CLI on NoRaincheck

Inpainting with Generative AI

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Inpainting with Generative AI

If anything, trying to do generative AI (images) via CLI is unusually ‘hard’. Mostly because most flows use ComfyUI. I have found ComfyUI to be great when trying things out, or doing things interactively.

The easiest way to use CLI/scripting has definitely been stable-diffusion.cpp: https://github.com/leejet/stable-diffusion.cpp

For inpainting, it looks like the below

 1./bin/sd-cli \
 2 --diffusion-model flux-2-klein-9b-Q4_0.gguf \
 3 --vae flux2_dev_diffusion_pytorch_model.safetensors \
 4 --llm Qwen3-8B-Q3_K_M.gguf \
 5 --init-img bench.jpg \
 6 --mask dog-bench-mask.png \
 7 -p "a lovely dog" \
 8 --cfg-scale 2 \
 9 --sampling-method euler \
10 -t 24 \
11 --color \
12 --steps 9 \
13 -H 512 \
14 -W 512 \
15 --vae-tiling \
16 --vae-tile-overlap 0.125 \
17 -o dog-lovely-bench.png

What is important (to me) is that I find that binary masks that ‘grows a bit’ is better than providing a fuzzy mask, on my hardware this runs reasonably quickly (~15s per step at 512x512).

Starting Up Matrix with Docker Compose

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Starting Up Matrix with Docker Compose

March 2026

Matrix has a lot of complicated self-hosting docs, mainly to do with federation and hosting. If you’re just self-hosting and not worried about setting up ingresses/federating, its actually fairly simple to setup Matrix. Here is a docker-compose.yml file that will do it. The only bit of configuration is to pull up the element_config.json though that can be left as default values (you can override them later)

Thoughts of ffmpeg and whisper filters

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thoughts of ffmpeg and whisper filters

January 2026

I’ve been experimenting with ffmpeg and the whisper filters. In general I think its awesome that such functionality exists, but at the same time, I don’t believe it addresses the particular painpoints when you go beyond the ‘obvious’ thing.

Installation

On macos to install ffmpeg with the whisper filters, the easiest way is via brew:

brew tap homebrew-ffmpeg/ffmpeg
brew install homebrew-ffmpeg/ffmpeg/ffmpeg --with-whisper-cpp

Considerations

One of the cool functionalities of whisper-cpp is the ability to integrate voice activity detection (VAD). This works out of the box with the whisper filter. Unfortunately what does not work is integrating translations, instead it is expected you create the translation yourself.

Thinking Local LLMs and AI

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Thinking Local LLMs and AI

December 2025

Running models locally is nothing new. Infact I’ve always had a particular affinity to llama.cpp. Recently, there is the newly introduced local text to image (z-image-turbo) generation model that can ‘comfortable’ be run locally (albeit perhaps a bit slow without a dedicated GPU).

Usage would look something like (using justfile to template it) using stable-diffusion.cpp:

 1[no-cd]
 2sd_generate:
 3 PROMPT=$(gum input --placeholder "prompt for image generation"); \
 4 OUTPUT=$(gum input --placeholder "output png file"); \
 5 DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/dyld/library \
 6 sd --difffusion-model z_image_turbo-Q4_0.gguf \
 7 --vae /path/diffusion_pytorch_model.safetensors \
 8 --llm Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507-Q6_K.gguf \
 9 --cfg-scale 1.0 \
10 --offload-to-cpu \
11 --diffusion-fa \
12 -H 512 -W 512 --steps 9 \
13 -p "$PROMPT" \
14 -o "$OUTPUT"

On M1 Macbook Pro with offload cpu enabled it will take roughly 2 minutes per a step, whereas not offloading will improve performance at the cost of memory consumption (n.b. you should have --offload-to-cpu turned on if you are using a low memory variant).

What if I tried self-hosting LLM Code Tooling?

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What if I tried self-hosting LLM Code Tooling?

July 2025

Currently Code AI tooling is going through a weird cycle. We have the Windsurf x OpenAI deal falling through, Cursor with some interesting (bad) pricing changes, Claude Code being a loss leader – which leads me to think, so what would self-hosting this on a laptop look like?

Firstly, there are a lot of options which exist already, however the reality is that my using of AI auto-complete and agentic mode is fairly limited. With that in mind, I think my current setup is rooted mainly in the llama.cpp world of things.

Maintaining Scripts using Just and Gum

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maintaining Scripts using Just and Gum

April 2025

I’ve found maintaining shell scripts and aliases to be a bit of a mess. I know people have their own systems with dotfiles, but it never ‘stuck’ with me. I’m trialing a new approach using gum and just, both which can be installed via brew. This makes it so there less memorisation of what different programs do, and their parameters, since you can control and name variables to a flow that you like. Combined with just’s ability to target justfile from different directories, this makes centralising scripts and cli commands very straightforward.

Python & TypeScript - in Review (2024)

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Python & TypeScript - in Review (2024)

December 2024

One thing that I like to stress is the importance of tooling and relying on defaults. By being able to speak consistently within ones own projects or using commonly seen patterns reduces the mental overhead. These could be folder structures or idioms, especially things which permeate across different programming languages or frameworks.

Here are some of my thoughts on Python and TypeScript; coming from someone who is predominantly a Python developer and does minimal front-end work.