the word among your teams and groups!

RSVP:
https://docs.google.com/a/stonybrook.edu/forms/d/114jhhoD_2eKnZreKiAsrCUEWIvB4fWoKuBkI8ia6_N0/viewform