AI, I.T., miscellaneous

I’ve played with Stable Diffusion a few months back, but the learning curve is steep, and easy access to DallE & MidJourney made it not worth it to press on. Until… I got excited about a super cool extension:

https://huggingface.co/monster-labs/control_v1p_sd15_qrcode_monster

I just love the idea of having the same image have one analog meaning to a human and discrete meaning to a machine. And the same extension can be used for general masking other than just QR codes.

Without further ado, here’s the eye candy:

A benign QR code

General masking for an almost subliminal effect

There’s much to be refined in my incantation, but I really like how the mask isn’t just overlayed on top of a drawing in a subtle way, rather it’s the basis for growth of AI hallucinations.

miscellaneous

Robin found it in a local river bed. It’s still fairly sharp and surprisingly light and well balanced. I have no idea if it is a real Native American artifact or not. For the stories of the past we like to entertain considering its origin, I hope the person who crafted it paused a minute to think of the stories of the future and who would find it. I hope some of the stuff I leave behind make a little boy’s day some time.

agriculture, self sustainability

There’s so much harvesting to do in the Fall. Nicole dug up a ton of potatoes while I was making cider.

Then I walked past the orchard and saw a whole bunch of hazelnuts ready to be picked, crap, I don’t even know what to do with them.

I’ll just grab a basket and figure it out later.

nature encounters

There’s a couple of baby coyotes hanging out all the time on the upper field. They take off whenever we show up.

Not to ruin a happy baby story, I think they are abandoned, have mange, and I’ve only seen one of them for the last few days :|.

It’s a bummer they’re having a hard time, I’ve rarely seen coyotes even though we hear them all the time, and I was happy to have a few encounters.

miscellaneous

But there was no way we would pay $25 per refill. After some apprehension (I don’t like things pressurized), I got a 10lb tank of CO2 and a gizmo to refill the original cylinders. Works like a charm and promises to be far cheaper per bubble. This might stir me to try carbonating cider, we’ve got a decent apple year ahead.

aesthetics, plots

It finished, 5 days total, looks awesome. Now I need to figure out what to do with such a big canvas, I don’t have a wall big enough for it at home.

With this successful test behind, I pause for a bit until the place becomes busier in the fall. I’ll try various experiments then.

plots

3 Days of uninterrupted work, it probably needs 2 more. Things have been going well so far, I’m starting to believe it’ll finish without a hitch. I’m swapping pens strategically so they don’t run out.

The cool software I used for this one yields cool artifacts when it renders.

I.T., plotters

I’ve recently gotten the ok to deploy a large gondola plotter in a public place. Theoretically, there is not limit to how large a gondola plotter can be. Practically, there are considerations to how large they get. I’ve been working on solving the various issues that arise from having a 10′ deployment. Of course with the ~20% margin to avoid extreme positions, it’s not 10’^2 drawable. Still though, there are many challenges due to the scale. Finding paper big enough is a challenge, so is moving it without damaging it. I figured out other quirks, it’s boring, let’s skip to the eye candy:

I have several public facing experiments lined up for it over the next few months or years. I’m not in a hurry. This is just a warm up to figure out what it means to deploy it in a public spot. What’s fairly clear though, is that there isn’t much I can do to make this better, and so this may be the culmination of a 5 years development effort.

That’s 3 days of the machine working non-stop, I’m watching the ink level closely and hope it’ll be done in a couple more days.

agriculture, self sustainability

It’s that time of the year we go raid the orchard every day for desert. We could sell some, especially since the price of berries in stores is insane, but that’d be work so we’d rather gift them to friends. It gives them excuses to come over :).

I had never eaten berries until I just couldn’t, it’s so nice to enjoy them without restraint. They also taste much better fresh off the plant. As with maple syrup, producing large quantities of something drastically changes the way you get to enjoy it. I’m not worried about there not being enough for others, or thinking about the expense of it. You can just chug down as many as is enjoyable without afterthought. I’m more worried about making sure the excess doesn’t go to waste.

The chickens clean up the berries that fell on the ground. Sometimes they pick direct from the plants, but not enough to make a dent.

aesthetics, plots

Some of the mechanical imprecisions of the machine come out on such a plastering of strokes, it’s got a good presence in a room nonetheless.

self sustainability, wood

Every year, one rainy Summer day the flues and the stoves undergo a deep cleaning. A rainy day is perfect because I can’t do much else and the soot is kept down when I work on the pipes outside. This year Esther was interested, and even though it’s VERY messy work I involved her. She did great and we had a discussion about how she’d be able to maintain her stove in her cabin. Music to my ears. I like that this is a default for her, she might not even have the concept of a house without a stove.

I remove the stove pipe, to clean up the inside all the way out the roof. It’s messy even with great efforts to catch it all.

The pipes hooked to the stove are taken outside to be cleaned. Ben’s pro tip: mark the pipes with chalk where you’re separating them, it makes it easier to line them back up.

We go through all the insides of the stove and clean up accumulated ash. The first firing of the year is usually very hot because no ash is there to provide insulation.

We move very slowly to keep flying ash particles to a minimum.

Everything gets scrubbed six ways to Sunday, first with soap, then with baking soda, followed by much rinsing. We cook on the stove for most of the year, it needs it. When it’s all clean we protect the iron with stove paste, I’m not sure what it does to protect it but you can definitely feel some patches soak up more paste than other. I’d do it just because it makes the stove beautiful.

Esther has lots of very good practical question these days, she understands how a stove works now. Apparently I’ll still be the one sweeping her cabin’s chimney.

We still love burning wood with no end in sight. This stove is the most important thing in the house and I take pleasure in giving it its ritualistic pampering.

self sustainability, wood

The oak went exactly where I wanted, but I misestimated its height. I should be able to patch the shed back up.

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