I'm a New Convert - Nilamon na ng Apple Ecosystem

I bought a Mac M1 laptop last year because of the great reviews. I got an academic discount (for teachers and students, around 2K discount, not bad), by buying it online at apple store ph. Just the base configuration, 13-inch 8GB RAM, 256 SSD.

And now I'm a convert!

Indeed, the keyboard is pleasant to use,  the integration with my iPhone and iPad is seamless. And the video editing using Da Vinci Resolve is much faster than in my 16GB RAM NVIDIA GTX 1050 gaming laptop. Like, what takes 30 minutes in the Windows laptop takes less than 10 minutes in the Mac. The trackpad can be clicked anywhere. And the battery life is insane! One full charge and I can work from 8 to 5 on battery.

I also know of several colleagues who have had Mac for 5 years and up. Most of my Windows laptops would just be good for 3 years typically. So I'm looking forward to having this laptop for several years.

That being said, there are a few things in Windows that I kind of miss in the Mac. Foremost is moving files and finding where the files are. In Windows it is intuitive how to move files from folder to folder, in Mac, it takes more steps. I only have 2 USB C's and so I bought a hub to allow me to connect to an HDMI monitor and USB harddisk. Pages is amazing because we can use LaTeX for equations but I can not save it in another document format (save for PDF) that can be opened by Word.

Other than that I'm enjoying using it. Still learning and getting pleasantly surprised.

Thank you 2021, Welcome 2022!

And just like that another year has zipped by. We're still in a pandemic and COVID-19 cases are once again rising after a few weeks of promising public health stats across the board.  Still, there's a lot to be grateful for, and I believe its better for one's mental health to have a sense of gratitude always. 

And so, here are the things I am grateful for. 

1. More and more people are getting the vaccine and booster.

2. I've gotten a better understanding of our spiritual life's journey and our purpose in the physical world.

3. I have a steady job which pays well enough that it allows me to support my family.

4. Nobody in my immediate family (close contacts) got seriously sick despite the fact that most of them have co-morbidities.

5. My brother who is working abroad, and his wife who is in Bulacan, survived COVID.

6. Amidst the pandemic, my youngest brother's food business which he runs with his wife is thriving and getting traction.

5. My project team is doing great and we have achieved several milestones.

6. I've managed living with 5 dogs in the house.

7. I've finally been able to go out of town with my family and visit dear friends outside NCR.

8. Some of my friends and colleagues who did get sick with COVID (some severely so) have survived.

9. Eisen, my  Lab, is now 13 years and 7 months - deaf, weak in the hind legs, and with occasional health scares, he still is my most faithful companion.

Elections is coming up in 2022, face to face classes in UP will probably not be happening yet, and we're back in Alert Level 3. I think the antidote to dread and despair in the coming year is to focus on our original mission, which is to love one another, and, instead of criticizing others, look inwardly and strive to be a better person. 

I Got (Business) Schooled!

Last year I and 9 other scientists were awarded a UK Newton Fund-DOST Leaders in Innovation Fellowship. The fellowship gave us and tech transfer officers  crash courses in research commercialization in London, Oxford and at the Asian Institute of Management. We were taught how to make business plans, pitch a product in under 3 minutes, negotiate, estimate market size, and project revenues.

Coming from Science all of the lessons were new to me and I enjoyed every bit of it for the novel and unique insights. I'd like to remember all the lessons I learned so I'm writing them down.

1. From Nieves Confesor of AIM - information is the currency of negotiation. In most cases, the more you openly share information the more you can negotiate better terms for your company.

2. From Richard Cruz of Ideaspace -  Scientists and engineers tend to think that their solution to a problem is the best for the end-user. But does it really address the customer pain? Stripped down to essentials our solution might not be answering their actual pain at all. Gather deep market insights by getting feedback from your end user.

3. From Maoi Arroyo of Hybridigm - the end-user is not necessarily the one who pays. Marketing should be directed at the one who holds the purse strings. Innovation = Invention x Revenues. If it doesn't earn its just an invention.

4. From Ricardo Lim of AIM - the former AIM dean introduced us to Design Thinking. Empathizing is the first step.

This is not the last in the list. I will add as I remember some more, since, hey, its been a year. I'll end with an advice that is somewhat antithetical to how we do science but which makes sense when we are developing solutions for an end user- Fail fast. Fail often. Iterate.

Me and my LIF Cohorts together with Tech Transfer officers holding up our business plans. This was at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London last March 2015.

With THE Nieves Confesor at the Asian Institute of Management. Photo by KM Magtubo.

Putting subtitles in video

Recently, our new VIP graduate student member Henry Lee, Jr. started a machine learning course in our lab. Some of our alumni like Francis and BA expressed interest in attending but couldn't come. So upon Francis' suggestion we took a video of Henry's lecture.

Pizza to go with the lectures. Photo by Elexis Mae Torres.

The video turned out great but the audio was terrible. I'm sure going to buy a directional microphone for the succeeding lectures but for the meantime I thought of annotating his talk by putting subtitles to the video. So onto Google to search for a subtitle editor.

Surprisingly, every forum I read recommended Subtitle Edit, a free, open source software to do just that.  So I tried it.

First, our movie was captured by an HD Panasonic video camera and the file format is .MTS. The lecture ran a little over an hour so the video file came out in two files, the first set was 4GB the second 1.4GB. I converted the MTS file into MP4 using Avidemux (oh, that's another topic. The proper setting can be found here.).

At first the file won't open in SE, its error message says the video codecs are not around. It suggested a link for downloading codecs. I just clicked and installed away and Voila! MP4's now open.

The SE interface is very easy to use. Five stars. And I've started adding subtitles.

Le Subtitle Edit interface.

But into the 50th second of the video I got lazy, so the complete annotations will have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, we will just have to wear earphones when we watch the video.

How to Install Image Processing Design Toolbox in Scilab without using Atoms

Besides SIVP - or Scilab Image and Video Processing Toolbox, I'm a great fan of Harald Galda's Image Processing Design. It has morphological operations and blob analysis functions not found in SIVP. These functions are great for automating analysis of several regions of interest in a scene at once.

However, as of posting, IPD does not show up in Scilab's ATOMS Module Manager. So I looked for ways to install IPD bypassing ATOMS. Anyone who has done this in Linux or MacOS let me know. Here's what works for Windows:

1. Download IPD.
2. Open Scilab and type SCIHOME. SCIHOME gives the path where the modules are stored.
3. In Windows Explorer copy paste the SCIHOME path to open the folder. You should see a folder named 'atom'.
4. Unzip the IPD module in the 'atom' folder. The unzipped folder should have the name IPD and not the zip filename.
5. Search for 'loader.sce' in the IPD folder, open and execute in Scilab.
6. Check your Scilab console it should show something like:

Start IPD - Image Processing Design
Load macros
Load dependencies
Load gateways
Load help
Load demos

And that's how you know you've succesfully loaded IPD toolbox in your Scilab.

Movie poster fun

One time our lab had a Christmas Party with Epic Movies as the theme. So each subgroup had to come dressed as characters from that movie. My group had the great fortune of being "cast" in The Lord of the Rings. I decided me and my students will go all out. So besides making props like swords and axes and beard, we even made... Tadah!.. a theatrical teaser poster with our faces superimposed on the characters.

We took pictures of our faces posed in the same way as the characters. Then with the help of GIMP and the use of ratio and proportion to get the scale of the faces right, we made this:

and this:

Making it was so much fun, my students were all game.

Then I thought, what if I share the fun with my  AP 186 class (Image Processing), besides there's a nice image scaling lesson there. And so for three years running, the first activity of my students in AP 186 is to recreate a movie poster with their faces in place of the actors'.

And so this year, I present to you the promotional posters of AP 186 2016!!!

The steps in making your own poster are:

1. Take a picture of yourself posed in the same way as the character. Be sure to get the lighting right too.

2. Crop your face using GIMP or any image processing software of your choice.

3. In the poster and and in your cropped image, measure the pixel distance between two fiducial points, e.g. distance between the eyes, distance from ear to ear, or forehead to jaw. 

4. Take the ratio between  the fiducial distance of the poster  and your image. Use this ratio as the scale factor to reduce or enlarge the size of your face image to fit exactly in the poster face.

5. You can also use the ratios of your skin color and the poster skin color to make the skin tone of your face match that of the poster.

6. You can then feather or smoothen the edges so that your cut out face blends with the rest of the poster image.

Practice makes perfect, soon you'll be posting memes in 9gag! Which poster got your thumbs up?

Freeware I Like

My students know that I never use pirated software and I encourage them to do the same. If i do not respect intellectual property how do I expect other people to respect mine especially with my line of work. UP is big on IP nowadays but how can we prosper if our young students are not even aware that they are committing plagiarism when they cut and paste and not even cite their source? I keep reminding my students to acknowledge their sources of info or assistance in their reports in the hope that it becomes a habit with them. (Incidentally, my dear AP 186 students, you have been copying my figures in your blog reports and you didn't even cite me as the source! See Checklist No. 3.)

Since 2000 I've been looking for free educational software which I can let my students install. I learned about freeware back in 1999 when I acquired a new laptop which came with a StarOffice installer (I still have the CD with me!). This was the precursor of OpenOffice which lately is now LibreOffice.

OpenOffice was ahead of Microsoft when it came to creating pdfs of documents. By searching the net I learned how to write a book using OpenOffice.  I like its equation editor most of all. One can also perform simple calculations in tables inserted in the document.

Next I was fortunate to find Scilab, a Matlab-lookalike. It is quite suited for teaching image processing and if you have been following my blog you'll get a lot of image processing tips from me my students.

Before Adobe Photoshop CS2 became free I was already using GIMP for image processing. For video parsing I swear by Avidemux (stick to version 2.5 if you want to parse videos into image frames). For audio analysis Audacity has several processing tools.

Sketchup and Google Earth always get installed in all my laptops.

For compression, I use 7zip for those files which Windows cannot uncompress. For virtual checking of the innards of my computer I use SIW.

I'll probably add to the list (and links!) as I go along.