We added to coronamap the capability of loading custom analysis coded by users in JS.
A list of the analyses can be found here.
Analysis are sorted by points, which you can give by liking them when opened. You can also fork any analysis and modify it as you wish. Everything is in beta, we’re still working on improving the system.
The creation of new analyses can be made from the Coronamap Analysis Editor.
A very very simple JS API to process an audio file trying to make it sound like the sound source is moving in space. Work in progress, likely never to be finished.
Link here
Instructions:
0) put on some headphones
1) press play button
2) you can try and equalize manually if you want
3) move the position of the source hovering the box with the mouse
4) press Circle to make the source circle automatically
5) refresh the page to test again
The underlying API is very simple, it accepts a simple setXY(x,y) which expects two relative coordinates ranging [-1,1]
My colleague Marco Dalle Feste and I are still quite shocked by how the Coronavirus situation has developed in Italy in the last weeks. Everything was shut down, and our families and friends were suddenly projected in this new and surreal situation of isolation. In a situation like this, where everyone feels powerless, we decided to do something, a small gesture, at least to try to give some contribution to the world in this difficult times.
We created Coronamap, a simple webapp to show data of the spreading of the COVID-19 contagion. The app is fairly simple, as it gets some data and displays it in an interactive map providing cases information, with various levels of precision: as you might expect, the italian situation is quite accurate, showing daily updated data from our Ministry of Health, discerned to the province (county) level. For the rest of the world, we stand upon giant’s shoulders: we are relying on data from the Johns Hopkins University, and we plan to increase the level of granularity of the data soon by implementing other sources for the worst impacted zones.
By a technical point of view, our approach wants to be innovative in a sense that it wants to be ready to embed various sources, and thus crawlers, of data from a growing number of reliable national authorities. We are trying to create a centralized database of the contagion information which could concentrate a decent amount of high-accuracy uniform information.
As a last note, I want to say that we are very concerned about the situation, and personally I’d like to point out that I feel that other nations are seemingly underestimating the impact that this thing will have in every part of the world. Yes, Italy was first hit and we may have responded with some delay, but the situation was like no precedent, while information from China was scarce. Now other nations in Europe are living what we experienced some days ago and they have no excuse to wait to deploy and enforce strong measures because Italy’s situation was publicly shared without censorship of any kind, the data is there to be looked at.
For now that’s all, here you can see the webapp which is updated daily in the information and functionalities. Our company website: DMNK Engineering
Since I’ve been really astonished from the difficulties I’ve had searching for this on the web lately, I’m writing this (really short) blog post hoping to save other people’s time.
If you want to change the DNS server of the default Raspbian installation on a raspberry PI – this probably goes for most of the recent linux distributions too – you just have to edit your /etc/network/interfaces file specifying, under the desired interface, this code:
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8
Of course replace 8.8.8.8 with your desired DNS server’s IP address.
That’s all.
See you in the next very exciting post!
Hello everyone!
Ok, lately I’ve been approaching the fine art of chess, mostly by watching youtube videos on the matter, and with some playing on lichess.org too. So I couldn’t avoid watching tons of video of the croatian youtuber Agadmator, which is really putting a lot of effort in getting people closer to chess, by publishing one or more videos every day.
So if you’ve been watching some of his videos, you might have noticed that aside the obvious personal contribute he puts in analyzing the games, the rest of the videos is generally just showing the moves and maybe adding some kind-of-predictable comments on them. When the idea came to my mind, I couldn’t help it. I *had to* do algorithmize agadmator.
Long story short, I spent three nights developing a web app which receives a PGN game in input and then generates an (fake) agadmator video for it.
I think it’s quite funny, I’ve really been enjoying the making of it and the end result, however it’s obviously improvable.
The link (for chrome or firefox only, desktop only – sorry for that, didn’t have time to optimize it) is here: Agadmatorizer
Of course I don’t think anyone will really read this, but if someone does, and if agadmator does, I hope you enjoyed this webapp, thank you for reading this post and I’ll see you soon.
Recently I’ve been following the crypto market, which is very fascinating to me. I’ve subscribed to kraken, a popular exchange and put some money in it. After a service outage in the middle of january, kraken’s team decided to cut the transactions fees for a while, thus I took the opportunity to code and test a from-scratch crypto-trader bot.
I have no time to get into details, also because they are not so much interesting or particularly complex, but I’ll say that it uses a combination of some simple and common algorithms widely used in the study of the financial market. The bot actually works, in the sense that it makes trades on some deterministic rules, but unfortunately it is not clever enough to make profit (even without the fees) and barely breaks even.
Anyway, as always, it’s been very fun and instructive to code, as I had to study and learn how the market behaves, how to handle the market data and how to try to predict trends and accordingly set sell/buy points.
Since I’m not posting the code (yet), here’s its debug window:
I recently bought an alto saxophone. It was quite a while I haven’t seriously been playing an instrument, so I came across a little challenge when it was time to read a music sheet. You know, that thing with a pentagram and some notes of various shapes drawn over it.
Since playing a note on the saxophone is not straightforward as it would be on a piano, I actually had two separate challenges: the first was to recognize a note on the pentagram, the second was to play it well (it means play the correct note steadly for some seconds – and in tune).
So I decided to code a little app to aid me doing so. The app is pretty simple: it shows a (random) note on the pentagram, and then listens to the microphone waiting for a note, identifying the pitch and, after some seconds of playing, says if the played note was correct or not. This app has proven quite useful in the process of improving my reading accuracy and speed, and I guess it might be useful to someone else too.
It’s published here: https://dmnk.cloud/noteslearn.
On the technical side, it is entirely coded using Javascript, and has been a cool challenge to code since it was the first time for me interacting with the microphone data on a web app. It uses some advanced Audio features of HTML5, based on the AudioContext component. Recognizing the pitch was a minor issue, obtained by playing a bit with the FFT of the signal, some other challenges included volume thresholding and octave recognition (less trivial).
In the end, the result is pretty usable for my alto sax, even though it may be less accurate if used with other instruments I didn’t test. The piano version is not perfect, for some notes it needs to repeatedly play the key to make the app recognize it. I guess it should work best with constant-volume-notes kind of instruments, like violin or flute, but as I said it was only fully tested with my alto sax.
Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I last wrote a piece on this blog, since that a lot of things changed, but I still want to share some of my experiences with the world.
I’ll be making some brief posts to track some projects I’ve been working to in these almost 2 years of absence.
This post is about KangaMex, a messaging platform which idea is really simple, yet I didn’t find something like it when I needed it. The app is a delayed messaging service, or a service to send messages which will be delivered only at a specified date and time in the future. You write your message, set the unlock date and time, the recipient’s username, and send it. The recipient will be notified that he/she has an upcoming message, but will not be able to see it until the unlock time has come. Very simple, nice way to send delayed messages.
The app is at mex.kanga.life.
I use Telegram. Many use Whatsapp. Others may use other messaging apps.
I’ve heard of debate about whether the security of telegram was really superior to whatsapp and similar arguments for a long time, but recently, a comment about “metadata” got my interest in one of these discussions. The comment pointed out that telegram, which claims to provide a very good security to its users, was leaking a certain amount of metadata.
Metadata is data that describes other data. Meta is a prefix that in most information technology usages means “an underlying definition or description.” Metadata summarizes basic information about data, which can make finding and working with particular instances of data easier.
Actually, the same arguments stands for whatsapp, but this got my attention and I wanted to actually search for some interesting implications. Since telegram is mainly open source and pretty open, we got a number of implementations, and often we have their source code to examine and play with.
Checking out this telegram command line client, it was immediately clear to me that one important piece of metadata which is actually broadcast to all users is the user status.
If you are a telegram (or whatsapp) user, whenever you switch to the app, your user status changes to ‘online’. This information is broadcast to all the users which have your number in their contact list, if you didn’t change the related setting in the preferences of the app. The same happens when you close or background the app, changing your user status to ‘offline’.
Even if the official apps doesn’t let you do that, one of your contacts could certainly write the code to monitor the status of every user regularly, thus building an history of the statuses you’ve been through during the day, collecting a worrying amount of information about you and your habits. Given the amount of messages we’re flooded with in these apps (think about group chats), if you collect this kind of data about someone on his/her primary app of messaging, it’s pretty trivial to derive some sensitive information like sleeping cycles or working hours (not for everyone, but still).
Even worse if you think that when two people are texting, having both contacts on your list means you could probably exploit the data to actually match who is texting to who. This is a bit more trickier to automate, but a finely tuned machine learning algorithm should do it (of course there may be problems with simultaneous conversations and group chats, but it would definitely work at least in some cases).
This isn’t the end of the world, but it is a good insight about a really common security problem of which people using these apps daily are probably completely unaware.
PS. I have of course modified the telegram web app to do this, and even if I’ve spent very little time on this, it actually works. Here’s a screen.
Code is on github.
You probably know the tv show “Who wants to be a millionaire”. Lately I’ve been invited at the graduation party of a friend, and thought about creating a game for it.
So I decided to create a HTML5 simulation of WWTBAB, complete with webcam support, sounds and introduction video. It has been quite fun, and I’ve been releasing the code on github.
Questions are hardcoded in the index.html file, but it’s trivial to modify them. Recently I’ve added support for images in questions.
I really don’t know if someone can actually make use of it, but who knows?
Just a quick overview about the keys used to control the simulation: