walz

We fixed the site and it's much faster now. Cloudflare caching for the win.

I was walking around New York last month during some light rain and noticed about half the people had umbrellas open. When the rain picked up a few minutes later, that number jumped closer to 80%.

It got me thinking it'd be cool to track this somehow, so I built a website! I am taking a sidewalk livestream, feeding it into a YOLO model for people tracking, then sending a frame of each detected person to Gemini 2.0 Flash, which returns structured JSON about each person's clothing and if they're holding an umbrella. I also had fun making the site look like a TV weather channel.

I showed some friends this project and someone mentioned how the legendary Tasks xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/1425) is out of date now. If you want to check whether a photo has birds in it (or if someone is holding an umbrella), you can just ask an inexpensive vision model for JSON.

60,000 divided by 60 is 1000, not 10,000. So only about a month, still a lot of time!

The phone has 4,000mAh, too.

I used an old Motorola phone for this, and yes, if it dies it won’t turn back on again until the power button is pressed. I Googled around and there’s a way to disable this behavior though, through an ADB command. The bad part is that it supposedly might get stuck in a boot loop – it tries to boot but there’s not enough battery yet, so it dies and keeps trying to boot. Over and over.

I made a second Tasker automation, so it shuts down with less than 15 percent battery. It might still get stuck in a boot loop, but eventually the solar panel will quickly charge it above 15% so that it won’t be for very long.