I'm a 34 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Parallel Desktop Mac VM Network Issues
If you use Parallel Desktop on a M1 M2 Apple Silicon mac, the experience is not great. Its their first stab at using the new Apple Hypervisor virtualization framework. You will notice all of the settings pages are basically none existent. On a fresh install of a VM, it seems to work fine but over time things stop working. One of them may [...]
bz2 File Compression
bz2 file compression isn’t the fastest compression but its performance MB/s and Compression ratio graphs are nearly flat compared to most other compressions. That being said, there is one graph that isn’t often shown and its the memory usage of bz2. To make those others operation in a near flat range, memory is the tradeoff. [...]
InvokeAI GPU Memory Usage
InvokeAI is a powerful tool to run Generative AI like Stable Diffusion easily on your own machine if you have a dedicated GPU. How much GPU memory do you need? All of these results were with a Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti with 8GB, with a target of 50 iterations. 512×512 = 3.5GB in 7s1024×1024 = 5.4GB in 35s1280×768 = 5.4GB in [...]
AWS EC2 + Wireguard
I’m a fan of not leaving common ports like 22 (SSH) or 3306 (MySQL DB) open to the public but really like being able to access those ports from my laptop. I used to use security groups and limit access by IP to my home network. Now, most consumer internet is not static IP but I find providers like comcast do not change the IP very [...]
Matomo SMTP through Amazon SES
If you are self-hosting a matomo analytic instance, you may consider using Amazon SES to send the actual emails for password resets and scheduled reports. Getting the settings right can be a little painful though. Note: Make sure to create your SMTP credentials in a region that has full email support, I normally use us-east-2 [...]
Most Popular Mastodon Instances
One of the hard parts of getting started on Mastodon is trying to pick what instance you want to create your account on. Once created you can access the entire federated universe but much like old email addresses in the past (you know before everyone mostly uses gmail now), the server you pick will be visible after your username. (Feel [...]
7zip CLI to Generate sha256 Checksum File
On Windows you have a nice option to right click on a file and have 7zip generate a sha256 file that sits next to the file. I wanted to script up a linux file server to go through and find all iso files and place the sha256 hash next to it. As you can see from the menu, its not the easiest thing to get to. But with this script you can [...]
