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Lamps and Random Numbers
💡Why are lava lamps used by a cloud company to generate #randomnumbers? Random numbers are the foundation for the encryption and security of the Internet. As software becomes smarter and ever more data is available, the (random) numbers generated can be calculated, of course with high difficulty and expense. This will be of no real concern for everyday usage for common people but certainly can keep CTOs at big tech and security services awake at night. To solve this, security engineers are turning to novel solutions from nature and the physical world. One such ‘creative’ solution being used by #Cloudflare (a CDN company which can be thought of as a…
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Present in Teams in PowerPoint
A #PowerPoint Tip. #MicrosoftTeams allows participant(s) to move between individual slides, while a speaker is presenting. As a speaker to enable this, you need to save your slidedeck (PPTX) in #OneDrive or #SharePoint, only then “Present in Teams” will light up in #PowerPoint. More details are at this Microsoft support page.
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iPhone faceid finally works with a face mask
Finally, it is here! Apple fixes iPhone’s faceid to work on faces with #mask. During the pandemic it was a pain to type a PIN everytime to unlock the phone while you were out and wearing a facemask. The new fix with iOS 15.4 doesn’t require an Apple Watch, owning one was a requirement in earlier versions. In the pictures here, notice my mask and the unlock icon (highlighted), taken with #iPhone12 Pro.
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Synthetic imagery and VQGAN+CLIP
When it took social media by storm last year, I checked it out and was fascinated with how much machine learning techniques have progressed in the last ten years. I am talking about the VQGAN+CLIP, a text-to-image generation model released by Katherine Crowson as a Google Colab Notebook. Suddenly when reading an article I got reminded of this, and spend some time trying with various captions and I am sharing the images I got. VQGAN+CLIP is a text-to-image model that generates images, given a set of text prompts. The field is called synthetic imagery (“GAN Art”). Here, VQGAN is the image generator, CLIP is the “natural language steering wheel” that…
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Redmi 10 Prime
I was looking for a new phone to replace a Samsung M20 which had broken down and Samsung service was quoting a repair fee of INR 7000 – more than half of the price (INR 12,990) I had paid three years ago. Till now, my experience with Samsung mobiles has been good. My wife was having a Samsung Galaxy M31s, my sister and my son were using Samsung Galaxy M30s, and I have a Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite as my second phone, which I am very happy with. But recently, apart from the problem with this one (M20) I had heard from a friend about a motherboard problem he was…
