My 2024 Top 20(ish)

This year has been particularly notable for the long-awaited return of Tears For Fears with “Songs For A Nervous Planet” to The Cure’s “Songs Of A Lost World,” we’ve seen legendary artists continuing to push boundaries. The progressive rock scene has been especially vibrant with strong releases from Frost*, Pure Reason Revolution, and The Pineapple Thief. What’s particularly striking about 2024’s releases is the diversity of sounds - from Underworld’s electronic landscapes in “Strawberry Hotel” to Orville Peck’s unique take on country music with “Stampede.” The year has demonstrated that established artists can still innovate while staying true to their core sound. ...

December 27, 2024 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

Running Flux on macOS

When I last wrote about FLUX.1 from Black Forest Labs, I mentioned, “however, it quickly became clear that my M3 MacBook Pro with its 36GB of RAM wasn’t going to cut it.” Since then, I’ve upgraded to an M4 MacBook Pro with 48GB of RAM. Alongside this, substantial improvements have been made to run FLUX.1 smoothly on macOS machines via the MFLUX project↗ . In this quick post, I’ll walk you through installing and using MFLUX. Let’s dive in! ...

November 24, 2024 · 7 min · Russ McKendrick
Switching Python environments using the cs function

Zsh Conda Environment Selector Function

Managing Python environments can sometimes feel like navigating a jungle 🌴🐍, especially when dealing with dependency conflicts. To streamline this process, I created a handy Zsh function to add to your dotfile for switching Conda environments quickly and efficiently. 🚀 Let me walk you through it! Why I Needed This Function 🛠️ After months of using Conda to manage Python environments on my macOS machines, I realized I had built up quite a collection. Switching between them manually became tedious. So, I decided to create a quick, interactive function to simplify the process. 🎯 ...

November 17, 2024 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

Vinyl Scrobbling macOS App

Like many techies on their day off, I completely abandoned my planned tasks and embarked on an entirely unplanned project: creating a macOS application. Well, to be more precise, I decided to prompt one using Claude 3.5 Sonnet↗ . With Anthropic’s recent updates to their AI model, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to test its capabilities while solving a personal need. The Catalyst: My New Tuneshine Device Recently, I acquired a Tuneshine↗ - a clever device that arrived last week. It works wonderfully with my streaming services of choice, including Apple Music↗ and Spotify↗ , and offers integration with LastFM↗ . ...

October 28, 2024 · 7 min · Russ McKendrick

Dynamic Network Config in Ansible: Local to Azure VNet

If like me you have been guilty of hard coding all of your network configuration in Ansible variables like this … Hard Code Values Lines: 12 Charaters: 359 Language: YAML 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 vars: network: full_range: "10.0.0.0/24" subnets: - name: "subnet1" address_range: "10.0.0.0/27" - name: "subnet2" address_range: "10.0.0.32/27" - name: "subnet3" address_range: "10.0.0.64/27" - name: "subnet4" address_range: "10.0.0.96/27" ...

September 21, 2024 · 13 min · Russ McKendrick
Ansible logo on a Mac background

How to Install Ansible on a Mac: A Modern Approach

As the DevOps landscape evolves, so do our methods for managing tools like Ansible. This post outlines my current preferred approach to installing and managing Ansible on macOS. The Traditional Homebrew Approach For years, many macOS users, including myself, relied on Homebrew to install and maintain Ansible. The process was straightforward: Installing Ansible using Homebrew brew install ansible While this method effectively managed the core Ansible installation, it became problematic as Ansible’s ecosystem grew more complex. ...

September 15, 2024 · 3 min · Russ McKendrick
Explore the world of AI image generation using Flux, fal.ai, and OpenAI. Learn how to build a Streamlit app that leverages GPT-4o for prompt tuning and Flux models for creating stunning visuals. Compare outputs with Midjourney and discover the potential of these cutting-edge tools.

Unlocking Image Creation with Flux and GPT-4o

This week I decided to see how many buzzwords I could get into one post, given the recent release of Flux by Black Forest Labs I had originally intended on trying to get it up and running locally - however it quickly became clear that my M3 MacBook Pro with its 36GB of RAM wasn’t going to cut it. Because of this, I decided to look at one of the many online services that offer access to the various Flux models via their APIs which led me to Fal.AI which in turn gave me the idea for this post. ...

August 11, 2024 · 14 min · Russ McKendrick
A wall of vinyl records in a home office setting

Behind the Scenes; More than just a background

If you’ve ever joined me on a Teams call from my home office, you’ve likely noticed the wall of vinyl records behind me. This post aims to answer the most common questions I get on calls, offering a glimpse into my music collection and the technology used to play it. The Collection My vinyl collection is more than just a backdrop; let me give you a tour: The Main Attraction The wall you see behind me during video calls is just the beginning: ...

August 4, 2024 · 3 min · Russ McKendrick