These are two closely related shaders that go well with each other. Lets start with the emission. It makes an object glow with a particular colour. This is useful when the lighting used in a scene is shaped a particular way(like those halo lights streamers use). This gives the scene the specific look imagined.

If you’ve seen a rendered image and something made it look ethereal or punchy, its probably the emission shader.

The way this works with volume shaders is crazy. Volume shaders differ from normal shaders. Normal surface shaders give a look only to the surface of the object. It does not affect the size or the density of the object. Here’s where volumes come in. Volume shaders give the entire volume a particular look. It can be used to determine how much light enters the object(imagine light shone on ice).

When the density of the volune is given a small number like 0.05 to .5, this gives the entire object a slight foggy look. The anisotropy value is set to about 0.3. Anisotropy is basically getting a different look from different angles(this is such a deep topic that deserves its own post).

When another object with emission shader is placed inside the volume object, voila you get cool rays from the emission object that give the scene depth instead of just being normal lighting. This is called volumetrics where you can actually view the light direction. There is a world volume shader which shades the entire world with the particular volume.

So, it’s no surprise that most of my renders have crazy colored emissions and volumetrics.

Let’s talk about the wireframe modifier. Looks like just another boring modifier but honestly one of the more powerful modifiers available.

It takes a solid object and converts it into another solid mesh with the original object’s edges. The more you difficult the merrier.

The offset value determines if the mesh appears inside or outside the original object, essentially allowing you to create cool effects with a duplicated object along with the original. More cool effects if used with the boolean modifier

The vertex group provides an area in which the modifier is to be applied

Thickness factor determines the sharp or round edges for the new mesh work that is created.

Replace original replaces the original mesh with the created mesh essentially creating a new object.

That’s all there is to know about this particular modifier but not all of it’s applications. One crazy use i found was creatting veins in a leaf. The top modifier on my favourites list only after the wave modifier.

Surfing through some hackerrank profiles, I found a guy, who made an AI chess addon that can view any chess board in a browsre page and provide a continuation for it. Which got me really interested in AI and spending money on udemy.

The concept that was the base of all the AI magic was the bellman’s equation.

It describes that the value of any state of an environment as the maximum sum of reward for performing an action and the value of the next state.

The bellman’s equation goes like so

V(s) = max(R(s,a) + ∆V(s’))

But this equation is for static environments with no probability.

For environments with a probability factor, markov equation gives an equation with consideration of randomness

V(s) = max(R(s,a) + ∆*sum(p(s,a,s’)V(s’)))

But even better is the concept of q learning. The base concept of q learning is that, instead of giving values to a state and action, we definitely the quality of an action. This has the effect of separating each state based on the actions it can take and prescribing the best action to take also considering random probability.

Q(s,a) = R(s.a) + ∆*sum (p(s,a,s’)*max (Q(s’,a’)))

This recursively gives the action based on previous action quality, thereby providing more accurate Intel and paths to traverse the environment.

The temporal difference is yhe difference between previous q value and newly calculated q value based on new information. This temporal difference is dynamic and chooses best action based on previous and current data

TD(a,s) = R(s, a) + ∆max (Q(s’, a’) – Qt-1(s, a))

And

Qt(s,a) = Qt-1(s,a) + ∆TDt(a,s)

=> Qt(s,a) = Qt-1(s,a) + @(R(s, a) + ∆max (Q(s’, a’) – Qt-1(s, a)))

Which may look complicated but simple enough and means that current Q value depends on previous Q values and the current reward thereby changing any value dynamically based on rewards acquired. If the new value is low the old value is kept as such. Rewards can be given at any state of the environment, gaining accurate control and precision over the agent

R – reward

V – value

Q – quality

P – probability of an action (or randomness in environment)

TD – temporal difference

You can always teach a new dog new tricks, if it’s willing to learn.

The domain name system, DNS for short is one of those creative ideas that make human life easier on the internet. The system is for converting human understandable domain names into ip addresses for easy relembrance and searching of a particular ip address.

There are four important parts for a smooth domain retrieval. They are the recursive DNS retriever, the Top Level Domain nameserver, root nameserver and authoritative nameserver.

The recuesive retriever is the first one to recieve the user input ‘theserver.com’ this then queries the DNS root nameserver.

This then sends the query to a TLD nameserver which has the .com level domain.

The TLD replies with the domain nameserver consisiting of theserver.com domain name which then sends the ip address of the domain.

Finally the DNS resolver responds to the user browser by providing the ip address found, and renders the webpage that is to be shown to the user.

The crazy cool thing is how a computer figuratively understands human language does what needs to be done by itself.

Disassembling an old tape recorder, I found there were tiny bulb structures that didn’t seem to light up (or have tungsten for that matter). Upon research I was surprised to find that there was a time in history where silicon was just sand.

This was the period of vaccum tubes. This is a creative engineering solution for computing problems.

The tube consists of two electrodes(as usual) the cathode and anode. The cathode is heated which produces electrons due to a phenomenon called thermionic emission. The concept is that metals emit electrons when heated. These electrons reach the anode due to the positive potential at the anode. This creates a currentflow from anode to cathode(electricity flows opposite to electrons).

Thereby it essentially creates a diode (di-electrode??). Diodes conduct in one direction only. This diode was used mainly for rectification of ac to dc.

For transistors, a thurd electrode was installed in between the cathode and anode. This was a metal mesh which was given an external negative supply voltage. This negative voltage repels the electron flow. By controlling the voltage level we can essentially control the circuit current creating a triode.

Triodes are mainly used as amplifiers because they are in essence an electric switch. This triode was also used to construct logic gates.

There was even a variant with four and five electrodes, the two additional eoectrodes called screen grid and suppression grid for further control of electron flow.

The entirety of the tube is kept in vaccum to provide clear paths for the electrons.

Now that, is something to marvel about.

Confusion arose when the lights turned on when they were supposed to be off and lit the room blue.

The LED was connected to pin 18 of the gpio and given an on pulse. But nothing interesting happened. When the off signal was given, the LED started off.

Upon investigating the problem in the strange waters of the internet, there were a lot of confusing answers and I realized the fact that a basic understanding of how LEDs and gpio works was essential.

GPIO input/output pin works by sending a 1 for on pulse and a 0 for off pulse. 1 represents sourcing and 0 represents sinking current. So 1 doesn’t necessarily mean turning the connected device on. It just means a current is sourced.

If the anode of the LED is connected to the I/O port the port can provide only a 12mA current source. This means th LED doesn’t have enough current.

But if the cathode was connected to I/O instead, and the anode to the 3V supply, (more than 20 mA) full brightness can be reached but the configuration is inverted and LED turns on, when the 0 pulse is given and off when the 1 pulse is given.

The best way to adress this boggling issue is to change the configuration in the code from 1 for on, to 0 for on. Although this sounds like a workaraound, truth is, no one cares how it works and just wants to see that light glow

Therw are two protocols for internet traffic.

TCP(transmission control protocol) is the safe and secure protocol. It engages a three way handshake with the recipient. The first phase is the SYN(chronous) where it establishes and verifies connection with the neighbour. The second phase is the SYN ack(synchronous acknowledgement) where the recipient computer ensures connection. The third phase is acknowledgement when the sender computer acknowledges the SYN ack and starts sending data. This method is slow and takes a lot of bandwidth but is extremely secure. If there is a loss of data packet, TCP asks the sender to resend that particular packet

But, UDP is all about dat speed. It doesn’t even verify SYN, but keeps on sending packets without any concern for the recieving computer. The advantage is it’s high speed and bandwidth.

Personally, I prefer UDP, because loss or frame has a very low probability of occouring and ofc everyone prefers fast over secure