Last week, I posted about how to use wa-card with Vue, and I was accused of “Profiting/benefiting from the destruction of the planet and society.” That annoyed me enough that I want to explain the blog’s purpose. For the past 14+ years, I have written about the things that interest me (who I am, what I do, and what I am learning). Since around 2020, the primary focus has been on what I am trying to learn. That is why I focused on local LLMs/machine learning in 2024, why I wrote about Python basics, and why I wrote about how...
How to use wa-card with Vue
Last month, I talked about wanting to spend some time exploring Web Awesome and Vue.js. I figured that we would start with the wa-card element. This is a great option for displaying a collection of elements that have photos, names, and descriptions. Let’s take a look at a simple example.
Trying to protect my shit!
A few years ago, I bought a one-year subscription to Incogni, and about 18 months ago, I did the same with DeleteMe. Services like these want you to stay subscribed indefinitely. Their pitch is that data brokers are constantly scraping new sources, purchasing new datasets, and reshuffling what they store – so even if they remove your information today, there’s a good chance it will reappear tomorrow. I switched between providers because I assumed each one had different partnerships and coverage, and hopping between them might help knock my information off the widest range of lists. When my DeleteMe subscription...
Trying to get back in the saddle
Back in March, I wrote about not feeling motivated to write. I am working on getting back in the saddle, and part of my strategy involves embracing what I want to write about. At work, I am doing a lot of back-end work. That’s interesting, but I want to explore Vue.js and Web Awesome here. Will it help me at work? Probably not. Will it help my marketability? Most definitely not. It will make me happy, though. I am hoping to put out a few posts per month, moving forward.
I’m working on my motivation to write
Almost exactly a year ago, I lost my job. This was the second time I experienced this, and both times, I found a new position in nearly three months. The first time, I was a ColdFusion developer with a curiosity for Angular, so I dedicated my time to improving my skills in Angular. The second time, I was a polyglot developer focused heavily on Vue, but I entered unemployment, not initially realizing how dominant React had become. If you look at my 2024 blog posts, you will see a variety of content because I wasn’t sure what to focus on....
How to build a social media bot that can describe an image for you
Previously, we have looked at how to use Llama 3.2 Vision and Postman to describe an image and how to use Llama 3.2 Vision and Node to describe an image. In today’s post, I want to build a social media bot as a front-end for the same Llama 3.2 Vision model. In August, we looked at how to create an AI-driven social media bot. This process will be very similar, but it doesn’t need to be interactive this time, and we need to pass in an image to describe.
How can you use Llama 3.2 Vision and Node to describe an image?
In today's article, we look at how to use Node.js, Ollama, and Llama 3.2 Vision to describe an image. Using this, AI can generate alt-text for you.
How can you use Llama 3.2 Vision and Postman to describe an image?
I spent much of 2024 discussing how to use local artificial intelligence with your projects. My overarching goal is to show that you don’t need ChatGPT or Copilot to use AI with your projects. Mr. Scoops got the best response, but my favorite example was using LLaVA to describe an image. For today’s demo, I will show how to use Llama 3.2 Vision to do the same thing. As we have done in the past, this demo will use Ollama (an AI that runs on your hardware). You can download Ollama for free and run it natively on almost any Linux, macOS,...
How I use social media
In June, I wrote about how I created JWS Social (my GoToSocial instance) and last week, I wrote about Toot Works‘ two-year birthday (my Mastodon instance). GoToSocial is a pretty niche system that works best as a small (or single-user) instance on low-powered devices. The host does a great job of keeping it up, but I wouldn’t trust GoToSocial with the number of users that Toot Works has. In addition to those two, this blog can be followed on fediverse as @joe, and I post content to PixelFed as @[email protected]. If you follow @[email protected], it boosts these articles and photos...
Two years of running a Mastodon server
In October 2022, I spun up Toot Works. Toot Works is a Mastodon instance that federates with other Mastodon, Pixelfed, WordPress, and GoToSocial instances and services like Threads and Bridgy Fed. Two years ago, the goal was for the instance to host no more than 100 users. The fediverse is at its best when the instances stay small. There are now 103 users, with 44 of them being active in the past six months and 18 of them being active in the past month.