Original post author: Ryan
I haven't posted much lately. That's partially because I've been quite busy at work. The little time I've had over the past two weeks for extra-curricular activities has lead to a string of failures. I will now blog these failures to officially put them behind me...
Machine Learning
I've been experimenting with a machine learning package named "Yolo" (which, in this case, stands for "You Only Look Once"). This is supposed to be a very fast object detection framework. I thought it would be good to implement this for my machine learning project. It has been fairly difficult to get it running, mainly because it was written in the programming language "C", and I am trying to run it through a modified "python" wrapper so it can play nicely with other things I've programmed so far in this project.
After a lot of effort, I was able to get it running. I trained the "Yolo" model on my car image dataset. But, the final results weren't so great. I need to tinker with it some more. There really isn't any fun output that I can share on this yet.
Raspberry Pi
After failing fairly hard with the "Yolo" stuff, I went back to tinkering with the Raspberry Pi a little bit. Except, for seemingly no reason, the camera stopped working. I checked the connections, reinstalled some of the firmware, searched online a bunch, but found no solutions. Then, after about an hour of troubleshooting, I noticed that there is a little orange-colored plug above the camera lens that wasn't perfectly seated into its connection. I fixed that, and it started working again. Nice.
Cryptocurrency
I've been trying fairly hard to buy some cryptocurrency. So far I've mined a grand total of $25 in Ethereum (over the past 16 days). That's not bad - but I've noticed a few "up and coming" cryptocurrencies that I'd like to make an investment into.
The problem is, TD Bank is being a major pain in the butt. They keep blocking any crypto-related transactions. At first, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Buying cryptocurrency looks shady, and it would likely be a good way for a scammer to steal cash. But, I've been on the phone with them a few times and they continue to block my transactions. I havent been able to buy anything, and I've been trying for 2 weeks now. I'm convinced that TD Bank must have an anti-cryptocurrency stance, and they block these transactions for strategic reasons (i.e., they feel that cryptocurrency might someday challenge our banking systems, so banks want to make using crypto as inconvenient as possible). That's a little bit of a conspiracy theory.
The major cryptocurrency exchanges (which you use to buy these coins) now have my account blocked because they think I'm a scammer. I guess sending through a few transactions that get blocked by the bank doesn't look so good to them. I don't blame them, but it's got me very stuck.
Also, while making this post my hard drive filled up. Geeeez.
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