Walking in a technology wonderland

One of the banes of modern technology is how to keep your digital information safe.  While modern PC's are quite reliable, often you are only one hardware failure away from losing irreplaceable documents, photos and videos. Therefore it is critical that you have some sort of backup solution. The solution  will often depend on the size of the files. Documents can often be backed up to the cloud using things like box or google drive, but cloud storage has its own issues and I would nor rely on it. While for small amounts of data it can be cheap and convenient, even with super-fast broadband backing up even moderately large files can be tedious and soon you will find yourself paying yearly subscription fees as your storage requirements increase. The alternative then is some sort of local backup. I take a lot of photographs, and recently I have been continually hitting the limits of my disk space, which has forced me to continually prune images. It seemed like a good time ...

Taking an old B&W  image and coloring it has become a thing in recent years. When done well it can add life to a image and bring new insights. However generally it takes a lot of work in photoshop and a trained technician. However even done well, it can have issues because often the colorer has to guess on the color of clothes etc I was interested to learn therefore of work based on machine learning to do the same thing. The idea is to train a algorithm based on a set of images and then use the result to color unrelated images. I was skeptical initially, but the results looked good so I thought I would have a closer look. I wanted to see if I could run the process myself. The code can be found here https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify and instructions are here https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify/blob/master/README.md  However it looked like a lot of effort to set it up, but fortunately there was an easier way If you go to this link https://colab.research.g...