Category: tech

Blep!

Creating a Mastodon bot in Python

Bleps always cheer me up, so I decided to create a Mastodon bot that posted one blep a day. (A blep is a picture of an animal with a tiny bit of its tongue sticking out, and Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to Twitter.)

Creating a Mastodon bot in Python was surprisingly easy, thanks to the Mastodon.py library. I’ve documented all the steps here, along with links to tutorials for each library or builtin feature that I used.

Have you created any Mastodon or Twitter bots? Let me know in the comments!
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AI Image Denoising

I tried some free AI Image Denoising tools on a noisy, low-light photo. I had big hopes for a very sweet picture that’s just too noisy to put in a frame. Unfortunately, free tools didn’t get me anywhere.

ImgLarger
http://imglarger.com
Result: I can’t tell the difference between the original and the supposedly “denoised” image. 0/10 might as well not have bothered.

DeepAI Super Resolution model
https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/torch-srgan
using Super Resolution torch-srgan
Result: The image was noticeably denoised, but the result wasn’t very impressive.
Following enhance, the quality was still poor.

BigJPG
https://bigjpg.com
The free denoising is limited to 3000×3000 px, so I had to crop the picture.
Result: Another poor quality, unimpressive result.

https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/image-editor
After a series of unsatisfying results, I told it “do nothing”. and it closed the eyes and added some wrinkles. ooookay.
The prompt “watercolour painting, pastel colours, photorealistic, detailed image” was better but still mangled the face a bit horribly, and this algorithm seems really determined to make smiling faces squint.

Jami (Gnu Ring) review

An unavoidable fact of database support life is webconferences with clients or users. Most of the time, we’re more interested in what’s going on onscreen than in each others’ faces. But every now and then we need to have a face-to-face. Skype is popular, but I recently had the chance to try out a FOSS alternative with better security: Jami.
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