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Completing a Coursera Specialization for Free

Coursera provides continuing education just like Udacity and offer the full learning experience that I am accustomed to, including lesson videos, reading materials, projects, discussion forums, and graded projects which are peer-reviewed. I recently completed the Full-stack Web Development in React specialization from Coursera, all for free. It’s called a specialization because it is made up of three courses below each with their own certifications and which takes 4-6 weeks each to complete: 1. Front-End Web UI Frameworks and Tools: Bootstrap 4 2. Front-End Web Development with React 3. Server-side Development with NodeJS, Express and MongoDB I started the program in December 2021 and finished it in June 2023 however. The intent of this post is to explain how I was able to fund the entire specialization for free. In December 2021, I read on social media that Coursera allowed for one free course per year if you were a student and had an email address from a partner school. I gave my stu

60 Days of Udacity: A Bertelsmann Technology Scholarship in AI

I applied and was recently awarded the Bertelsmann Technology scholarship where a group of students take part in an Artificial Intelligence track made up of 5 parts to be completed in 3.5 months.    As part of taking the class, we have to take part in a slack channel where we post our daily studies for 60 days reflecting on what we have learned. This is a transcription of those 60 days. The public github wiki is located here https://github.com/chromilo/udacity-bertelsmann-scholarship/wiki  Day 1:  I am in p3  (Datasets) doing the xray annotation project. I have created the appen job using the "Image Categorization" template. I uploaded the xray image data and modified the CML to make the  questions specific to checking for pnemonia. Also updated the Examples section. I am still working out the usage of conditional only-if in checkboxes to determine what other smarts to include when annotators go through the page. Created one Question so far and will continue working on the ot

One of the more underappreciated AWS service

The most under-appreciated AWS service is the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). This service provides SSL/TLS certificate for your custom domain as long as you subscribe to any ACM-integrated service like Elastic Cache or Cloudfront.  I had been using Wordpress to host my website https://aminsolutions.com for some time on a free web hosting provider. In order to provide SSL/TLS web encryption, I would have to buy a public certificate from an SSL provider and have that in front of my Wordpress content management web site. I found there were many limitations with that including installation of a public certificate on a free webhost subscription.  I would have had to start a paid web host subscription and in order to install a paid public certificate on a Wordpress website that wasn't getting a lot of hits. Regardless, it had to be secured via SSL web encryption so this is where AWS Cloudfront came in. Using AWS Cloudfront integrated with ACM, I can get a free public SSL web certificate

Unable to get to computer BIOS because monitor goes to sleep at startup?

I just enrolled in a course that requires running virtual machines on my Windows 10 Pro computer using VirtualBox. I couldn't start the virtual machines because of this error "The native API dll was not found (C:\WINDOWS\system32\WinHvPlatform.dll)". After doing some troubleshooting, I found this to mean that the hardware acceleration settings required by the CPU to support virtualization are currently disabled in my computer BIOS. I had to enable virtualization on my CPU chipset (VT-x/AMD-V).  Seems easy enough, right? I rebooted my computer and was expecting to see the memory counter and options to get into the BIOS. It must have been so quick that it took me straight to Windows 10 login prompt right away. I tried again and as usual I am immediately back to Windows 10 login. Each time I reboot, there is a box that says my monitor is going to sleep and does not wake again until presented with Windows 10 login prompt. I can hear the disk and fans spinning during startup,