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

Updating the GenAI tooling

A lot has happened in the past 6 months in generative AI and models and tools have substantially improved.  We've upgraded from Stable Diffusion to a new base model called Flux, so let's have a look at how to install and use it.  We're also upgrading to a new client WebUI Forge, which looks very familiar to those already using Automatic 1111 but has some new features.   Automatic 1111 is no longer maintained, and Forge is a fork.  Note that Forge currently has a memory leak, and to fix it you have to periodically switch to a different base model to clear the GPU memory.

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

Home Networking 101: Minor security improvements

A typical home network setup

Let's start by looking at a typical home network after your local internet provider has set you up.  A typical home network will have the following three components: the internet, your ISP modem, and your home network with all your devices.

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

Home Networking 401: How to over-engineer your home network to perfection

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

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.