On the bright side, the 24 hours of thunderstorms dropped the temperature by 15°F.

“Welcome to the party, pal!”

An announced feature in iOS 27 (which I thought was going to be the “stability-focused” release) is the ability to use the currently-laughable GenAI “Image Playground” app to make… wallpaper.

Ten bucks says it’ll suck until Apple finally buys somebody else’s image-generation app.

(the one time I tried this app, it absolutely refused to draw a catgirl; Apple’s just been phoning it in on AI and Siri since the beginning)

Speaking of wallpaper…

When I ask Klein to generate SF-ish wallpaper in widescreen format, around 10% of the time it reveals that its training material included a lot of watermarked screenshots and promo pics from games, including Korean and Chinese games.

So I use the base2edit SwarmUI extension, telling Klein to perform the following edits on every image: “Remove all watermarks, logos, and signatures from the bottom edge of the image. Remove all black borders from the edges of the image.” It seems to work pretty well.

I really need to run a large batch of cheesecake with “Remove all extra limbs. Add all missing limbs. Ensure each human hand with visible fingers has four fingers and a thumb on the correct side, and that each human foot with visible toes has five toes with the big toe on the correct side.”

Mostly to see if it actually works, or if it’s just one of those magic-feather things. 😁

(I can get Klein to generate a fantastic futuristic scene, but it still populates it with contemporary cars, sigh)

Laser-focused on security…

A new Windows zero-day exploit is based on a security hole Microsoft claimed they fixed six years ago. Not clear if they accidentally reintroduced it due to incompetence, or simply never fixed it, also due to incompetence.

Farm Harem Never 2, episode 7

Y’know, usually when you finally reach the hot springs episode of a series, you don’t spend half the episode actually building a hot springs resort. This week is an attempt to catch up to the plot while scrubbing any traces of harem motivations from the adaptation. This also means that the audience is not rewarded with fan-service when a bunch of the gals strip down and go for a soak.

Verdict: sigh.

(no new fan-art from this series, because they haven’t really done anything new, and I used up pretty much everything from last season)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 8

We begin this week on a sinister note, as the shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions-ever enforcers of the magical world instantly decide that Coco is one of those witches, and move straight to the memory-wipe spell, only to discover that the element of surprise works both ways. The quite serious confrontation is defused when Our Scruffy Roommate points out that there are a bunch of civilians still in need of rescue.

The week also ends on a sinister note.

Verdict: the plot thickens when stirred.

(do not mess with Witch-Daddy’s daughters!)

Well that explains it!

When I updated the OS on my Mac Saturday, the first thing it did after rebooting was delete the ChatGPT app as malware. This was not negotiable.

Why? Hacked.

The Shout is strong in this one, with Our Not-Just-A-Slave-Dealer kicking it off, and even Our Lusty Busty Landlady gets in on the act, demanding a magical bubble bath in return for a peek at Milfy Muff that somehow doesn’t faze Our Hero in the slightest. Meanwhile, we get to see Our Best Guild Catgirl, but only fully dressed from neck to ankles. There is no justice in this shouty world.

Verdict: half-credit for milf-service.

(lack of catgirl-service is… Torture)

Schrödinger’s Delivery

Packages originally promised by 11 AM Friday:

1:15 PM Your package is out for delivery!
…
1:15 PM Now expected tomorrow by 6 PM

Clear as mud, thanks. Fortunately they arrived at 4:30 PM. Friday.

Just A Job To Do…

“It started out as a simple fender-bender, but then a case was filed with the WWWA and since the Central Computer chose to dispatch you two, the conflict was resolved by setting a city on fire, dropping a continent into the ocean, and then the entire planet’s atmosphere was contaminated with noxious gas.”
– The Dirty Pair Strike Again, 1985, chapter 1

(suddenly I have an idea for a New Dirty Pair series…)

“What’s the pretty lady going to do with that?”

(classical reference)

Waifu Wallpaper

For amusement, I used Sigal to generate a gallery of all the cheesecake wallpaper I generated for my 4K vertical monitor.

[Update: Sigal automatically handles sub-albums, so I used split to break it up into a bunch of 100-pic galleries. I had to delete the whole thing and re-upload it, because I'm low on disk space on this server...]

Download links are included for the full 4K images. Newest stuff is at the end.

Waifupaper

[Reminder To Self: I've temporarily moved this to my new test machine, which I built with a bigger disk; eventually I'll move the IP address and generate a bunch of fresh certs, and it will take over for all my sites]

Dam furriners!

Seems someone wanted to blow up a dam in Alabama.

(I have no idea what species this gal is, but… I’d hit that)

On the bright side…

Even the village idiot joined this 9-0 Supreme Court decision that freight brokers who use shady illegal trucking companies can be prosecuted sued for the damage and injuries they cause.

(the big-eye look doesn’t always work out…)

The obvious solution!

It never occurred to me until just now, but if you buy a robot waifu in Japan and she gets broken, of course you repair her with kintsugi!

Linux Of The Day: Pop!_OS

First things first: the Macbook’s wifi just worked in the live-boot environment. Crazy, I know. Of course, the GUI started out in dank dark mode with tap-to-click enabled, but both settings were easily fixed in the control panel, and I didn’t even have to reverse the scrolling direction on the touchpad. They offer a variety of options for menu bar and app launcher, but the default was an obviously Mac-derived menu at top, dock at bottom.

Even in “light” mode, the default (and only installed) color scheme for the terminal was black text on a medium-gray background. Opaque, fortunately, so I could read it despite the skittle-text.

Since the live-boot environment looked promising, I launched the actual installer, selected a standard install, and hit “Go”. It exited.

TL/DR, it dumps core while trying to find a disk to install on (despite the GUI and CLI tools allowing me to partition and format the drive). There are no command-line options. Google found nothing useful.

[Update: the root cause of the core dump was that the Macbook has two NVME devices. This didn't bother any other distro, but the PopOS installer probed the second one, didn't find a valid partition table, tried to create one, and failed. Because the second device was only 8K in size. So I opened a terminal window and ran sudo rm -f /dev/nvme0n2. The installer no longer saw the mystery disk, and proceeded normally. Now to find out if they correctly handle sleep!]

[Update: no, they do not, which I expected. Still, this is pretty much the most successful desktop Linux install on this hardware, so I'll stop for now.]

Another day, another kernel patch

Linux server up to date after the latest privilege-escalation vulnerability? Nazzo fast, Guido.

“He chose… poorly.”

Farm Harem Never lead actor:

When we were deciding on direction with this series with the director, in the original source material, the harem aspect with the girls was strongly pushed in the manga. In the anime, we decided that we should try to pull back from the harem aspect and focus on the slow life aspect of the series so we can make it a more easy-to-watch experience.

Unrelated, I swear

I sometimes wish Amazon would tell me which of my purchases it thinks a recommendation is related to…

Yet Another Linux Distro: Bazzite

This one is optimized for gaming, which means proprietary driver support. So, while it couldn’t load the Mac-specific wireless driver in the install environment, it worked once it was finished. Oddly, though, the USB ethernet adapter does not work. It’s detected as a network interface, but NetworkManager wants nothing to do with it, and there isn’t a real network control panel in the KDE GUI environment. I can do this shit from the command line (Fedora-based, by the way), but “less-sophisticated users” cannot.

Also, defaults to dark mode, and the terminal had dark tinyfonts on a translucent dark background, and switching to a black-on-white theme did not change the automatic text-color-coding, so much of it was unreadable. This does nothing to dispel the stereotype that Linux developers live in dark caves and feed on the flesh of the Eloi. I do not want Skittle-text in my terminal windows. Ever.

For even more fun, the flatpack app-manager Bazaar that’s installed by default on the toolbar does not work. The icon bounces a few times when you launch it, and then it silently fails. Manually running sudo /usr/sbin/bazaar works fine, and got Brave and 1Password installed.

The most annoying thing, though, was that it was configured to try to sleep after N minutes, even plugged in. Which causes it to lock up when it wakes and can’t read the disk. Sigh. Easy to disable from the control panel, at least.

Farm Harem Maybe 2, episode 6

At this point, I have to conclude that they’re just taunting the audience. First we have Our Plowing Hero officially winning the right to bang angels, including Second Wife Tia, but not noticing that that’s what just happened. Then he mediates a marriage between Hakuren’s Wimpy Little Brother and His Stalker Fiancée, leading Hakuren’s Other Brother to hint that everyone knows she’s looking to ride the divine tool, and the dragon lady herself to openly state her intentions, both of which fly right over his head.

Verdict: sanitized for your (over-) protection.

(dragon princess is unrelated)

Witch Hat Atelier, episode 7

In which many lessons are learned, and the animation budget is once again well-spent.

Verdict: gosh, it’s like someone’s out there pulling the strings!

Mythos Mostly Mastered Marketing

According to the author of curl, the AI model “too dangerous to release” not only ain’t much to write home about, but the people invited to try it were only allowed to watch someone else use it on their behalf.

Last week ended with Our Shouty Hero being given a seriously over-powered bow. This week, he uses it (and the power of Our Shouty Loli Sage) to rush back to the rescue of Our Shouty Furry Knight. With incredibly convenient timing, he temporarily restores Furry’s Full Power, making quick work of the undeafeatable silver wolf that had just defeated them all. Meanwhile, Our Shouty Button Elf is squeezed into a strapless magical dress; it has to be magical, because it held up far better than her usual buttons. Upon discovering that she was called home to become the wife of someone with even less common sense than she has, she promptly fled back to a life of adventure, but not before giving her lesbian maid one last free show.

If this sounds over-packed, it was, to the point that they finished wrapping up the plot threads over the ED music, denying us the wholesome sight of a dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

Verdict: no dark-skinned catgirl in lingerie.

(silver wolf is unrelated)

Wow, desktop Linux is catching up to Windows!

I ran apt upgrade last night on agott, and came back eight hours later to find it sitting at a screen demanding I set a Secure Boot password. No explanation of why this didn’t come up when I was installing the OS or during the two previous sets of upgrades. No option to not use it. Makes me feel all worn and fiery inside.

Pirate flags at half-mast

The director of Bodacious Space Pirates (and another show some folks might recognize, Martian Successor Nadesico) has died.

Claude Design hallucinated its own functionality

My sister’s in town, and she had a small graphic-design task she needed to do for what I’d describe as “bullshit corporate reasons”. Not really part of her job, just one more damn thing tossed onto her already-full plate. Her pal ChatGPT (which we now pronounce “chat-jippity” after someone said it that way in one of my meetings a while back) failed hard, and I remembered Anthropic’s recent announcement that Claude Design was A New Thing.

She went off and had a happy little session with it, and then asked for the results. It said they’re in /home/claude/projects/..., which of course doesn’t exist. It gave several sets of instructions on how to open and view the slideshow it created, none of which worked. It pretended to run commands with Claude Code to fire up a local web server, which did not happen. It offered to bundle everything up into a single file for her to download and click on, which to no surprise at this point, did not happen.

We went off to dinner, and when we got back, I took over. She had all the image files it had incorporated into the design, so all we really needed was the HTML/JS slideshow. The first time, it gave us just a stub file, but when we pointed that out, it supplied the complete file. With that, I was able to open Terminal, construct the directory tree it expected, and open the file so she could review the animation.

It looked nice. So, apart from the danger of it relying on the dubiously-secured Claude Code, “win”?