Finally got through Chapter 2. To run notebooks for the first two chapters, I tried Paperspace, JarvisLabs.ai, Kaggle, and Colab. In the end, only Colab worked perfectly. The others all had issues running widgets or running code in the notebook. I spent hours researching workarounds, (re)installing dependencies, upgrading/downgrading jupyter, etc. Those obstacles stalled my learning process quite a lot. My goal is just to learn the material, not learn the tech stack (yet), so I went with the platform that just worked for fastai.
I have an existing google account, so here were my steps:
- Go to https://colab.research.google.com/
- The “Open Notebook” prompt appears.
- Click on “Github” option.
- Search for “fastai/fastbook”.
- Choose a chapter to import
(Side note: I used the tips here to use the modified code for duckduckgo after spending a couple of hours trying to get Azure image search to work – Lesson 2: Question on How to Get a Bing Image Search API key - #5 by murilogustineli. The end of chapter 2 suggested helping folks one step behind you, so hopefully this helps).