Published on by Nayar

Using AI to Catch a Thief in Flic-en-Flac

A thief stole a bicycle on my porch and we have CCTV cameras installed. However, witnesses couldn’t recall the exact time, leaving us with three full days of footage to review. Watching it manually was impractical, especially since the mobile app couldn’t fast-forward remotely as it was not on the same LAN as the DVR.

We downloaded all 65 video files from the DVR, but even that was daunting. That’s when I turned to AI.

Using AI to Solve the Problem

I asked ChatGPT to write a Python script to detect bicycles in the footage.

The script worked immediately, but after some testing, I adjusted it to detect people instead—making it faster and more efficient.

It saved only frames with detected persons, reducing hours of video to just the important clips.

Tools and Setup

I ran the script on an Ubuntu machine with an NVIDIA RTX 4070 ti super GPU, which processed the footage quickly. What would have taken days was done in almost 3 to 4 hours.

The Moment of Truth

Reviewing the condensed clips, I finally found the thief on camera, riding away with the bicycle.

What do you think is the proper way to bring justice?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published on by Nayar

Key Rate is down to 4% from 4.5% in Mauritius. Should you rejoice?

As from September 2024, the new rates came into effect.

Before starting to chant for your favourite politician, let’s see if its a good thing.

If you have lots of Money in the Bank?

Bad news for you. You will receive less interests per year on your savings account. You will now receive Rs 26,000 instead Rs 31,000 on Rs 1 million Rupees in MCB. So your money isn’t going to grow as fast in the bank.

If you have a current home loan?

Good news for you mate if you have a floating interest loan. You will be paying less on interest charges now as the PLR has also decreased.

So yeah. You may chant.

For new home buyers?

If interest rate decreases, meaning you’ll be able to get higher loan amount to purchase your dream price right? RIGHT? Sorry but nope.

Let’s consider a person getting Rs 30,000 per month as salary. The bank would give a maximum loan of Rs 1,832,710 to that person if the interest rate 6.75% pa. The person can therefore make an offer of Rs 1.8 million to a house owner to purchase. 

When the interest rate is decreased by 0.5%, the person will be allowable of a loan of Rs 1,930,222.

But you see. If you have money despite not doing anything, your colleagues also has more money to bid on the same house. In the end, you’ll end up paying the house Rs 1.9 millions. You didn’t make any “progress”.

Conclusion

Money is losing value.

Published on by Nayar

Breaking Even on FUNDKISS after 5 Years.

I have been investing on the FUNDKISS platform since 2019. FUNDKISS is a peer-to-peer lending platform based in Mauritius. Over the years, I have invested Rs 525,000. Today, i just broke even after 5 years!!!

There’s no point is calculating CAGR. Do you think it was worth it? If I would have kept the money in the bank, with interest I’d would have gotten much more for 5 years. I know COVID19 played a huge part in this sub par performance. I have lots of capital in default + arrears.

While I still have lots of capital outstanding, I don’t have any big expectations from them. Some projects haven’t paid me in 8 months. Most of the remaining ones are non-performers.

I’m glad I didn’t “lose” money in math terms but we’ll have to ignore inflation figures or even basic saving interest rate (3.1%) right now. How was your experience so far? 

Published on by Nayar

Trip to Madagascar: What is Diurnal Air Temperature Variation?

I was told Madagascar is almost same climate to Mauritius. So I did some research and indeed. The temperature matches that of Mauritius. I see Antananarivo will be 19 to 23 degree Celsius.

It would be kinda comparable to a Curepipe temperature in Mauritius.

But then I noticed something else. Have a look at the minimum and maximum temperature difference. In Mauritius is it around 5 degrees (23 – 18). But in Madagascar, it’s like 13 degrees ( 23 – 10).

During the day you may be fine wearing just a t-shirt

But on other occasions or at night, you might need to have 2 sweaters and 1 t-shirt.

 

But it’s alright. Just be prepared and you’ll be fine 🙂

Published on by Nayar

I bought a Macbook Air M1 in 2023 instead of Asus Zenbook 14 OLED

My Asus Zenbook UX310UQ which I bought in 2018 served me very well except in 1 department: battery life. Recently, the battery would just die randomly so I had to keep it plugged in at all times. So I needed a laptop with adequate battery so that I can work on the move or even be my sofa.

I was deciding between an Asus Zenbook 14″ OLED (which has a gorgeous display) and a Macbook Air with the M1 chip. It was about Rs 10,000 cheaper than the Macbook with similar specs.

The RAMs cannot be upgraded on both laptops unfortunately and 8GB is very limit in 2023. I decided to opt for the Macbook M1 specially after hearing excellent reviews about the battery life and performance.

It really didn’t disappoint in that area. I got 8 hours of battery life in the first day and I even run some machine learning codes on it. However 256GB of storage is really limiting. Every time I would install a software, it would bring me anxiety about filling the disk. The 8GB Ram honestly “feels” more than adequate for web browsing and even coding. However it would swap to the SSD a lot in the background which is rumoured to cause damage to it. Since everything is soldered to the board, replacing the SSD will not be possible thus the Macbook might be bricked earlier than expected. I haven’t found lots of people actually reporting dead M1 SSDs on forums. Please share if you find some with me.

I was quite surprised to discover that the laptop can be used without signup with an Apple account. The OS even updates without it. However in order to update Apple apps such as Numbers, iMovie etc from the App store, you will need to signin using an Apple ID.

The MacOS is really nice in terms of keeping your screen real estate. The window borders are virtually inexistent. On my KDE laptop, so much pixels were wasted to draw the borders.

The widgets feels much more luxurious than on KDE. Is it the better screen or just better graphics. I don’t know

And 1 thing which really impressed me was whenever you open the lid, the laptop is ready to be used. My Linux laptop would take like 5-10 seconds to be ready from sleep.

Some cons:

  • No print screen button
  • SSHFS is really slow. I got like 3MB/s. https://osxfuse.github.io/
  • Python/git stop working after update
  • Youtube was not playing in full HD. I could see the blurriness
  • You get only 1 year warranty as compared to 3 on the ASUS
  • Every one has a Macbook in a cafe. I had to place a sticker to recognise mine.

Product photo of Macbook M1 Air (purchased April 2023)

After 1 year of using it, I had to upgrade to a more powerful one since the M1 Air is not really built to run large language models on them. So I sold it to my sister who I hope will take care of it 🙂