I am in the process of building a self-driving RC car. It’s a fun process full of discovery (I hate it already). Once it is finished I hope to write a longer article here about what I learned so stay tuned!

While the electronics stuff was difficult for me (fingers still burnt from soldering) I hoped that the computer vision stuff would be easier. Right? Right? Well no.

Neural network inference on small devices

To be clear I didn’t expect to train my CNN on the Raspberry Pi that I have (its revision 2, with added USB WiFi dongle and USB webcam) but I wanted to do some inference on a model that I can train on my other computers.

I love using PyTorch and I use it for all my projects/work/research. Simply put it’s fantastic software.

Problem 1 - PyTorch doesn’t have official ARMv7 or ARMv8 builds.

While you can get PyTorch if you have NVIDIA Jetson hardware, there are no builds for...

I love Google Colab! It is perfect for running Deep Learning experiments on a budget. I like how nonrestrictive it is and how you can run whatever you want inside the container you are given.

Sometimes I like to connect via SSH and use a proper editor to edit my python scripts, and while Jupyter-like environment is great for visualizing etc. sometimes you just want a shell. Luckily you can SSH into your Colab runtime.

Now, full disclaimer, I do not know if Google allows this explicitly or they just didn’t consider it. If I am asked to remove this guide I will immediately do so.

To get SSH access you need a bridge of some sort. There are already some tutorials using ngrok but that requires you to make an account there. What I came up with is much simpler.

Here are the steps:

1. Open a new Colab notebook (you can name it ssh for future use)

2. Set your runtime to Python 3 and GPU...

Kivy is a great UI framework for Python. You can use it to write cross-platform rich UI/UX applications for almost all platforms.

Kivy’s documentation is great, but there are no instructions for newer Fedora releases so it can be tricky to install it with Wayland, Python 3.7, dependencies etc.

So here is how to do it, it’s very simple:

We will need to compile stuff so install development tools:

sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"

Now let’s install all the Kivy dependencies (updated Nov 2021):

sudo dnf install gcc SDL2-devel zlibrary-devel mesa-libGL-devel "SDL2_*devel" ffmpeg gstreamer1-devel ccache ncurses-devel ncurses-devel.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686 gtk2-devel.i686 gtk2-devel  idn2 unzip zlib-devel.i686 patch autoconf automake libtool ncurses-compat-libs ncurses-compat-libs.i686 perl-FindBin lld-devel python3-pyjnius

sudo dnf install pangox-compat --releasever=32

You write code every day.

Whether you are a student or it is for your job or just for fun, most of the time you find yourself writing some code. Even when you are not writing code, you are thinking about it.

On your commute you are on HN or Reddit reading about latest and greatest. You are subscribed to many mailing lists and you read them all. You use Github search and sort by star count.

At least I do.

But then it happens. You get tired. You do not want to do it anymore. You question yourself. Your tools annoy you. Even the simplest tasks become a burden. You think about the days when you built some fun stuff.

Well don’t give up.

This is what happened to me and I guess you could call it “Programmer Burnout”. Although I prefer different kinds of burnouts.

The feeling really sucks, because you like your job and enjoy making stuff. In the end, that is why you are doing it in...

We are back!

After missing Fedora 28 Release Party :( we are back stronger than ever!

Fedora 29 Release Party was held at University of Novi Sad in Serbia like our previous events. Around 50 Fedorians were presents, and I am happy to report that I saw a lot of new faces.

We had four talks:

1. What is new in Fedora 29
2. How to work with keys, encryption and 2FA
3. What are kubernetes and how do you use them
4. What is BIOS, what is UEFI and how does it all work

Of course a Fedora quiz was in place with many Fedora awards! :)

I hope that we can continue this tradition of making release parties in Novi Sad. See you at Fedora 30 Release Party when this cold weather passes! :)

If you didn’t know, Google offers a “free VM” for you to use their Cloud platform.

It is available on this link:

https://console.cloud.google.com/cloudshell/editor

It is a container based solution, so you have root privileges which means you can do much more than just use the gcloud tool.

You can for instance run Fedora! My project anyfed just got a small update and it is working in Google Cloud shell just fine.

All you need to do is follow the instructions on the Github page or tldr; version:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nmilosev/anyfed/master/anyfed
bash anyfed

Your internet connection inside the chroot may be broken but there is an easy fix. Exit the chroot and copy the contents of the /etc/resolv.conf to the /etc/resolv.conf inside the chroot. In my instance it was:

nameserver 169.254.169.254
search c.cloud-devshell-prod.internal google.internal

Happy hacking...

Once again, we had an awesome Fedora Release Party at Univeristy of Novi Sad! :)

Thanks everyone for coming, I hope it was informative and useful for you. I would also like to thank the speakers, Doni, Igor and Marko for sharing their experience with us.

The image gallery can be found here (still updating): https://nmilosev.github.io/f27rpns-gallery/

And the talks are here (still updating also): https://github.com/nmilosev/f27rpns-gallery

Fedora 28 is just around the corner, so see you all soon! :)

Another successful and very fun BalCCon is behind us! Huge props to the organizers, speakers, volunteers and everyone else who made it happen.

BalCCon is a very important event for the Serbian (and even wider) Fedora community simply because it is the largest local event that gathers hackers, tinkerers and of course many Linux users.

This year we had a large booth like the years before with swag to give away and some interesting devices running Fedora on them.

I also gave a short talk (maybe a bit too short) about how we use Fedora in Education at my University.

The main thing for us, as always, was to talk to people about Fedora and how it can work for them and introduce them to different projects within Fedora.

All in all, a great event, met many cool people and hopefully we see each other at the next BalCCon. Till then! :)

Another awesome Fedora Release Party in Novi Sad! Thank you all who came to hang out and hear what is new in Fedora 26.

We had several interesting talks about what is new in Fedora 26, how to package RPMs, how to use Fedora Server edition, how to become a Fedora contributor and the ever-so-important talk about privacy, encryption and security in mobile IM applications.

Gallery: https://nmilosev.github.io/f26rpns-gallery/

Slides: https://github.com/nmilosev/f26rpns-gallery/tree/gh-pages/talks

See you in 6 months!

The days of hacking Intel drivers to run X server on Chromebooks are behind us. :)

As of version 50, Chrome OS includes a Wayland server. Even though this is mostly for running Android applications, even my old Toshiba Chromebook which doesn’t have Android support, has Wayland in it. Therefore Crouton Fedora can now fully utilize it and run GUI applications on it, mixed with Chrome OS windows!

https://github.com/nmilosev/crouton-fedora-wayland

There are some problems but nothing major so far. Let me know how it works for you!