After my talk at Microsoft yesterday, I got introduced to Paul Foster who is running a makeshift 'hackspace' for TechDays 2015. He showed me around his collection of Raspbeery Pis, Arduinos, receivers, rockets and more. We talked a bit and as I had two days left at TechDays and not too much to do I asked him if I could join in. He gave me Raspberry Pi and a camera and told me to get it running with Project Oxford's algorithm for face recognition. It took me about 4 hours and here is how you can build it, too.

You need a Raspberry Pi and a camera for example from the Pi Foundation as well as an internet connection. I implemented this project with Python 3, because it was preinstalled on my Pi.

First, connect your camera to the camera-flex-port. Start your Pi, run 'sudo raspi-config' in your shell and enable the camera. Open a Python editor and paste my code. Insert your subscription key into the requests. Now, you can run different calls to the projext oxford site. 

At the bottom of the code you find all the calls you need. You need to create a person group first with 'createPersonGroup'. Then, add a person to that person group with 'addPersonToGroup' which will take three pictures of you. Train the group with 'trainPersonGroup'. After the group has been trained successfuly with the pictures you took, you are ready to call 'identifyFace' and you should be greeted with 'WELCOME Jakob' after some API calls.

Obviously, my code is very static as the person name is fixed to 'Jakob' and the API calls are fixed to the Project Oxford site. Additionaly, it cannot handle multiple faces - but it works. 

I always try to plan ahead. I have a plans of what I want to achieve in three, five and ten years. Today, I want to share with you my plan for what I want to achieve in the next 12 months starting July 2015.

Music
When people ask me what instruments I play, I say all of them. Instruments are to songs like hardware is to software. I enjoy writing software just as much as I enjoy writing songs. I could not bring along my self-built studio abroad, so I need to find new ways to make music. Over the last year I have been so busy with projects that my musical explorations stopped at some point. I want to start again. I am staying in Berlin this summer and I will bring along my Ukulele, try to get hold of a piano and utilise my Logic X again. I will dedicate one morning, afternoon or evening just to do music.

Open source
I have tried to get involved with Open source for about two years now and two trials with Ruby on Rails and the Linux kernel did not go past the stage of issue ticketing. I want to try it again, either with RubyOnRails or with the Play-Framework which I will be using on a daily basis at treev this summer. I do feel confident to write efficient and sustainable software and I want to give back to the community.

Cooking
It was a luxurious experience to have been living in a catered accommodation this year. It is basically like a all-inclusive hotel which just you stay at for a really, really long time. A side effect of this unique life style is that I did not learn how to cook and also did not have much of a choice in terms of food. I have tried vegan food over the last months and as far as I know it is more environment friendly than meat is. I want to try to live of vegan food for the next twelve months. I want it to be healthy and affordable. To achieve this goal I will conceive a food plan and keep track of my grocery shopping with a Excel/Numbers/Google table.

Sports
I started Boxing this year and I love the fitness that comes with it. The punching and fighting does not appeal to much to me even though I have to admit that it is fun — but it hurts a lot and it makes you dumb I worry. I want to go for a run and do exercises at least three times a week. I will conceive a plan for that and my Pebble Time, hopefully, will me guide with that.

Writing
Finally, I want to start writing down my thoughts on a weekly basis. I want to organise and share my thoughts with you. I think it will help to keep track of goals as well of thoughts. Maybe, someone stumbles upon it and its useful to them. I need to find an effective way to brainstorm and conceive useful posts.

Books
I want to read fours books, one every three months. 


Reassessment
I want to reassess this plan every quarter.