An art-challenged individual's perspective on AI (anime) generated art

You might have heard it in the past few months: some areas of the Internet are buzzing with discussions on “generative art”, that is, artwork generated from “AI” models that were fed with an absurdly large amount of images as training as a base. There are supporters, there are critics, and techology advances: among all this, this post offers my humble experience with computer-generated imagery. In this post, you’ll be guided by Yumiko, Satsuki, and Maya: the first two are characters created by someone else I know (who wants to remain anonymous) which I then expanded, cooperating with their creator in a certain project from a few years ago; the latter is… well, a character with an interesting history, which will be explained later.

October 7, 2022

Translations available for KDE unstable packages

As many readers of this blog are aware, openSUSE has been offering packages of git snapshots from KDE since quite a while. They are quite useful for those wiling to test, report bugs, and / or hack on the code, but also for those who want to see what’s brewing in KDE land (without touching their existing systems). However, a major drawback for non English speakers was the lack of translations.

October 22, 2021

Setting up Let's Encrypt certificates for the 389-ds LDAP server

In the past months I’ve set up LDAP at home, to avoid having different user accounts for the services that I run on my home hardware. Rather than the venerable OpenLDAP I settled for 389 Directory Server, commercially known as Red Hat Directory Server, mainly because I was more familiar with it. Rather than describing how to set that up (Red Hat’s own documentation is excellent on that regard), this post will focus on the steps required to enable encryption using Let’s Encrypt certificates.

August 1, 2021

Setting up OwnTracks Recorder and OAuth2 with nginx, oauth2-proxy and podman

One thing I always wanted to do when going on holiday is to track where I go, the places I’ve been, and see how much I’ve travelled around. This is true in particular when going to places where I walk around a lot (Japan stays at the top of the list, also for other reasons that are not related to this post). Something like viewing a map showing where you were, and where did you go, with optional export to KML or GPX to import into other programs like Marble.

June 13, 2021

Blast from the past: 超獣機神ダンクーガ (Super Beast Machine God Dancougar)

After quite a long time, I was finally able to take a look at this series: a rather atypical mecha show that despite some bad production, still manages to be interesting.

February 25, 2021

Partings

Because changes occur when one least expects them. This post is about one such change.

February 7, 2021

DIY KVM over IP with pikvm

(Note: this post also appears in Planet KDE and Planet openSUSE because I thought this might be interesting to others) As I mentioned in some other posts, I have a small “server” which I use as a NAS to provide archiving for photos and other files of interest. As it runs in a remarkably small (and quiet) enclosure, I’ve managed to put it in an incospicuous part of the room it is in.

January 30, 2021

Quick tips: Server Name Indication for internal domains with Turris Omnia

Omnia? The Turris Omnia is quite a nice (although a little pricey) OpenWRT-based router from CZ.NIC. It provides a fairly powerful CPU, relatively unconstrained eMMC space, and quite a lot of hackability (some revisions even have GPIO ports to play with). It runs a modified version of OpenWRT, named TurrisOS. The problem A few years ago, I built a custom NAS for my storage needs, using a cheap Intel SoC (J1900 chipset) and a (much pricier) mini-ITX small form factor server tower.

January 9, 2021

Fixed comments

The migration happened and well… it turns out that it was not as smooth as I expected. In particular, comments weren’t working at all due to a filesystem permission on the database (which meant nothing would get written at all). That is now fixed. Sorry for the problems. To add problems over problems, I had a hardware failure (RAID card) last June, which wrecked the root filesystem and I had to reinstall everything from scratch.

January 6, 2021

Refreshed look

You might have noticed that the blog has a markedly different look than before. It has not only changed visually, but also under the hood. This (brief) post summarizes the reasons behind the change. Why? Simply put, the previous solution was unmaintainable. “But,” you might say, “it was a static site generator! How could it become unmaintainable?”. It can. You might recall I moved from Wordpress to Jekyll about six years ago.