Categories
PC Nerding

AI Art

Months passed since last post, again, life didn’t give me enough free time to goof around. The new cool internet fad is generative AI Art. You write a prompts and an AI tries to guess and creates art for you. I tried a bunch, each has different way to interpret your stuff, each has a different art style, unless you specify in a detailed way what kind of image and style you are looking for.

Here’s a list of what I tried until now, all with an example prompt of cute cow logo, round background shape, pastel colors. My current logo is a paid stock image and I won’t replace it as I like it a lot, but as you can see most AI results here are actually pretty good, something one could professionally use.

CrAIyon
https://www.craiyon.com
The only one truly free, formerly know as DALLE-E mini.
Each prompt generates 9 images.

Enstil.AI
https://enstil.ai/
Another free AI. Faster and higher quality than Craiyon, but results are less accurate. Each prompt generates 3 images.

No longer available.

DALL-E 2
https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
50 Free credits. 15 free credits each month. $15/115 credits. Each prompt or variation consume 1 credit and generate 4 images.
Requires registration and waiting for an invite.

MidJourney
https://www.midjourney.com/home/
25 minutes (around 25 prompts). Then montlhy sub starting at $10 for 200 miniutes (200 prompts). Each prompt/variation roughly use a minute and generates 4 images.

Stable Diffusion
https://beta.dreamstudio.ai/
Online beta with 200 free prompts. Then 10拢 for 1k prompts. Each prompt generates one image.
Stable Diffusion is actually Open Source, so you can run it locally if you have a recent high VRAM (10 gb recommended) Nvidia GPU.
Little SD update: https://rentry.org/GUItard . Here’s a link to a noob proof guide for installing SD on your pc, optimized for 6GB VRAM cards and with a low memory (4GB VRAM) mode.

2022 Oct 16: An update a couple months later

I’ve used all of these for a while, I’d say there’s no winner, each have different strengths. In my opinion:

Craiyon is free and basically a toy compared to the others.
Enstil died like a week after this post.
Dall-E2 is great for art, impainting and outpainting features
MidJourney has the best “artsy” art.
Stable Diffusion is the most versatile but the hardest for a newbie to get into, it’s the last one I named but it’s the one I used the most for two reasons. First reason: I can run it locally or I can use all the available online ML services (I mostly use Google Colab and Paperspace Gradient, but there are more like Vast.ai or Runpod.io) when you need a more powerful GPU. Second reason: you can use Dreambooth to train a custom model for your Stable Diffusion install, I trained it on my own face and use it to make fake photos and art. I’ll let the pics speak for me.

Categories
PC Nerding

Favourite folder in KeePass

First of all, all due credits go to this post by Mark on Sourceforge, many thanks to this unsung hero of the web.

Seven years ago I made a smallish tutorial on KeePass, as my password database grew I started adding multiple groups and sub-groups and my most used passwords ended up being buried and requiring too many clicks.

Seven years later I decided it was time to have them readily available on when I open the database, but I didn’t want to lose my neatly organized passwords. Thanks to Mark today I will show you how to add a “Favourites” view to KeePass, using KP’s triggers.

Default boring KeePass window
Favourites shown on the starting page and a “Show Favourites” button to instantly load that view.
Categories
3D Printing Nerding

Learn how to make more cool Christmas lithophanes

Clickbaity title, isn’t it? This year, and this time in time for Christmas, I want to show you another great lithophane generator. A couple years ago I posted Make your own Christmas Lithophane decoration about making spherical lithophanes you could hang on your Christmas tree. In accordance with EU laws to avoid any kind of personal data handling I don’t track users at all and I don’t keep any kind of metric, but it’s my most commented post so far, so I guess people like and make these a lot.

Now let’s cut the small useless talk and get to the point: Go to itslitho.com to see the new lithophane generator I’m talking about. It’s more feature-complete than the one I used in the earlier post, keep in mind this does not mean “it’s better”, for some people the other one is simpler and easier to use. This time I won’t be explaining every single feature of this editor, it has too many for lazy Muu? to show you. As you will see from the screenshot below, it does feature a preview window

itlitho screenshot
You can actually preview the model as you edit it!

It’s Litho profile examples

What I’m showing you today is a bunch of examples, one using led tealights, one using the old Christmas ball decoration led and one that can use both lights. The best part of this site is that allows you to save and share profiles, you can see in this preview what my creations look like and access the relative profile directly by clicking on it.

Image formats and lithophane lights

Regarding image format, for the first two profiles I kept the same 4:1 ratio reusing my previous dog photo collage, while for the Holy Bell I made a new 2:1 image with my town’s Basilica (Church) Patron Saints Antonio Abate and Francesca Saverio Cabrini. More details on them on Wikipedia (in Italian) if you actually care.

The led candle lithophane uses these candles, the Christmas tree lithophanes use these shitty small led lights (the same 1-hour LEDs we used in Make your own Christmas Lithophane decoration, if you bought a 30 pack like me and have a surplus), the Holy Bell one can actually use both, making for a great standalone light or Christmas tree decoration.

Results

Now what kind of asshole blogger would write a 3D printing post without sharing the actual results? Here’s a small preview and a video of the flickering led candle.

I hope you like these lithophanes too!