Geek Gathering

All things Geek and Beautiful.   This section will have random posts about any cyber, software engineering or IT topics, as well as program and portfolio management.   I work as Sr Manager Cloud Platforms and Software Engineering for a billion dollar global retailer; my posts reflect my personal opinion and best knowledge at the time.

Geek Gathering

Networking concepts explained for the non-techie

Networking concepts are not easy and please don't ever let anyone make you feel bad for not knowing.   This is not something you are usually taught in schools, or by your parents, friends, or anyone!  Read "It is complicated" for my rant on this.

Geek Gathering

How to create a more secure home network

In case you're wondering - yes, yes you can make your home network more secure, with a little bit of effort and money.  

Check out this other post about slightly improving your typical home network.  This post takes it one step further, and will assume you spend a tiny bit of money (~$200) and a couple of hours of your time.  Note that this is not a recommended architecture for a small business.

Geek Gathering

It's complicated

Why are computers and networks so complicated?  Why can't we protect ourselves from cyber criminals?  Why can't someone explain to me quickly how the internet works?   We don't get educated on these concepts that have now become essential knowledge to navigate the world.

Imagine you met a frozen-in-ice-come-back-to-life prehistoric person.    And you and your new friend were dropped off in the Save-On-Foods to get food.  You have so much acquired knowledge about things that will flummox your prehistoric friend, for example

Geek Gathering

** WIP ** How to over-engineer your home network to perfection

Note: this article is applicable to home and small business network architecture

-- words in progress --

Introduction

I cleverly preempted your first question ("why the heck are you making it so complicated, no-one is trying to compromise my network anyway") by including "over-engineered" in the title... :)

Geek Gathering

Drupal 10: Creating interactive map using Leaflet

WORK IN PROGRESS

I'm hoping to get a map page added to the blog that would allow me to provide a user experience that displays a number of locations, and clicking on that location would navigate to the blog post about that.  Most sites seem to recommend the 'Leaflet module" which seemed to do exactly that.   Sounds relatively easy!  Install the module, and off we go!

However, it has proven a lot more confusing that I thought it would be; here's what I learned.  Again, I'm using Drupal version 10.

Geek Gathering

Gaming: my favourites from 2023

 

A purely self-indulgent post :) 

1 Final Fantasy XIV

My most favourite game.   After the WoW (World of Warcraft) universe - where I had logged over 10 years of playing - changed from being a great, friendly and collaborative place to a nasty, uncouth, homophobic and gender unfriendly environment and I finally gave up on it,  and switched to Final Fantasy XIV.  

Geek Gathering

Generative AI: creating images with Stable Diffusion using a LoRA (TXT2IMG)

If you have created or found a LoRA (see previous article), we can use Stable Diffusion's image generation from a text prompt ("TXT2IMG") to make awesomeness. 

First, move the LoRA file to the Stable Diffusion folder.  If you trained the LoRA yourself, take the output from the last epoch, which is the one that doesn't have the '000001' (for the epoch number) in the file name, and move it to the stable-diffusion/models/Lora folder.

Geek Gathering

Generative AI: Beginners Guide on how to train a LoRA for Stable Diffusion using Kohya

Big shout-out to my partner: who provided the experience on what settings work in which cases as they have far more patience than I do to experiment:) 

I wanted to try to create a LoRA that would help generate images that looked like a medieval city.  I had lots of pictures from our trips to Europe, so used those.  Make sure you avoid any copyright infractions with your selection of images to train on!!