Posts From Category: technology

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

For a number of years I’ve been involved in the Apache Tika project as both a committer and PMC member.

With the increase in container technology usage over the past few years we spun up a separate repository for Apache Tika Server in Docker, called tika-docker with convenience images hosted on Docker Hub

This has resulted in questions on how to customise configuration and host instances that link to other services. To help people get started, we’ve created some example scenarios.

So let’s dive in and check them out.

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Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

One of the coolest new features added to Apache Tika in the past few years has been the addition of Parsers that leverage Deep Learning to perform object recognition and captioning.

Contributed by Chris Mattmann and Thejan Wijesinghe, through their work with USC Data Science, you can configure Apache Tika to call of to predefined models and get deep learning equivalent of ‘Hello World’ - tagging dog or cat pictures!

So let’s try it out.

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Having got used to my replacement laptop, I’ve decided to keep using it, but there was one thing annoying me - the trackpad!

The trackpad is definately not the same quality as the MacBook Pro I was used to, but I could cope as the main features are there. However, I often move around a lot going from meeting to meeting, making use of the sleep/suspend capability.

That was when the trouble started…

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With my beloved, and worn, day to day laptop having to go in for repair, I had to setup a temporary laptop to work on for a few weeks.

At work we use Cisco Meraki devices in many places, including the edge of network for our various offices. Whilst their main use is to form a mesh network around our offices and server infrastructure, we also use them to enable a lightweight Client VPN solution.

The Cisco Meraki Client VPN option provides a L2TP/IPsec based VPN using either its own internal user store, an LDAP Directory, Microsoft Active Directory, or a Radius server to authenticate users.

Cisco Meraki provide great instructions for Windows, Mac and mobile devices, but really old instructions for Linux. Therefore, I am posting this as much to remind me the next time I need to set it up as to help others.

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