GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

I'm happy to have some ideas worth blogging about at last!  Here's a really big one I stumbled across if you're in an organization that wants to keep permissions relatively locked down on AWS (in terms of performing actions on resources), but still wants to enable individual users the ability to interact with their own stacks as needed without waiting on admins. The TL/DR Of It Using AWS CloudFormation, you can deploy a stack consisting of a single resource.  This resource is of type AWS::IAM::ManagedPolicy .  Attach all the policy statements you want, then add Users consisting of any IAM users on the AWS account.  Voila, instant permissions to do whatever. More About the Process Let's say you need to tweak various aspects of your AWS setup.  Maybe you have a DynamoDB entry that needs to be manually tweaked, a Lambda function where the concurrency needs to be adjusted, an SQS queue where the maximum age of a message needs to be adjusted, or files sitting around...

How does one go about deploying a model on Amazon SageMaker from Keras, TensorFlow, or TensorFlow Hub without first doing training? There are countless articles and blog posts discussing how to train a machine learning model using TensorFlow or Keras, and then deploy that model right away to Amazon SageMaker.  But what if you're already starting from a SavedModel, or just want to serve up a model trained on plain vanilla ImageNet from within your own AWS account?  You might end up wading through tons of confusing, outdated information that will misguide you, causing you to go down rabbit holes that will make things seem unnecessarily complex.  For instance, you might be inclined to use compatibility libraries to find low-level attributes of modern classes to leverage older deprecated function calls, or to build totally unnecessary infrastructure along the side that makes a Docker container for your model, which will be inevitably broken because you don't know how to invok...

I'll explain this down below. Spotify facilitates very convenient access to lots of great music on many different types of devices.  However, being a standalone application that manages its own music in its own way means you can't interact with the songs as you could when they were in MP3 format or on vinyl.  For developers, the Spotify APIs can change the game. A Brief History of My Music Listening I'm a bit of an odd bird in my musical tastes, which were influenced by my mom as we listened to a lot of oldies stations driving around to various events and activities.  Where most oldies stations typically play music that is 30-40 years old, one station in Dallas (KAAM 770) plays music that is around 50 years old.  Thus, back in the 1990s, they were playing lots of big band and swing standards.  (Now they have caught up to where traditional oldies stations were back then, but playing music more along the lines of The Carpenters rather than classic rock....

From walking the show floor at Texas Pinball Fest 2016, I couldn't help but get the vibe that something novel and big would be in store for TPF 2017 -- something beyond the big but also typical/expected releases of commercial games such as The Big Lebowski and Ghostbusters  (more on those later), but in fact the ushering in of a new era: totally home-brew and open-source pinball.  As the re-themed games became more impressive from 2015 to 2016, and with easy access to leaning about hardware, fabrication techniques to develop new things and restore/renew/improve on old things, and a rejuvenated fascination with pinball in general, it was not surprising to me in the least that we would see someone totally knock it out of the park like Scott Danesi did at TPF 2017 with Total Nuclear Annihilation . However, just in case Scott wasn't there with his amazing game (for which I placed one of the pre-orders slated to ship sometime in 2018), I wanted to produce some work as well in or...

Since last time I wrote in, I have been extremely busy preparing for Texas Pinball Fest 2016 -- tried to get four machines ready, then three, and then... oh well... only the two I had working to begin with were actually working by showtime.  Meanwhile, I had started to investigate a couple other projects, but never got something going nice enough to warrant writing a blog post on. Now that Texas Pinball Fest is over, and I swear my games are acting like rabbits (if you know what I mean ;), I'm trying to step back and work on some of the projects I had going before this massive push to restore a bunch of pinball machines happened.  However, I have another great big push for this weekend to get prepared for the North Dallas Area Retrocomputing meetup.  I've had vintage computers hanging around me since they were new, but have acquired some "new" stuff since around Thanksgiving (especially from Fred's "Warehouse of Wonder"), and need to get all the new ac...