's blog

Bringing a Dog back to Focus with AI

This lovely Golden Hovawart dog has recently passed away. Her owner wanted to print a picture of her late dog. Girls being girls, the picture she chose was quite a ktisch and slightly out of focus. Until Sharpen AI.

AI music will give you the creeps

Even if you live on Mars, you must’ve noticed the creative powers of AIs. Last few months, the internet was full of amazing, text or image generating artificial intelligence algorithms. One creative field seems to be left out. Music.

Apple Wallet Discount Cards for Modern Gastronomy

My dear friend & client has just recently opened a bar, K7, just in the middle of Prague’s hip–famous Krymská street. As he wanted to offer discounts to his soon to be regulars, we did a brief brainstorm.

How to offer customers loyalty cards, without handing them a plastic thing, which nobody ever carries with them anyway?

Drink or two later, we had a brainwave. Digital Wallet Passes. For both Apple & Google.

Creative AI Battle: DALL·E vs Midjourney

July 2022 has brought us public betas of two impressive AI services for generating original images from text, OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 and Midjourney.

Both AIs offer similar “tell me what to paint” (text to image) service. Both use diffusion algorithms to reduce initial noice to an image matching your prompt, both utilise huge models trained on billions of parameters.

Let’s explore their features, strengths and weaknesses.
Note: when sharing AI generated image, always tell your prompt.

Making KioskPi — custom Raspberry Pi OS image using Pi-Gen

How to make use of Pi-Gen, a tool used to create Raspberry Pi OS images. Today, we’re gonna create our own Pi OS image featuring a Web-Based Kiosk with HDMI-CEC control. Minimalistic and performance-oriented. No desktop environments or Chromes to slow us down.

My specific use case is making a digital menu card to be displayed at three portrait mounted TVs in my friend’s canteen.

Error Boundary for Next.js API routes

Next.js ships with a simple, yet powerful router for JSON / REST APIs. There are, however, two features I’ve found missing. Error boundary and HTTP method recognition. Let’s have a look how to handle them.

TLDR: npm i next-api-wrapper

MySQL as smart JSON storage

I’ve been using this semi-relational, or SemiSQL, if you’d like, approach to SQL since around 2009. At first, I’d store the data as text or longtext types using PHP’s serialize(), but then I quickly moved to JSON.

In late 2015, with MySQL 5.7.8, our prayers were answered and the native support for JSON datatype was introduced. 🙏

Let’s have a look at the best practices using JSON in MySQL 8.

How to rename currently operating Linux user

rsync error
protocol version mismatch -- is your shell clean?

Here’s my full solution on automated backups using chroot.
TLDR; if you’re only interested in making rsync work, head near the end.