If you wake up in the middle of the night to investigate a noise, it’s very important to identify the intruder as your sister or a stranger within a split second. Newborns as young as one to three years old can distinguish between known faces. Throughout the history of humankind, human brains have gotten really good at recognizing faces.

On the other hand, software that does face detection relies on machine learning algorithms to locate human faces in images and videos. Then software that does face recognition analyzes the detected facial characteristics to determine if there is a match within an existing dataset. To recognize a particular person’s face, we first need to train a machine learning model to classify an existing dataset of faces. This type of technology is used in a variety of modern applications, like for biometric passports in airports or to unlock your phone. …

I love to eat fresh fruit, but I never know what’s in season until I go to my local grocery store. Imagine my delight when I discovered national fruit holidays! Yes, it’s probably a marketing gimmick in my country, but it can also alert me to what’s in season.

This tutorial shows you how to set up custom calendar notifications. Even if you don’t care about fruit, learn how to trigger a notification on a certain date using a Postman monitor, so you never miss any special events. In this tutorial, we will do the following:

• Set up a Postman collection
• Add an example response for data storage
• Mock the API on Postman servers
• Set up an SMS notification with Twilio
• Run the collection locally in Postman
• Schedule a monitor to run on Postman servers

Tutorial requirements

• A personal phone number to receive SMS notifications
• A free Twilio account …

Some mysteries in life can only be answered by data. For example, if you have questions about your Twilio usage, there’s a few ways to dig into the data. There’s prebuilt summaries and graphs of your activity in the Twilio console, and if you’re handy with a spreadsheet, you can export the data. There’s also third-party providers with out-of-the-box analytics and visualizations.

If nothing answers your particular question, this tutorial shows you how to make custom reports using the Twilio REST API to access your data and drive your own insights.

Tutorial requirements

• Python version 3
• A free or paid Twilio account with a history of activity

Set up the Python virtual environment

Make a new project directory, and change into the directory from the command line.

Create a virtual environment called venv. If you’re on Unix or Mac operating systems, …

SpaceX is launching thousands of Starlink satellites to assemble a giant interconnected constellation in space. If you look up at just the right time, you might be lucky enough to spot some.

But how can you know ahead of time when a satellite is going to pass overhead?

You don’t have to count on luck to see these tiny silver ants parading across the night sky. This tutorial shows you how to set up a scheduled job to check if a satellite approaches and send an SMS alert.

Tutorial Requirements

• Python version 3
• A personal phone number to receive SMS notifications
• A freeTwilio account and a Twilio phone number to send SMS notifications
• A free Docker Hub account, Docker Desktop (for Mac or Windows) or Docker Engine (for Linux) to build and share containerized applications
• A free KubeSail account to deploy your code to a Kubernetes cluster

Set up …