At the start of January, my coworker and former-roommate sent me a message with a link to a guitar kit on Temu, [temu guitar link]Not gonna build the Temu Electric Guitar? similar kits are on ebay and I thought about it because there were some fretless ones. They're, uh, not good. I think the one reason to get them is the body. Throw away everything else. lmao. I'd venmo you half the cost if you buy it And this is how we wound up here, because in return, he wanted me to write about building t...| Opinionated Guides
Friday, September 13th # On Friday, September 13th 2024, I found a new issue had been opened on the GitHub repo for this site. This issue has since been deleted (the page 404’s) but I still have the email I got as a notification when the issue was made Dear @VegaDeftwing: I hope this message finds you well. From ScanOSS, we are constantly reviewing open source code and noticed the use of language that could be considered vulgar or inappropriate on one of your repositories.| Blog on Opinionated Guides
There are a few social ettique things that people sometimes handle incorrectly over text, much to the detrimant of their own relationships. After dealing with these so many times, I thought maybe having a source to point to that says “Not only does this bother me, but it’s bothered me enough, historically, that I’ve written exactly how, why, and how to avoid it” might help. Rule 1: No anxious cliffhangers # we need to talk 1:12 PM Why?| Opinionated Guides
This page is targeted at a non-technical audiance. Right now, AI is moving crazy fast in multiple areas: Generating images in most any style, including photo-realistic to the point of deception This is quickly moving to include video generation as well This also includes manipulating existing images Generating descriptions of photos Generating speech from text in a way that is almost totally convincing This includes making new speech models from existing recordings of voices Generating near-h...| opguides.info
Last week I went to an airshow with the Blue Angels and yesterday I went to the Nebraska State Fair. The Fair Scammer # My state, Nebraska, is largely agricultural, so it should be no surprise that the fair had multiple buildings stuff to the brim with animals - cattle, sheep, chickens, pigs - and while I find factory farming of the animals stomach churning, I’m also not about to stop eating meat (I guess my stomach is more powerful than my will), and either way, that’s not really what wa...| Blog on Opinionated Guides
Preface # This is a uses page. I want to preface everything by saying I am very fortunate to have all of the stuff I have. I like my stuff. But, ultimately, it’s just stuff. I know I do not use any of it to its maximum potential. It makes me happy to have it, but I also don’t need the vast, vast majority of it to accomplish the majority of what I want to accomplish.| opguides.info
I previously wrote AI Art Panic about how this image generation stuff isn’t going to displace artists much if at all, but, uh, it didn’t age well. I said that it was more likely to simply augment how artists work. I wrote about how it had limitations, like not being able to generate somebody’s personal character. Small problem with that assessment: Character is owned by me, art is by Siplick Character is owned by me, art created with DreamBooth trained model.| Blog on Opinionated Guides
Quantization is the process of constraining an input from a continuous or otherwise large set of values (such as the real numbers) to a discrete set (such as the integers). - wikipedia I’m less than two months from graduating with degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. One subject that comes up a lot in both fields is Quantization. Reading audio in to a micocontroller from a DAC? That continuous signal, represented physically by infinite values, now may only have 1...| Blog on Opinionated Guides
I removed this post due to it being a downer. If you view the page source, you can un-comment it, but I have decided the hate from strangers doesn’t matter. Comic by Chats With The Void (@skullbird) on Twitter| Blog on Opinionated Guides
The term digital native describes a young person who has grown up in the digital age, in close contact with computers, the Internet, and video game consoles, and later mobile phones, social media, and tablets. The term is often used to refer to millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha; the latter two are sometimes described as distinct “neo-digital natives”, “true” digital natives, or “digital integrators”. ‘Digital Native’ on Wikipedia You know how every headline about...| Blog on Opinionated Guides
This paper was written for CSCE-430, Computer Architecture at University Of Nebraska - Lincoln in Spring of 2021. This in-page view isn’t all that great, so feel free to download the pdf directly. If you would like to read the refrenced papers, I recommend using Sci-Hub with a VPN on, as the academic publishers putting up paywalls as barriers to science can go fuck themselves. Previous Next Page: /| Blog on Opinionated Guides
Super brief post about one of the more fun projects I setup recently: a lil’ time lapse script #!/bin/bash CAM=$(v4l2-ctl --list-devices | grep C920 -A 1 | grep /dev | awk '{$1=$1};1') #Uncomment the next line to verify it's using the correct device #echo $CAM ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s 1920x1080 -i $CAM -ss 0:0:2 -frames 1 "/mnt/data/lapse/tl$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S").jpg" I have multiple cameras on my system, but only wanted output from the better one, the C920.| opguides.info
The year is 2022. In the world of social media, Twitter has long been the platform of choice for politicians, celebrities, and everyday users alike. But as the years have passed, the once-mighty site has struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of the internet. As the lines between the virtual and the physical world blur, Twitter becomes a battleground for hackers, activists, and corporate interests. Despite the best efforts of its engineers and executives, the site is p...| opguides.info
I’m not being paid to say any of this, I haven’t spoken to any of the companies listed here except for Noisedeck, which while is made by two really awesome people, also gets a pretty nasty review here because it doesn’t work for this use case. Sleepy Circuits, which I’ve only talked to. I don’t even own their hardware. Furthermore, I have paid my own money for Visual Synthesizer, Cathodemer, and KodeLife.| opguides.info
Post originally published March 22 of 2021, date above represents most recent edit The Nebraska Union at UNL, photo by ensign_beedrill, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons At the time of writing, I am currently a student at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, where I study Computer and Electrical Engineering as a dual major. I have a serious passion for both of these subjects, which is why I am so incredibly frustrated at how negative my experience at UNL has been, especially in the classes...| opguides.info
Plots of land & Euclidean space # One of the bigger points of the metaverse is the idea of owning a slice of digital property. This is a weird mix of the scarcity and value from real life property and the domain name (like myfancyname.com) market. It also makes no god damn sense in this context, and is really just artificially putting limitations into a system for the sake of making yet another crypto currency.| opguides.info
From time to time, I get asked about my religion. Sometimes, “asked” is putting it lightly, like when my SO’s father asked if I believe in a God, but made it very clear there was only one right answer if I wanted to date my SO. Sometimes I’m asked with honest curiosity, as when people find out I grew up in a mixture of Wicca and Christianity, people wonder how that works, and what I came out believing in.| opguides.info
I bitch about consumerism a lot, yet, I like things. So that’s what this post is about. Things. Things I’ve bought over the last few years and what things fall into “OhMyGod This is Life Changing”, “A Bit of a Mixed Bag” and “How Did You Fuck This Up?”. Because I know not everyone cares about all these products, I’m going to skip right to the juicy bit- the thinking about what lessons come from this thinking:| opguides.info
So, you’ve got a website that you want to make use less bandwidth. Maybe you’re paying by the byte for content delivery, maybe you’re worried about the environment, either way, let’s assume you want to make your images as small as possible. The obvious place to start is just shrinking your images. Here, this is a 4032x2268 .jpg shrunk down to a 1008x567 .jpg - 25% of the original quality.| opguides.info
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH LEGISLATURE OF NEBRASKA, FIRST SESSION: That we hereby reaffirm our solemn oaths of office by expressing a firm resolution to maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Nebraska against every act of aggression whether foreign or domestic, including every act of unconstitutional abuse of power arising from the state or federal government.| opguides.info
Most of these things probably exist. For many, it’s just that they don’t exist at a practical price point. Without further ado, In no particular order A not garbage, not phone based, IR camera that doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars Yes. I know the FLIR and SEEK Thermal cameras are a thing, but both have their share of software problems or hardware incompatibilities. Most of all, I don’t want to have to hope that their app keeps working with my phone at risk of a $250 paper weight.| opguides.info
My name is Vega. I have to tell myself that a lot, reminding myself of who I am. I know that may sound weird, but, if it wen’t already obvious, it isn’t my legal name. (yet.) Despite my best efforts, my parents still call me by my ‘old’ name. I’m hesitant to call it a dead name, as I’m not trans. I don’t think it’s the same or that it’s fair to claim that it is.| opguides.info
When I looked into the mirror this morning, I wasn’t sure who I was looking at. Is that me? Is that really what I look like now? Has this years long separation from reality caused me to not recognize my own face, or would it have happened anyway- a side effect of growing older. If you saw me, would you even recognize me? Or am I the ship of Theseus, digested by the carnivore that we call time, now fertilizer for someone you’ve never met?| opguides.info
History # Before I can get into how OpGuides works now, I need to provide some history so that you can learn from my mistakes. The first iteration of OpGuides was OpinionatedEngineering.md. A single markdown file so long that the scroll bar was hard to grab. It was meant to be viewed and distributed not as a website, but as a file to be opened with https://typora.io (so that the html and everything rendered- though in theory any markdown editor would do)| opguides.info
I use VCV Rack a lot. I normally use it on Windows as running VSTs in Linux is still a bit of a PITA and If I’m going to make music I want to have access to all of my tools. However, I still want to be able to use VCV on Linux for processing guitar when taking breaks from working on other things without having to reboot over to Windows.| opguides.info
The year is 198x. # I stare at my amber terminal. Hexadecimal fills my screen and my mind has become lost in the flow of 6502 assembly, as I hand optimize the code flow. I’m interupted when I recieve a message from my friend, _Maverik, he’s excited about the ground breaking CGI in Tron. Nostalgia is a weird feeling. We can forget when things happened, and misttribute things to entirely different decades.| opguides.info
As I walked to my car after class I could smell the ashes of a cigarette and hear the echos of a train scraping on its tracks. The cool foggy air held still beams of light. It looked like a scene from Blade runner, but I couldn’t help but feel like the Android’s of it’s inspiration, lusting after something to make me feel alive. The drive home was mentally taxing. The fog so dense that cars ahead seemed to be balls of light floating in the distance and keeping sight of the lines to stay...| opguides.info
If you’ve been on the internet at all lately, you’ve seen AI generated art and discussion of the impact of the tools. You’ve also probably seen a lot of hate for AI generated art. There’s a lot of drama going on, as art focused communities across the internet decide how to handle this. Does AI generated/assisted art need tagged as such? Should it be allowed at all? There’s the whole Deviant Art situation (ArsTechnica).| opguides.info