Vancurious Blog

History

Clergical stoles - traditions of distinction

Think of the last time you walked into a room.  Your mind trying to make sense of the scene: the objects, sounds, people present; your lizard brain sorting the space into 'safe' or 'suspect'.  Clothing provides a clue to identity, whether self defined or externally imposed.

Biking

Europe Brewery: Hertog Jan

The Hertog Jan brewery was opened in 1915 and the location was strategically chosen to be close to a natural springs, which provides the main ingredient for the beer.  The brewery took a lot of damage during WW II but was rebuilt.  However, in the 1980s the brewery was struggling and was looking to close.  A team of employees decided to take over the building and started to brew specialty beer instead of the historical pilsner.  These specialy beers are a success and start winning prizes and they haven't looked back since.

Biking

Bike Tour in Europe: taking your bike on the train

Yes, you can take your bike on the train, but we did find this the hardest and most stressful part of traveling with a bike in Europe.  And the least predictable.  Don't make your trip or time table contingent on catching a particular train!

Biking

Bike tour: planning and packing

After three weeks of biking through Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium,  here are some suggestions of what to bring, and what to plan for.

What to pack

In addition to the specialty bike gear mentioned in a previous post, here are some other things we found really handy:

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.