coding totoro

Mini guide for Voice Control automation with Tasker

Choose Plugin > AutoVoice Recognize as shown:

Click Edit, then just go back out. If you wish to speak to it via a Bluetooth, select the appropriate option. For us, we leave it like it is.

You can now speak to AutoVoice, and it will transcribes what you say into text. But you’re not doing anything with that text yet, so let’s set up a Tasker profile to… I don’t know, put your phone into silent mode.

This profile will have a State > Plugin > AutoVoice Recognized context. As shown in three humongous screenshots:

Click EDIT. The next screen has three important options:

1. Event Behavior: Basically, your whole voice command will be treated as an event (like plugging in or out a 3.5mm headphone jack). This means that the effect will last a total of 2 seconds at best. I’ll show you later how to get around this.
2. Command Filter: write in here the words that will trigger this profile. I put in “be quiet for a moment”, which is what I’d want to say. You can put in “shut up” or whatever, even “correct horse battery staples”, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can say it accurately enough frequently. Do beware that whatever you say has to contain the exact phrase. If you tick “Exact Command”, you have to be even more precise and say ONLY the Command Filter phrase.
3. Command ID and Last Command ID: I’ll cover this in the next blog post.

Once done, click the tick mark. You will be prompted to pair a Task to this profile (what you want it to do). Since we’re trying to make a Silent Mode profile, a Sound Off Task will be appropriate. I already have one made, you can make one yourself. Name it anything you like and have the action: Audio > Silent Mode > On.

Once done, your profile will look like this:

Now, activate it.

Go to your homescreen and make a Tasker Task Shortcut:

Choose the Voice Query ACTION/TASK.

The only thing I hate about Task shortcuts is that you need an icon for each of them. I just chose a panda for mine.

Click the panda, speak your Command Filter phrase, and your profile gets run.

There is one small problem, however. Like I mentioned earlier, your voice command is treated as a short-lived event, so as soon as it’s over (roughly 2 seconds after you finish speaking), the effect wears off. The hack around this is to set your Task (Sound Off in our example) not as the entrance Task (the one with the green arrow), but as an EXIT Task (red arrow). This means that long after the profile is done, the effect will still be applied. Like so:

Message me on Google+ if you have questions. A video should probably be easier to follow. Note that there are MANY MANY ways you can activate the Voice Query Task, not just through the panda shortcut. Swiping an icon with Nova Launcher is one good way. Custom ROMs like AOKP or RootBox, Carbon, ParanoidAndroid, etc. allows you to set up custom “Navigation Ring” targets in addition to swiping up for Google Now. It is by far my favorite method. As seen here in this awesome implementation. You choose your most familiar method. Ask if you need more.

Getting my shit together

Belated new year resolution:

- Do Machine Learning and Algorithms right
- Get competent at OOP (Java, Python) and web stuff (CSS/HTML, Javascript, MySQL, general Database concepts)
- At least try to make some Android app
- Get an ML internship somewhere. Or make $7k by the end of the year (20 hrs/week @ $9/hr).

It gets less and less likely down the list, so why not throw in losing 50 lbs and getting at least 2 people into a regular conversation basis.

Oh, and do 23andme.

Calc 3 take-home help

So that’s what you have correct. The next integration step:

is wrong because the derivative of the right-hand side is not the same as the left hand side:

Usually, you would have to do a u-substitution to get something like u^(1/2) du before you can do that integration.

Here’s a hint: Let theta = 2x, so that you can use the double angle formula

Yet (1-cos2x)/2 is sin^2(x), so:

Now, substitute x = theta/2 and you have sqrt(2) * sin(theta/2). Ultimately:

Remember to do u-substitution: u = theta/2, du = 1/2, and you’re good to go.

Challenging conceptual myths - entry 1

I decided to do something productive with my life for once, so yeah. To kick things off, let’s talk about something widely accessible, say, cultural relativism. Cultural relativism, as are other forms of relativism, is a contradiction to what it claims to be. However, I will not delve into that rabbit hole, but instead just examine some problems found on an intuitive, digestible level.

Nowadays, we feel a certain high level of comfort in not arousing disagreement and offense. We talk ourselves into believing that each of us is “uniquely similar”, or “similarly unique”, or something along those lines, and feel content with not having given rise to any conflicts.

Cultural relativism is one such attitude. But even more than that, it is a moral theory, a hypothesis for how we conceive the morality of the world as well as how we should live our lives. That’s big stuff.
Like all other self-respecting debaters, I’ll include a definition of the thing I’m talking about just so that we can be on the same page:

Cultural relativism: “…civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”

Translation: What values you find as morally good and bad are relative to the culture you live in.

Unimportant: It is the middle ground between extreme relativism (morality is relative to each individual) and objectivism (morality is objective and applies to everyone equally).

A few problems with this (by problems, I mean an intuitive judgement of a theory, not a formal one):

1. We can’t say Hitler was immoral. Certainly we can condemn murderers and rapists and their actions as immoral, since they live inside our society and are subjected to our moral values; we dictate what is acceptable and not for them. Yet we cannot condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc., for having killed/massacred all those people for no good reason whatsoever. So long as their society acted consistently and deemed such behaviors as morally permissible, they did nothing wrong. They make their own rights and wrongs.

2. If we want Hitler to be subject to OUR rules, where do we draw the line? Can a neighborhood be considered a “culture” with its own moral picture? How about a county? A state? A country? A continent? Maybe earth has its own moral values, distinct from Klingon’s. There is no clear line to draw. Although we tend to go with the judicial system and consider an independent country a “culture”, this is just as arbitrary as me considering my own family as a “culture”.

3. If we make our own rights and wrongs, what do you suspect people would make? What else other than what they feel comfortable obeying? But people tend to disagree, even over the most trivial of matters. What then? Oh sweet democracy, we vote. This turns a matter about moral conduct into an opinion poll. How I should act is now how the most people feel I should act.

4. On the flipside of the Hitler’s problem, we ourselves are always right. We make our own values by the majority rule. Thus, at all times, we are always right. Even when we each owned a few slaves around the house for menial chores. There is no room or aspiration for improvement. We simply change accordingly with how the public opinion changes.

5. The majority rules. The minority is now not only repressed; they are immoral, condemnable, abominable. There are no just revolutions, going against the status quo is morally impermissible.

Welp.

Oh, and, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with someone. Not everyone likes Baskin Robin’s coconut flavor. If you don’t want to get dragged into a discussion at all, I suppose it’s fine; otherwise, don’t be afraid of a debate, so long as you say “I think X BECAUSE Y” instead of just “I think X and that’s that.”