John’s Home Page

If you need a pixel art style heart SVG file, you've come to the right place.

This is a recipe that few on this planet appreciate.  I believe that only I and my Aunt Mary are the extant Woltmans that enjoy this wonderful entree. It is a spicy spaghetti made with Campbell's tomato soup and cayenne pepper.

I was recently given a hand-me-down Remarkable 2 tablet, which is good because I would never have spent on money it - not because it's not good, but because it's $600 for essentially an e-ink sketch pad.  I wanted to mark up some e-books I own, but they're from Amazon, so I had to figure out how convert them to a format the Remarkable would support.

Here's the quick version:

• Install an e-book program called Calibre (it's free / open source).
  
• Install the Calibre plugin KFX Input from the Calibre plugin menu.
• Install another Calibre plugin called DeDRM. This one has to be manually downloaded & installed. You don't have to unzip the file.
• Your Kindle's serial number.
• Download an e-book linked to that Kindle.

Hit the read more link if you want to see more details & screenshots (Calibre has a unique interface imo).

I had to use Gnome the other day and I did not enjoy it.  What started out as a few "hmmm, that's kinda weird" misgivings quickly grew into a more powerful "oh, oh no, this is all wrong" terror.  Everything felt familiar, but slightly off, like a bad dream.

I found that I could not do tasks that I've been doing for decades, such as moving a dialog window out of the way to see what was underneath, nor could I set my background to plain, solid color to cut down on distractions.

Looking deeper I found that Gnome was composed of so many dreadful decisions and baffling behaviors that I was going to have to write a long-winded article complaining about it all.  So read on if you'd like to hear about the many, MANY ways that Gnome is bad, and how to fix it!

Simple recipe for when it's hard to chew.  For Jen.

While using Linux I was unhappy that, by default, extracting archives like ZIP files is a multi-step process on KDE Plasma.  But, with the help from some others, I have a fix.

While doing some research, I had to read a bunch of bug reports, mostly related to my article about how Gnome isn't a good interface.  Here is the best one by far (and no, it's not about thumbnails).

I decided to split my blog up between my general interests and family stuff.  

The phrase "will 20xx be the year of Linux on the desktop?" started as a serious question, but over the past 24 years of it never ever being the year of Linux on the desktop, the question became a punchline.  Except now, in the year 2024, it might finally be true for some people, and by some people, I mean me.  Read on to find out what I think about the experience of using Linux as my daily driver.

Here are 100 images generated through a randomized set of prompts.  They are 4K and were meant to be part of our TV's slideshow screensaver.  You can do the same, if you want.

I wanted to share some of the experiences I've had with a recent AI art piece.  There's a technique called "inpainting", which I still didn't have much experience with.  This project was a good chance to learn more about it, and what sort of challenges you encounter.

While having a blog in 2023 may be anachronistic or perhaps even crazy, what's even crazier is having content that dates all the way back to 2004. I've managed this in the past by writing scripts to convert from one blog system to another, and the conversion to Publii is no different. 

I've been having a blast using my computer to generate random images.  A new use I've found for "AI art" is as a source of inspiration.  About a week ago I went down a rabbit hole that ended up with me learning a bunch of other tools so that I could execute an idea that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Another visit to California! This time I did not go to Sequoia.  Don't worry, my friends, I still saw some redwood trees.  We had back-to-back jobs, first in San Diego, then in San Jose.  SK and I spent the weekend between jobs at a 76er's game, Point Reyes, and John Muir Woods.