How to instantly make the background of photo & video transparent

A company called Kaleido AI GmbH in Vienna, Austria has successfully made use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology to effectively remove the background from the main object(s) in any photo and even video, awesomely making the background transparent, without the hassle of using any greenscreen.

In most cases, the conversion can be instantly completed within a second, and the result is impressively promising!

The product/service that makes photo background transparent is Remove.bg. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux as a software, very useful to perform bulk images conversion, which you can download from this webpage: https://www.remove.bg/windows-mac-linux

It also has an Android app which you can click here to download and install it from Google Play Store.

Alternatively, you can also upload your photo to their website, just by a simple drag-and-drop action, to perform online conversion. The URL is: https://www.remove.bg/

Remove.bg provides API for integration, and its plugins are available for Photoshop, Zapier, Integromat, Figma, WooCommerce, Drupal, Sketch, and even Visual Studio Code.

Remove.bg sells credits for image conversion, 1 credit for 1 image conversion. If you don't need high resolution converted image, the converted preview image up to 0.25 megapixels is free of charge.

Below are some examples to give you an idea about what can be expected from Remove.bg background removal service.

Original photo:

Background removed:

Original photo:

Background removed:

Original photo:

Background removed:

Kaleido AI GmbH's A.I. technology for background removal is not only applicable to images, but also can be used for videos as well.

Currently, only online conversion is available for videos. The service name is called UnScreen, and its URL is: https://www.unscreen.com/

Below is a sample video provided in UnScreen website to see it in action.

38 KLSE stocks that show continuous net profit growth

As I mentioned before, Rakuten Trade has a handy and useful Stock Screener function which includes Detailed Analysis powered by Thomson Reuters.

You can use this link to open a new Rakuten Trade account for free.

We can find the following 38 stocks with net profit chart that shows continuous growth over the recent years and forecasted to continue growing in the upcoming 2 years, by a quick screening through the Detailed Analysis. This is useful to perform initial filtering for investment stock picking.

Among the 38 stocks, 32 of them show consistent continuous net profit growth, while I opined that another 6 worth to add into this list although their graph is not as perfect as the 32.

The 32 stocks, sorted by their counter number, are as follow. Note that the price information at the top right corner of the graphs is the last matched price before market closing on Wednesday 19 August 2020.

0001 SCOMNET

0002 KOTRA

0021 GHLSYS

0037 RGB

0080 STRAITS

0128 FRONTKN

0169 SMTRACK

0176 KRONO

0200 REVENUE

0208 GREATEC

0215 SLVEST

0218 ACO

0219 RL

0220 OVH

0221 TCS

03017 UNIWALL

3034 HAPSENG

4731 SCIENTX

5008 HARISON

5077 MAYBULK

5102 GCB

5156 XDL

5279 SERBADK

7013 HUBLINE

7029 MASTER

7084 QL

7160 PENTA

7181 ARBB

7277 DIALOG

9296 RCECAP

9687 IDEAL

9792 SEG

and the other 6 stocks are:

5250 SEM

5292 UWC

7034 TGUAN

7091 UNIMECH

7148 DPHARMA

7153 KOSSAN

Disclaimer: This article is intended for sharing of point of view only. It is not an advice or recommendation to buy or sell any of the mentioned stock counters. You should do your own homework before trading in Bursa Malaysia.

FileRun - self-hosted file sharing and content collaboration solution for personal, family or enterprise

I was looking for a multimedia content sharing solution to perform some sort of e-library function in a hosted server.

I would like to upload documents, e-books, presentation slides, audio files, video files, and the like to the system. Those content then can be accessible by particular persons and/or group of persons that I assigned permission with. They should be able to open the content directly in web browser in their desktop, tablet or mobile phone. For editable content such as text files, MS Office documents, LibreOffice documents, etc., they should be able to edit the file directly in the web browser, if I give them the "edit" permission.

First thing I thought of was Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or similar cloud drive available in the Internet. However, those services will have stringent quota limitation, less flexible for me to control users and access rights, and does not have certain feature that I need.

Then, I looked into ownCloud, Nextcloud, and the like. They are a bit too complicated for both the users and administrator. They contain excessive features and functions that I don't need. Worse still, I found that they have little bugs here and there which I couldn't resolve nor found workable solution in the Internet.

Finally, I settled down with FileRun which run in LAMP environment. It is simple, easy to use, and has a nice user interface.

It even has special handling for photos and audio/music by making use of the metadata embedded in those multimedia files. I hope that in the future version, this can be extended to video files too.

Installation of FileRun to an existing LAMP platform is pretty easy too. There are 2 files to download:

• Click here to download the latest version of FileRun.
• Click here to download its installation script called unzip.php.

After download, rename the FileRun zip file to just FileRun.zip without version number in its filename.

Upload both FileRun.zip and unzip.php to a web-accessible folder in your web server.

Use your web browser to access to unzip.php in your web server, and follow the step-by-step instruction to complete your installation.

You can even install FileRun in Synology DiskStation and RackStation NAS. Click here for the instruction to install FileRun on Synology network attached storage.

With FileRun, you can manage and organize your files, tag them for easier searching, bookmark certain files into your collections and/or starred folder.

You can share your folders and files to other users and groups in FileRun, and determine whether they can perform upload, download, make changes, share links, read comments, or add comments.

You can also create weblinks to share files or folders to be accessible by other FileRun users or external users without any FileRun account in your system.

You can put an expiration date for your weblink, limit its download, set a password before the linked file can be accessed, require user login before the linked file can be accessed, etc.

I find FileRun very suitable for simple e-library system for file sharing and content collaboration in self-hosted server. You can even access your files directly from Windows Explorer via WebDAV. It even has a Mozilla Thunderbird FileLink addon to enable you to send large file in your email.

Updated the firmware of my Samsung Xpress M2885FW printer to version 3.00.01.18

Despite Samsung printer business had been bought over by HP since 2017, there is still new firmware release for my Samsung Xpress M2885FW printer recently in mid-July 2020 to version 3.00.01.18.

You can download this latest firmware from HP Customer Support Website for Samsung Printers here. The filename is M2885_V3.00.01.18.zip with size of 17.2MB.

After unzip, you can find the following files in it.

If your printer is connected to your computer with USB cable, the firmware update is pretty easy.

• Make sure the printer is idle with no printing/scanning/faxing job running.
• Drag and drop the file SWUPGRADE-ON.prn to usblist2.exe.
• After that, drag and drop the file M2885_V3.00.01.18.hd to usblist2.exe.
• The firmware update process will start in the printer. The printer will reboot itself at the end of the process.

You can check for the firmware version running in the printer by accessing the printer's IP address using your web browser and login into its SyncThru Web Service and navigate to Maintenance > Firmware Upgrade.

Another way to update your printer's firmware is by clicking on the Upgrade Wizard button on the webpage as shown above, and select the file M2885_V3.00.01.18.hd from your computer.

Here is the changelog of the firmware for this printer for your reference.

Bursa Malaysia RM150 cashback for ETF investment

There are 19 Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) listed in Bursa Malaysia, and majority of them are thinly traded.

One of the more active one is GOLDETF (0828EA), which is also risen the most among the ETFs in Bursa Malaysia, with more than 28% 1 year historical return as of today.

Bursa Malaysia has just rolled out an ETF cashback program. An investor who invests (buys) one or multiple Bursa-listed ETFs with cumulative value of RM3,000 and above within the program period will be eligible to receive Touch ‘n Go eWallet Reload PIN worth RM150.

Terms and conditions:

• Program period is valid from 3 August to 2 November, 2020.
• Investors who invest (buy) one or multiple Bursa-Listed ETFs (stock code beginning with "08") with cumulative value of RM3,000 and above within the Program period will be eligible to receive a Touch ' Go eWallet Reload PIN worth RM150.
• All above ETF buy trades must be carried out in the investor's Direct CDS Account.
• Investors who have not made any buy or sell trades in Bursa-listed ETFs from 1 January 2020 until 2 August 2020 are eligible for this Program.
• Limited to the first 500 eligible investors only.

You can click here to visit to Bursa Market Place website for more information about this program.