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.
Helpful Mac CLI Settings
Mac tries to be the os where everything just works, but there are actually a lot of really powerful and useful settings that do not appear anywhere in the UI. This is a growing list of the hidden options that I use. Show hidden files Open finder to a folder Press Command + Shift + . (period key) Avoid creating .DS_Store files on network [...]
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 [...]
Dealing with False Positives of Golang Apps on Windows
Golang is a great language to build cross platform apps but if you look at the Windows executable, you may notice it has a higher chance of triggering antivirus tools with a false positive compared to Linux or Mac. Hello World Baseline So let’s take the most basic of apps. Hello World just opens a new process on the machine, makes [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
