Can robots dream? According to Google, they can. Trippy “deep dream” images like this are recently being posted all over the internet.

What is deep dream?

Google’s image recognition ability is very powerful. Google had become very good at identifying images. Given spicture of a dog, cat, or a bird, Google’s image search will be able to identify the animal properly. The deep dream software uses Google’s image recognition system to identify elements it recognizes, and pronounce it. Basically deep dream is the process of taking an image, finding all known elements of images it recognizes (for example it may associate a shape to a dog), makes that area more dog-like, and feed the results back into itself. After many iterations, the software attempts to make a picture more into the elements it recognizes. Different data-sets produce different results because deep dream is a field of machine learning. Machines learn through the data sets it is given, allowing different patterns to emerge depending on the data set the machine uses to recognize images.

My roommate and I were discussing about how we should create a webapp that tells you who is the better boyfriend/girlfriend in a relationship. This reminded me of a reddit post by /u/Prometheus09. Inspired by what he did with his Whatsapp data, I decided to do the same thing using my Skype logs.

My last relationship went from November 2013 to April 2015. Unfortunately my Skype logs start from March 2014, so I’m missing about 4 months worth of data. Still, I had fun doing this and it gave me some insight into our relationship. Here is a relationship in 200,000+ messages over the course of 14 months worth of data.

Agar.io right now is one of the most popular browser games. You start off as a small blob, eating pieces smaller than you to grow, allowing you to eat other players who have a smaller mass than you. My classmates and I have been playing this game from time to time, however it was pretty difficult to play on the same server. Agar.io allows you to connect to a server in the same region, but you cannot specify which server and you’ll get thrown into a random room. This is incredibly frustrating when you’re trying to play with friends and you have to try over and over again to join the same room as your friends.

Good thing we can easily fix this with some jQuery. Notice when opening the console and picking a region, a websocket opens to ws://45.79.193.74:443. This is the IP and port that we want to give our friends.

League of Legends used to be one of my favorite games. One of my practice Rails sites is a LoL stats tracker that lets you look up play stats from RiotGame’s API. Rather than use a gem that does all the work for me, I wrote my own wrapper to practice making my own API calls.

I noticed people sluggishly using the arrow keys to fix a typo in a terminal command, wasting seconds that add up over time. Here are a couple of keyboard shortcuts I use that increased the quality of life when using the terminal, and allows for speedier in-line navigation.

I was around 15 when I started to play around with web and game server hosting. As a result, I became interested in owning my own dedicated server, but my 5mbps down/1mbps up connection did not make me a suitable host. After moving into an apartment where I don’t pay for electricity and has Verizon FIOS, I was able to finally build my own computer and learn how to be a sysadmin.

Hardware

Doubling my main computer as a HTPC and hosting game servers on top of that only led to everyone having an inconsistent experience due to my resources being eaten up whenever I started up a game. Near 100% CPU and RAM utilization isn’t fun for anyone. I decided to build my own (dedicated) server. This was the fun part.

Since I have only built gaming rigs in the past, server grade hardware was unexplored territory. I had to research server grade motherboards, NAS drives, ECC RAM, Intel Xeon processors, etc. This was my final build after a week of research: