General – Page 4 – Macinations

July 10, 2023

💵 Paying for computer cycles likes it’s 1969

It’s interesting to see all these AI servers popping up all over the web. Some are language models, while others are specifically for image generation. What’s also interesting is how these system harken back to the mainframe days where you need to pay to use the cycles. Want a more comprehensive answer? Pay for credits or buy a subscription. Want an image larger than a postage stamp? Want to use something other than the craptacular demo render model for an image? Want to move your request up in the queue? I can understand these. There is a fair bit of computing power at play for generating AI images. It’s just funny how this model is a mirror of the early days of computing. You may have stacks of CPUs, GPUs, and Ram, but no work is done on your machine. Regardless of your computer power, when you want to do something with AI, especially images, it’s nothing but a dumb […]

July 4, 2023

JixiPix Summer Sale with 40% Off

There is a fantastic sale going on for 40% off the entire JixiPix line. Use the coupon HOT40SALE to save on the Premium Pack, Bundles, and individual titles. I’m a huge fan of JixiPix and their art tools. Over the last two years, I believed I purchased each app they offer. I started with the Premium Pack + Pro Bundle, then filled in the rest over the next few sales. I use them standalone and within Affinity Photo. I discovered them on a search to make a portrait look like an oil painting. That led me to Portrait Painter, which I love messing around with. Portrait Painter led me into Spektral Art, which can make images appear to glow, or melt, or look neon. I’ve got an entire desktop wallpaper collection of Spektral Art and beach scenes. Thing is, these are incredibly versatile tools that can run standalone or within another app. And the collection of effects is near endless. […]

June 25, 2023

💥 Fun with Comic Life 3

Comic Life is a full featured desktop publishing app for the design, layout, and publishing of comics. I’m not an artist, nor do I work on comics, but I have a great time using this tool to entertain my kids, and antagonize my teammates. For my kids, I like to make paneled comics with web images or screen captures from a movie. I set up my panels, drop in my images, then add speech bubbles to say something funny. I use this a ton during the holidays, especially Halloween, and Christmas. My other use is to antagonize my team by writing smart ass phrases using Comic Life’s Lettering feature, then drop them into Teams. I amuse myself to no end with Batman style Shazam! WTF? Or a giant Challenge Accepted banner in chat. I use these enough to have a whole library of them hooked up to text expansion keywords. Comic Life is like Affinity Publisher, but Comic Life focuses […]

June 18, 2023

📭 I was wrong, there is still tons of spam, but SpamSieve is tossing them away

The battle rages on! Pretty sure I’m in the lead though. Well, it was short lived. The drop in spam messages was just a lull in the action. It was nice for the 3 days it lasted, but it’s back to 40-50 messages a day. However, SpamSieve is in full swing, trashing every one of them, and working overtime. I’ve had to pull back a handful of good emails to mark them as Good, but I haven’t had to Train any as spam. SpamSieve is way more accurate than I expected. I’d rather have a few good messages hit the bin than the other way around. Trash them all and let me sort them out! 🙂 Putting the initial mishap aside, which was my fault, SpamSieve is well worth the investment. Yes, there have been a few false positives, but not only is that expected, people write spammy emails messages, SpamSieve hasn’t made the same mistake twice. If I say […]

June 11, 2023

💾 Copying 16TB with CopyQueue

I know I’m behind the times with spindle drives in external enclosures, but after deleting terabytes worth of duplicates and unneeded data, I need to move huge chunks of data. When you have tens of thousands of files, ranging in size from 200k to 10GB, how do you reliably move all that? Well, duh, you use Finder. Or use one of the many products with the word Finder in the name. Or, you use one of the dozen tools with the name Commander. That works when moving a few files. They’re fine transferring files from one SSD to another, but this is an older Mac Pro with spindle drives inside. There’s also spindle drives in enclosures. SSDs are awesome, but there is no such thing as a $99 8TB SSD. That’s the price of hard drives, so that’s what I have. The problem is, since I have large blocks of free space, I want to consolidate files and reorganize. I’m […]

💵 Paying for computer cycles likes it’s 1969

JixiPix Summer Sale with 40% Off

💥 Fun with Comic Life 3

📭 I was wrong, there is still tons of spam, but SpamSieve is tossing them away

💾 Copying 16TB with CopyQueue

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