Second attempt at ControlNet
But as you can see, I still suck at anime styling, but getting there. Next order of business: attempt Style2Image.
(Artwork by my friend and former colleague @Sam Hong)
Subscription Hell
So in the last 2 short months I’ve subscribed to:
- Voice.ai (lifetime)
- NextDNS
- Midjourney
- ChatGPT+
- FPT Play
- VieOn (basically means suscribing to K+ and HBO Go also)
And that is on top of my existing subscriptions:
- Netflix
- Adobe Creative Cloud
I need help.
AI Pursuit Burnout
Keeping up with the latest tech/tools/terminology in the AI space is incredibly exhausting right now. It feels like every other week there’s a decade worth of development going on. I’ve never seen anything move at this speed since the dotcom era.
“Have you GPT it?” have officially replaced “Have you Google it?” when people ask each other any sort of question now (at least for those around me at least). And that is saying a lot. Anybody who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s remember how ‘Google’ became a verb. It took them a few years and it was already considered incredibly fast back then. GPT just did that in a matter of months.
There’s plenty of debate/discussion to be had regarding this tech of course, but for me I feel like those who rally against it are exactly like the traditional Xe Ôm driver before the arrival of ride hailing apps, or the radio operators before the rise of television, or the teachers of the past who organized protest against the use of calculator. Love it or hate it, it is something that will change world forever, and it’s here to stay.
Anybody remember when this tweet went viral just a few years back? Who’d think that less than 2 short years later it’s already changed. I often say to my friends that in addition to Googling, they need to list “prompt writing skill” in their resume as well. It often incites a laugh or a chuckle but I’m dead serious. You don’t want to take a backseat in this revolution unless you want to become obsolete.
My first foray into the scary world of generative AI
I finally caved in and deployed a local installation of Automatic1111 Stable Diffusion on my PC just to see what the fuss is all about. Got my mind blown within minutes.
October 24, 2022
Just learned that my mom got diabetes today.
I know it’s not like cancer, but still, why does it get me down so much.
Old age are catching up to us all.
Shout out to Portainer.io for the UI facelift
As an avid Portainer user and a UI designer, I just want to give a shout out to whoever worked on Portainer 2.15’s new UI facelift. They truly did a great job. Not only does it LOOK better, it actually addresses some of the minor annoyance that existed in the old UI.
Now to be clear, the old UI wasn’t trash or anything, it was pretty okay, but it wasn’t GREAT. And while it didn’t affect the way Portainer works, there were some minor visual bugs that bother UI designers and/or hardcore nitpicking perfectionists, and I just happen to be both.
Take the App Templates page for example. In the old version, there were no constraints set for the app icons, and since they come in all shapes and sizes, they often get stretched and distorted beyond recognition, making the page looking very amateurish.
That’s no longer the case
Nam Vu’s curated list of 18 excellent services you can self-host
It is no secret that I am a major self-hosting fanatic, but people have been asking specifically about what it is that I host my home “server” (which is a glorified term really, it’s only an old Pavillion laptop running a 4th gen core i5 and 8GB of DDR3 memory). Still
1. Authelia (Authentication and Authorization gateway)
Authelia is an authentication gateway. You only need to sign in once and you’ll get access to the whole server, but it’s not really SSO. You still need separate accounts for their respective applications. Still, having an additional layer of security in front of your services does provide peace of mind, especially when you combine it with Duo Security as a MFA method.
2. NGINX Proxy Manager (Reverse proxy)
There’s many reverse proxies out there, like Traefik and Caddy, which is actually what I started it. But I choose NPM due to its simplicity. Sure Traefik and Caddy may offer more fine tune controls and is more suitable for power users, but NPM just works™ with minimal configuration. It also handles SSL (via Let’s Encrypt) and its default configuration covers most of my need.
3. Jellyfin (Media Server)
This is it, this is what sent me down this self-hosting rabbit hole. Those who followed me would remember that I run a small movie club called Phimhub, and I started out with a WordPress website much like namvu.net, that listed (NOT hosted) a number of interesting movie titles for our group. Much to our dismay Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided they didn’t like the site and axed my account (no specific reason given). So I did what any reasonable person would do, and host my own media server, with blackjack and hookers.
Read MoreAbout UX Research
There are two key parts to every UX design project: conducting research to learn about the users you’re designing for, and gathering feedback about their perspectives. UX design is all about putting the user first, and research helps designers understand those users.
UX research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation and feedback. Your product design should be built upon research and facts, not assumptions. UX research aligns what you, as the designer, think the user needs with what the user actually needs.
Remember the product development life cycle from an earlier course of the program? The product development life cycle has five stages — brainstorm, define, design, test, and launch — that take an idea for an app, website, or product to its launch.
Let’s check out how research fits into the product development life cycle.
Logic Pro X theme for Audacity
If you recall I actually attempted to touch on this subject once in the past. That was back when I still used Photoshop for UI design, so that little screenshot took me like 3 days or something. Today I’m attempting to do it again but in Figma and see if I could do something similar in 3 hours.
What if Audacity has a theme that used the same design language as Apple’s Logic Pro X?
CODEX has left the scene
Even though I don’t really have time to play video games anymore these days, I still deeply respect these scene groups and what they did to make life enjoyable for millions of underprivileged children.
For those who didn’t get the subtle callouts in the text:
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