John’s Home Page

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.

I got to travel to Anchorage, AK for work again, and took some pictures!

Cross-compiling Qt and Qt-based projects for the Raspberry Pi continues to be an error prone, complicated process.  It's even worse when doing it on CentOS because of the outdated tooling (GCC 4.8?!).  To lower the friction, I updated my cross-compilation Ansible playbooks to work with an Ubuntu 18.04 desktop instead of CentOS.

I built a new computer! JH helped and is now a master of the philips screw driver.

I had many contenders for "worst hike ever" until I hiked the Manitou Incline.  This is it.  This is the worst.

The Aleutian Islands! Volcanoes! Polar bears! Ice floes! Penguins!  I didn't see any of that!  But, I did get to see some other cool things.

Yes, really.  This time I'm accompanied by my brother Scott and by JTB.  We drove around the Sierra Nevada area to visit Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks.  We took many photos, why don't you look at some of them?  I also got pretty wordy, ick.

Have you ever wanted to cross-compile a Qt application on your Raspberry Pi but hate bash scripts because bash scripts are literal garbage?  Well now you can, with some handy Ansible playbooks that I wrote!

I completely re-jiggered my website again, like I do.

This week we celebrated jerky and crabs. By which I mean my brother's and my father's birthdays. I converted 20 pounds of meat into about 3, and we caught and cooked 45 blue crabs.

I was once again in California for two consecutive weeks.  I thought my brother needed to come see the West Coast and take in some of the scenery.