Quick run through on Google Collab

 For all you budding machine learning artists who want to make amazing Ai art but don't know how to, this is a quick run-through of a google collab notebook. 

For this is post I'm using this Collab In which you can create images using text prompts. 

An elaborate post about this collab here.

This notebook resides on my drive, google will ask you if you want to make a copy of the notebook on your own drive. (strongly recommend). In which case, Google will make a yellow folder in your google drive named Colab notebooks.  In case you can't access this notebook at the time you read this, I must have modified the path of the notebook. But things mentioned in this book are applicapable to any notebook.

Let's jump into it immediately.

- On the top right, you will see a connect button, click it and google will allocate a cloud computer to you. It will take a moment.

- You can see the computer allocated here. 

- on the left you can access the computer you have been allocated. The red arrow in the image below is where you can access your files and folders. 

the 3 icons marked in green are

1-  upload files to your remote cpu, remember these files will be purged after the session(even if this tab closes, exception google pro+ account)

2- refresh your drive, cause it is not as real-time to display the changes, so you can refresh it to see any updates

3 -Mount your personal google drive.  this is a great option so that way you can save your results on your drive without worrying about loosing your data at the end of your session. 

- Now let's start exploring the main section. The great thing about collab is that it is designed to share and edit code. So these notebooks are made of 2 kinds of cells, 'code' and 'text'. 

Cells are independent blocks that run in isolation. it is very helpful to isolate errors.

 

-As shown in the image above, on the top left you have an option to add new cells. Another way to add new cells is to hover over the bottom of another cell or in the center of an empty notebook. 

- This is what a new text cell looks like, you add comments and information here. It is pretty straightforward.

- Similarly, this is what a Code cell looks like. Code in these cells has to be written with python.

use exclamation for commands you would run in the terminal, like dependencies and other installations.

That pretty much sums up the basics of google Collab. Make a copy of this notebook and open all the cells and play around. This notebook covers all the basics required.