Windows on myByways

Kokoro TTS and Abogen on Windows

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I described trying out Kokoro text-to-speech (TTS) model via Kokoro-FastAPI web UI in a macOS (native) container. Here, I install Kokoro-TTS and Abogen on Windows, to take advantage of my Nvidia GPU.

Faster Flux.1

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More Flux.1-based models! Go faster with FP8 or NF4! New LoRAs and ControlNets! There is quite a bit of interest with this model, as evidenced by the speed of community-led enhancements.

Wow! Flux.1 by Black Forrest Labs

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While I have many posts about SDXL, I do not use Stable Diffusion 3 at all - license concerns aside, it is simply not good, and may never get better. But just a few days ago, a new, freely available, offline model that is better than SDXL was released by the team that presented Latent Diffusion and created Stable Diffusion, Flux.1 by Black Forrest Labs!

Fun with Llama 3 (8B) in Ollama

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I saw a post on Reddit, entitled “Llama 3 rocks with taking on a personality!”. A fun experiment! I thought to replicate it, blatantly copying the puzzle presented. Llama 3, released by Meta just before the weekend, is impressive.

Testing new PAG and Perp-Neg nodes in ComfyUI

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I know it’s bad form to start off with a disclaimer: but the truth is, I do not know what I am doing. I am just testing out two new ComfyUI nodes, PerturbedAttentionGuidance and PerpNegGuider.

Mistral System Message setup to improve Image Generation Prompts

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I used ComfyUI-IF_AI_tools to integrate to the brxce/stable-diffusion-prompt-generator model running in Ollama. I wonder if I could use the base Mistral 7B model to help improve my uncreative prompts instead…

LLM Prompt Generation with Ollama in ComfyUI

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I described running Mistral, a Large Language Model, locally using Ollama. To accompany that piece, I created a prompt and manually used AI to generate an image. Today, I’ll wire up a ComfyUI workflow to Ollama to do this seamlessly, thanks to ComfyUI-IF_AI_tools.

A game with Mistral 7B using Ollama

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I keep posting about Stable Diffusion, but I do experiment with Large Language Models too! I do not have much to contribute in this regard, instead, here is the transcript of a game I played with the open source Mistral 7B model via Ollama.

Stable Video Diffusion

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More and more AI generated images are shared as short video clips. So, here a quick test of Stable Video Diffusion - which was released back in November last year. Don’t know why I didn’t post this when I posted about AnimateDiff and the Hotshot Motion model around the same time.

TripoSR image-to-3D-object

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want to convert a 2D image into a 3D model auto-magically? On 5 March 2024, Stability AI and Tripo AI released TripoSR: Fast 3D Object Generation from Single Images that does exactly that!

Differential Diffusion for in-painting

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Differential Diffusion is the newest method (framework) of in-painting without an in-painting model. Instead, all that is needed is a mask (map) where the lighter the area, the greater the re-painting applied.

Generate transparent images with Layer Diffusion

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ever wished you could generate Stable Diffusion XL images with transparent backgrounds? Well, your wish has been answered by the smart people behind the Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency paper. They have made their code and models available, and what do you know, Chenlei Hu has ported it to ComfyUI!

SDXL-based 4-step models compared

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the advent of techniques like Adversarial Diffusion Distillation and Latent Consistency models, A.I. image synthesis based on Stable Diffusion XL has been getting faster and faster. Here is just quick comparison of a few models at 4-steps, some of which are fine-tuned and trained for realism.

Consistent portraits revisisted: InstantID

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Not long ago, in a attempt to obtain Consistent portraits using IP-Adapters for SDXL, I shared a comparison between IP-Adapter-Plus-Face and IP-Adapter-FaceID. Today I’ll look at InstantID.

New Stable Cascase Checkpoints for ComfyUI

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An update to my previous post on Stable Cascade with ComfyUI - instead of requiring four separate model files, we now only need two checkpoints, and the ComfyUI workflow is now very straightfoward!

Stable Cascade with ComfyUI

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On 12 Feb 2024, Stability.ai released Stable Cascade “research preview” (non-commercial license), and over the weekend, ComfyUI was updated to support this new model! Time to give it a go!

Comparing face IP-Adapters for SDXL

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As a follow up to my last post regarding Consistent portraits using IP-Adapters for SDXL, this is a short comparison of the two face IP-Adapters for SDXL by h94 / xiaohu: namely, ip-adapter-plus-face_sdxl_vit-h.bin and ip-adapter-faceid_sdxl.bin.

Consistent portraits using IP-Adapters for SDXL

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Getting consistent character portraits generated by SDXL has been a challenge… until now! ComfyUI IPAdapter Plus (dated 30 Dec 2023) now supports both IP-Adapter and IP-Adapter-FaceID (released 4 Jan 2024)!

QR Code Monster for SDXL

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Time to try another ControlNet for Stable Diffusion XL - QR Code Monster v1 in ComfyUI. This ControlNet can influence SDXL such that the generated image “hides” a scan-able QR code, which at first glance, looks like a photo!

Generating animations / videos with SDXL LCM

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I never tried generating video clips or animations with SDXL before, simply because my GPU is not powerful enough. But after testing out the LCM LoRA for SDXL yesterday, I thought I’d try the SDXL LCM LoRA with Hotshot-XL, which is something akin to AnimateDiff.

Crazy fast image generation with LCM LoRA for SDXL

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stable Diffusion keeps improving at an astounding pace! This time, it’s the idea of distilling a model into a Latent Consistency Model (LCM) for very, very fast image generation with a quality trade-off. On 24 Oct 2023, the distilled Segmind Stable Diffusion 1B (SSD-1B) model was released, followed by a better implementation in the form of Latent Consistency LoRAs for SDXL and SDD-1B released on 9 Nov 2023.

Using the SDXL-Inpainting 0.1 Model

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Stability AI just released an new SD-XL Inpainting 0.1 model. Here is how to use it with ComfyUI.

SDXL Revision workflow in ComfyUI

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I tried out Stability AI’s four Control-LoRAs but mentioned that I did not understand the output of the Revision “image-mixing” workflow. I’ve since done a bit more experimentation…

Stability AI Control LoRAs

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Less than a week after my post testing diffusers/controlnet-canny-sdxl-1.0, along comes Stability AI’s own ControlNets, which they call Control-LoRAs! Not one but 4 of them - Canny, Depth, Recolor and Sketch models!

SDXL 1.0 with SDXL-ControlNet: OpenPose (v2)

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As promised in my last post, today I am testing out Thibaud Zamora’s SDXL-controlnet: OpenPose (v2) model using ComfyUI. I keep saying I’ll keep my posts short but never do…

Fooocus KSampler Custom Node for ComfyUI SDXL

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I tried Fooocus by Lyumin Zhang (Illyasviel) which fulfills its promise to allow one to “Focus on prompting and generating” - it is certainly easy to use! But shortly after its release, someone has “ported” the code to ComfyUI as a Custom Node! So of course it’s time to test it out…

SDXL 1.0 with SDXL-ControlNet: Canny

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Stability AI documentation now has a pipeline supporting ControlNets with Stable Diffusion XL! Time to try it out with ComfyUI for Windows.

Scale and Composite Latents with SDXL

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I experiment with latent scaling and latent compositing with SDXL 1.0 using ComfyUI. That is to say, increasing / decreasing the size of the image, and combining multiple images into one à la green screen (chroma key) compositing.

CLIPSeg with SDXL in ComfyUI

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Onward with SDXL and ComfyUI! Sometimes I want to tweak generated images by replacing selected parts that don’t look good while retaining the rest of the image that does look good. Rather than manually creating a mask, I’d like to leverage CLIPSeg to generate a masks from a text prompt.

SDXL with Offset Example LoRA in ComfyUI for Windows

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I mentioned in passing that my Nvidia RTX 2060 with 12GB could not run both SDXL 1.0 Base and Refiner models in a single ComfyUI workflow. Today, I show you my workaround and also experiment with adding the SDXL 1.0 Official Offset Example LoRA to the workflow.

Configure a mouse for macOS trackpad-like gestures

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A short post about setting up a mouse on macOS to mimic trackpad gestures.

Browser support for HTTP/3 QUIC

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been over a year (or two) since three major browsers enabled HTTP/3 using the QUIC protocol over UDP. Chrome and Edge enabled HTTP/3 by default in April 2020 and Firefox followed “shortly after” in April 2021. I am not sure - does Safari in macOS Monterey 12.5, released July 2022, enable HTTP/3 by default?

Enabling AMD Ryzen 5600X fTPM for Windows 10

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

You might have read that Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 11 requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). More recent AMD CPUs support Firmware TPM (fTPM) which implements TPM in software on the CPU instead of requiring a dedicated (discrete) chip. This is how I enabled fTPM.

Tweaks and Hacks to Configure Windows 10

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post this from the time I built my Windows desktop. But I keep adding to the list of things I need to configure to get Windows 10 into a ”usable” state for me. Unlike with macOS - for which the default installation is well configured, secure, and pretty much good-to-go - the installation and setup of Windows is extremely painful and a terrible experience. I have to spend hours trying different methods to remove junk, disable telemetry, and secure Windows (and still fail)…

Command to turn off monitor in Windows 10

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to turn off my monitor in Windows 10, while listening to music, rather than wait for the Power plan “Turn off the display” timer to kick in. Hmmm, seems Windows has never improved, because I recall having this requirement back-in-the-day - haha, that was during my first project ever, when I was involved in some Win32 development…

Configuring Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2)

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Here is how I configure Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). I do things a bit strangely: by changing the mounts, by running a GUI Desktop, and by running Docker in WSL2 and not on the Host…

Custom icons in Windows Start Menu Medium Tiles

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the Windows 10 Start Menu, I used Pin To Start to a medium sized tile for Firefox - and the icon is nice and large - but is not the case for other shortcuts. I was wondered why… and how to make all the icons have a more consistent look.

RTSS layout for Cyberpunk 2077

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently posted about configuring RTSS to overlay CPU and GPU information on games in Windows 10. Here is my setup for Cyberpunk 2077, so that I can keep an eye on my framerates (when testing the plethora of graphics settings), CPU / GPU / RAM utilization and temperatures.

Cyberpunk 2077 settings for RTX 2060 @ 1080p

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I though I’d quickly post my Cyberpunk 20774 settings running on a Nvidia RTX 2060 at 1080p (920×1080). The default Cyberpunk Ray Tracing Medium preset results in low frame rates and rather blur graphics, although all effects are enabled.

Originally written with v1.04, but updated for version 1.05+

1stPlayer DK keyboard and mouse review

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I bought a cheap-ish mechanical keyboard from 1stPlayer, the DK 5.0 Lite 87 along with the DK 3.0 mouse. I called this purchase “a mistake” as I am not quite satisfied with the physical build and the very poorly designed software. So, I figured I might as well do a short review that may help prospective buyers.

Fix mechanical keyboard keys 1678923450

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I suddenly experienced a strange issue today - the row of number keys on my 1stPlayer DK 5.0 Lite mechanical keyboard, i.e. the keys from 2 to 9, would output the wrong number! Specifically, hitting all numeric keys in order would output 1678923450 instead of 1234567890. This happened while gaming and I have no idea what caused it.

Creating Windows and macOS VMs

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Just a bunch of un-related findings that may help when creating Windows and macOS VMs using VirtualBox.

CPU and GPU Monitoring Overlay for Gaming

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On my new Windows 10 desktop I wanted an on-screen display (OSD) of system performance overlay while gaming - similar those benchmarking videos one finds on YouTube. While I don’t overclock my CPU or GPU, I still do want to know the utilization and temperatures, as these give me a hint as to whether the system is thermal throttled or bottlenecked.

VirtualBox very slow on Windows 10

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I found that Oracle VM VirtualBox 6.1 was running very slowly on my brand new Windows 10 PC.

Initially I thought it was to do with VirtualBox, e.g. insufficient cores or memory, the display controller (VBoxSVGA), insufficient video memory, etc. And then I thought it might be an AMD thing, so had a look at BIOS, e.g. nested AMD-V, etc.

My first PC build with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just got myself a new desktop PC! I am not much of a Windows user, but am looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077! I have never built a PC before, so I did the research and learnt a lot. Here is what I bought and why.

How to download videos from YouTube

Sat, 30 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Wondering how to download a video from YouTube, with audio and subtitles intact? Here are a couple of methods I’m documenting in case I ever need to use them.

Fixing Windows 10 100% disk by stopping SysMain

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just spent hours trying to figure out and fix a Windows 10 machine that was taking 100% disk, 100% RAM and about 50% CPU with absolutely nothing running. Of course, I initially blamed the user… then, a misbehaving (hidden, background) app… then, malware / virus… the, a runaway Windows Defender… then, a hard disk / hardware failure… but ultimately discovering the culprit is - drum roll - Microsoft Windows itself! As usual!

PowerShell Pipeline to Rename Files

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For me, Microsoft PowerShell is hard! I can’t wrap my mind around data pipelines (|). Instead, I keep reverting to if/then, loops and other traditional programming paradigms, similar to what I’d do in UNIX shell!

About the Windows Sandbox

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Starting with Windows 10 May 2019 update, there is a new Windows Sandbox feature, which, despite its name, is based on Windows Containers.

Windows Permission Problems Copying From NTFS HDD

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today I tried to copy files and folders off a USB hard disk (NTFS formatted) on my Windows 7 desktop. I encountered multiple files with permission problems. The manual method to change permissions is very tedious, so I created a script (DOS batch file) to do the same.

Batch file to list deleted files

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it turns out that after creating a PowerShell script to list deleted files (part 1) and another PowerShell script to monitor for deleted, renamed or moved files (part 2), I’ve decided to revert to a simple, batch file instead because running a batch file is so much easier than PowerShell!

PowerShell to monitor for deleted, renamed or moved files (part 2)

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 2, of my attempt to “sync” photos I deleted on my desktop to my SD card (you can read part 1 first). In this post, I try to use PowerShell with .NET framework to (try) monitor for file system changes, and output to a batch file that “replicates” the ren (rename) and del (delete) to files and folders.

PowerShell to list deleted files (part 1)

Sat, 16 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I have an unusual workflow when copying photos from my camera’s SD card to my Windows desktop. For any photos I my desktop, I want to also delete on the SD card. In this post (part 1 of 2), I describe my PowerShell script to “repeat” what I deleted on the desktop on the SD card. In my next post, part 2, I expand the PowerShell script to (try) monitor for file system changes instead.

Legacy HP computer info

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the last day of 2016… Time for a bit of nostalgia! Over the years, I posted bits and pieces on Blogger, myByways.net (Microsoft), Google Pages and others. For posterity, I’ve transferred selected information about a HP notebook and desktop I used to have, but I doubt any of this information is relevant any more.

Streaming from desktop with NVIDIA GameStream to iOS and macOS

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently discovered an alternative to remote control my Windows 7/10 desktop PC, instead of using Microsoft Remote Desktop. This method requires a computer with a modern NVIDIA graphics card with GameStream and works with iOS and macOS using a client called Moonlight!

Clean Install Windows 10 with Product Key and Tokens.dat

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

To clean install Windows 10, you need more than the product key from an upgraded instance of Windows 7/8. You’ll need a file called tokens.dat created during the upgrade process.