Too long without posts

3 things on my mind; orca, Starfield, Local Hosted GPT 🙂

Orca

Few weeks ago I wondered into the living room & spotted the dark shapes bobbing through the inner harbour that I now recognise as orca!

Picking up the binoculars confirmed this. I jumped in the car, and headed down to the local wharf to await their arrival… but they decided not to make it so far up stream 🙁

While waiting I spoke to other excited Jaffa’s, one who explained to me how he’d heard on the internet grapevine that they were heading our way, and he’d checked on a webcam, shocked to see them live!

After this conversation we all headed to another bay to catch a look at the pod from a distance, but I took away with me the idea that we have available a live early alert already established, in the medium of the webcam … we just needed someone to be watching it to alert us … or something ;p

Nearly a couple of decades ago my wife had spotted a young stray cat coming into our garden, then she believed was bearing kittens. To validate her suspicion I knocked together a rudimentary script, hosted on a old laptop, with a 1.3 mp camera, it could detect a change in the images. I managed to catch a few photos of a hungry young kitten, eating from the saucer of food we’d left available.

This led to us feeding the cat through to the birth of 4 kittens, that we rescued. The Mum, ‘Fluffy’, never really became a house cat, although would sleep and eat within our home. We kept 2 of the kittens (between us decided 5 cats were too many… did I mention I was allergic to each of them ;p)

[David] Bowie & Shirley [Bassey] stayed with us, (sadly Shirley died a few months ago ~15 years old), Zeppelin (nee Stephen Hawkins) & Mojo (nee Elvis) were found new loving homes.

This is me leading the story that I considered using similar feline spotting tech, to spot the aqua predators, and this is what I did!

Initially using the YouTube feed and a script on Google CoLab, I hacked together a YOLO image detection script to see if I could identify orca swimming into the harbour … but all it identified was boats ;p

So after a bit of research I hacked together a model, from a predefined data set, that could identify orca … but all it could see was orca, like everything was orca; weird reminiscence of Being M “)

I needed better, so spent time trying to merge the models, but the original held too much significance, needed more cow bell orca!

For 3 days I learned how to train a YOLO model from fresh, utilising the orignal image data set, merged it with my acquired orca images and data, and gave my machine a hard workout. Conveniently this is in winter, while I’m working from home in the same office, I was grateful of the heat pumped out of my box. The results were good, and after more refinement suitable.

So now I have a model I’ve yet to push in to live production; the idea was to have it live, sending some kind of alert if orca are spotted on the cam, and give me, or anyone else interested time to get out and observe.

I do plan to push this to prod, yet still divided on the platform I’m gonna host it. A Raspberry Pi could work, although not sure if it would have the grunt, a Digital Ocean droplet would work, but I’m never keen for paying for other peoples computer resources, considering Google Cloud as I believe it would fit in their free tier … but yet to make a decision yet

I need to tidy up this detection git: https://github.com/AmbiguousError/orca_watch

Then add the scripts I used to build / refine the model, and my best.pt

Starfield

The last post I made of this game were, if not critical, then not praising; and I’d like to rescind this opinion

I’ve traveled and developed further, new outposts, curated ships, outposts, and enjoyed the story and experience

Circa 8 days of playtime in, and I don’t want my first game to end. I’ve resisted using mods, although still feeling OP, I’m working through the story and side quests, and know I’m gonna have to give it up sometime … or maybe not, my OG Skyrim Dark Elf  is still kicking with over 200 hours of gameplay since 11.11.11!

Local Hosted GPT

This is my current project, which I’m not sure how far I can develop, with my current available on-hand hardware.

I’m looking to build a local GPT model, only accessible on my local network … I can’t believe I’m not considered this previously, I’ve been messing around with GPT & LLM’s since 2019!

Currently I’m trying to install a model on a Rasp PI 3, but don’t believe it’ll have the resources to be useful. Hoping to make this a proof of concept, then pick up a RPI 4 or 5 to play with more … maybe bring back the PS2 camera I picked up to make a more interactive tool?

Let’s see how this goes, I have some ideas of making novel GPT’s just for the lols … currently the install is “installing build dependencies: still running for the 6th time ;p

One more thing

I found that GeForce Now could be installed on Linux Mint, and I can stream the XBOX GamePass, and STEAM libraries, without installation!

Huge game changer, and works really well, even when the closest server are 3k + km’s across the Tasman … thin the wire-guard facilitated VPN helps a little

So I’ve still been geeking out, just not posting about it .. will try harder ;p