Famous author and artist Eric Carle turns 91 today. I remember loving his books when I was a kid, especially The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?. Each book features his distinctive art style. The images are collages composed of tissue paper and acrylic paint, producing vivid depictions of animals and nature.
THE PROBLEM
Carle’s work is as complex as it is beautiful. How can we make it easier for children to produce their own homages to his creations?
THE SOLUTION
Neural style transfer is a technique that allows you to compose images in another’s style using deep learning. That is, you teach a computer to identify key elements of an image’s style and redraw that image in that style it has just learned.
Taking the code from the tutorial I built a website that lets you upload images, have the style of Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar transferred to it, and display it for the world to see and for you to download! At any given time the latest 10 images will be displayed for any visitors to see. The website is built in one of my favorite frameworks, Flask.
You can access the website at ericcarletransfer.ml. Be warned, the transfer time can be in excess of 10 minutes- it is very computationally intensive.
The results have been encouraging though! Take a look:
The neural network is picking up on the look of the tissue paper and paint. In the future I want to work on reducing the amount of noise seen in the backgrounds.
Word searches can be a great way to build a summary activity for reading a story, article, or book. However, they are time consuming and difficult to make.
THE SOLUTION
text2wordsearch uses the Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm to automatically extract the top key words from a blob of text! Simply copy the text from the article or story and choose how many words you want in your word search. Then copy the word search into your favorite word processor (be sure to use a monospace font!). The keywords selected are found in the bottom box.
The technical details are that this uses an AWS Lambda function to run the RAKE algorithm and generate the word search, ingesting the text from the web interface above which is deployed on AWS API Gateway. The Lambda function is written in Python and leverages two excellent packages: python-rake and word-search-puzzle. Because it is a Lambda function they had to be installed to a directory and uploaded as part of a zip bundle along with my function code. This zip is included in the repo linked below for you to deploy and play with yourselves!
Zoom Bombing is exposing children learning remotely to inappropriate content and disrupting meetings so a few pranksters can have a laugh. The biggest unsolved issue with Zoom Bombing is that people are sharing links and passwords on social media in order to egg trolls and classmates on to bomb these classes and meetings. How can we share a meeting without disclosing the meeting ID and password?
THE SOLUTION
BombSquad is a solution I built on Amazon Web Services to help mitigate the worst of Zoom Bombing. Here’s how it works:
Select your meeting options- you can permanently turn off the participant microphone and camera so that nobody can reenable it by clicking the checkboxes.
Paste your invitation link
Get a sharable cloaked URL that goes right to your meeting!
Continue orchestrating your meeting from the Zoom client like normal.
The technical details are as follows: BombSquad takes your URL, transforms it to force the user to use the Zoom web client, stores the original URL securely, and only redirects the browser to the real meeting URL if the user clicks through the sharable link you receive. The invitation link inside the window is disabled. Thus, all a user can see are BombSquad URLs! This is performed using a combination of AWS S3 and Lambda instances as shown above, making this a neat example of a serverless application– the first I am distributing publicly!
COVID-19 is taxing our internet infrastructure, and many stuck at home are struggling with tasks where it would be useful to share one’s screen with others, such as teaching from home, sharing content with someone without handing them your device and getting it contaminated, or monitoring what is happening on a home computer in real time.
FreeDisplay is a free open-source program written in Python that allows you to share your screen with anyone on your local network, such as your home Wi-Fi network. It creates a QR code other can scan for easy sharing and serves a simple webpage with a mirror of your screen so that any device with a web browser can easily view your screen! Use it for home teaching, sharing content without handing someone your device, presentations, monitoring activity on your home computer and more. Download for free here: https://kevinl95.github.io/freedisplay/
This is an exciting new project I’ve been working on to use off-the-shelf smart lightbulbs to make an inexpensive and automatic classroom management gadget. Using a bit of Node I was able to get the noise level of a classroom and translate it into a color for a connected smart lightbulb, from green to red as the classroom gets louder! Inspired by the ‘traffic light’ noise warning gadgets I see in classrooms, this one is fully automatic. There are no switches to throw- just set the maximum volume in the free software and the lightbulb will change color on its own!
Screenshot of the GUI. The program is an Electron application, and I have applied a material design stylesheet.
Have you ever wanted to download a YouTube video to share elsewhere but found that every ‘YouTube Downloader’ on the internet is an adware-filled, slow-to-load piece of junk? This is especially problematic when you are trying to get video content to your students- most of the time you cannot directly link to YouTube on a school network connection as it will be blocked, leaving your only option to download the video and re-share it on a platform like Seesaw, a popular platform for student engagement. So how can you get the raw video file to share without getting your computer infected? I have designed a simple desktop application that downloads YouTube videos and I am offering it for free to download! It is available for MacOS and Windows. Best of all it’s a portable app- meaning no installer and therefore no need for an administrator password to use on your school computer!
If you are interested in how I developed this program, read on.
THE PROBLEM
YouTube download websites are filled with adware, malware, deceiving links, and often inappropriate ads. Educators need to be able to download YouTube videos to get around school content filters. They need to be able to use a program that can also evade roadblocks like not being able to install software on a school-issued computer.
THE SOLUTION
The Windows version of the application
The solution was to develop a desktop application (ensuring the longevity of the project as there would be no need to pay for hosting a website or risking my web application getting blocked by a content filter). I also wanted to write this application once and deploy to my two target platforms – Mac and Windows. There are various libraries for downloading YouTube videos simply – I figure a lot of the scammy websites are making use of the open-source ytdl-core or similar JavaScript libraries to download their videos and quickly deploy new websites. I wanted to use something similar as these libraries are easy to use, well-supported, and cross-platform. The solution for all of my problems was to build my app using Electron, which lets you build cross-platform apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I could build a website using ytdl-core to download videos using the same technology as the sites people are being driven to by Google and then make it a desktop application. Then, using the exact same code for both platforms, I could then deploy to Windows and Mac! And that’s exactly what I did- what you see above in these screenshots is literally a simple website using jQuery,Bootstrap, and ytdl-core that takes in the YouTube link the user pastes in the box, uses regex to check that the link is a properly formatted YouTube link, and then opens a save prompt to save the video to the user’s computer! The save prompt is one of the neat elements of the Electron API that you can just use and have it work one each platform, pulling up a native save dialog and letting me configure it to ensure the user can only save MP4 files, for example, as that is the file format Seesaw accepts. The open-source Electron Packager then lets me bundle all of my dependencies together and create a Windows and Mac application bundle. These bundles include everything needed to run the application in exactly the spot the application needs it, meaning there is no installer to run and therefore it can run without administrator access on your computer! The whole ecosystem let me hack this together very quickly with almost no friction between any of the tools.
ytdl-core lets me ensure that we automatically grab the highest-quality version of the video and download it in MP4 format, making sure everything is as simple as possible to go from video to Seesaw fast, saving teachers time. This all happens in the background – the goal was to make a tool that takes minimal thought to use. Just grab the video your students need, and paste the link!
SHARING THE SOLUTION
This application is completely open-source. You can view it on GitHub here! This also serves a project homepage you can share with your friends and colleagues as it features download buttons for both Mac and Windows. It is also where you should go to get the most up-to-date versions of the software- as I improve it and make bug fixes the links below will not be updated, but they will always get you the first release.
Adventures in Problemism 