With ActivityPub your blog becomes part of a federated social network. This means you can share and talk to everyone using the ActivityPub protocol, including users of Friendica, Pleroma and Mastodon.
I just installed ActivityPub WordPress Plugin along with Hum, WebFinger, NodeInfo WordPress plugins in order for this to become part of the fediverse.
I love and support the use of AI or AI powered tools to accomplishing certain tasks that you would normally take hours or days or so. However, more and more big companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, or social media companies are starting to take advantage of it by controlling the information on what to show and what not to show their users, altering the narratives, supervising the narratives, which is based on the individual’s or group’s decision that will have huge impact on a lot of areas like getting the right information, freedom of speech or freedom of writing and communication in near future.
Increasing the low quality resolution images wasn’t ideal to do in any kind of photo editing softwares under any circumstances. Especially when you receive a 600px by 400px from the client and they wanted you to put in social media profile and websites. And when you asked them for higher resolution and most of the reply from them is that’s all they got.
LetsEnhance.io is a AI powered web based tool allows you to upload low quality images and turned them into higher image quality like 2x 3x or even 5x so that you can use your images for web, social media, or even printing.
First, you have to sign up with your email account. LetsEnhance.io allows 5 credits / images in their free plan so that you can test their tool. The dashboard looks simple and pretty straigh forward. Upload your photo and you can select photo, digital art and select tone and color enhance if it is required. You can also use their existing presents like printing or e-commerce. After you have selected you can click “Start Processing”. It will take only few seconds to process and you can download the photos you’ve just uploaded.
I’ve been using their free plan and I only have 1 credit left as you can see in the screenshot. Overall, I’m really impressed with the results from LetsEnhance.io and I suggest you should try it out.
If you’ve stumbled upon this post via Google or search engine, I’m hoping that you’re already familiar with using VPN and you’ve already expected to see how to guide to setup your own VPN. If you’re not familiar with the term VPN below is the tl;dr for you to understand what VPN is.
TL;DR: Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows you to connect to the network which residing in different part of where you’re currently living. For example: if you’re living in Singapore and the VPN server that you’re connected to is in United States, the website or the app you’re accessing only to understand that you’re United States like you can browse some movies in Netflix which are only available in United States. VPN is not just about the location but it is also securing your data between your browser/app and the server you’re communicating. If you’re living in the country where some sites are blocked, you can use VPN to access those sites without being blocked.
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Outline VPN is an open-source project created by Jigsaw that provides a safer way for individuals and organizations to access the open internet. What makes Outline VPN standout is that it lets you create, run, and share the access keys to your own VPN server with you don’t have to have much technical knowledge or going through all the complicated scripts to setup.
This guide will walk you through how to setup your own Outline VPN server and create access keys to your devices such as computer, desktop, laptops , and mobile devices.
Outline VPN requires you to have your own virtual private server (VPS) which you can easily create an account at Digital Ocean, Amazon, Google Cloud Service, or Linode. I suggest you to use Digital Ocean which they offers $5 / month to run your own VPS server. Once you’ve finished setting up and provided necessary information like credit cards there, then you can follow the following steps.
Now, just head over to Outline website and download the Outline VPN manager for your operating system. If you’re using windows or mac, select the appropriate one.
After downloading the outline manager file for your operating system, please install and run Outline manager. Outline manager will probably look like this at the time of I am writing.
As you can see the screenshot above, I’ve already setup two outline servers from different cloud providers.
Now click “ADD SERVER” from the left menu and Outline will show you which provider you would like to setup. You can select Digital Ocean if you’ve created the account there. Press “CREATE SERVER”.
It is important to know that you should decide which location you want to create your own VPS server to run outline VPN. For example: if you want to watch Netflix videos content available in U.S, you can select the New York or San Francisco. Once Outline has created the server, you can’t change it back. What you can also do is either you create a new VPS server in another region to install Outline VPS or destroy the existing one and create the new one again. It’s all up to your decision.
Next step, Outline Manager will open the browser and you have to give authorization access at Digital Ocean in order for Outline Manager to create the VPS server and install Outline VPN server on behalf of you. It may take about two minutes depending on the connection.
You’ll see something similar like the screen below after the setup has been completed. All you have to do is to create the keys for your devices. “Acess keys” allow you to connect with your device and your Outline VPN. Click “Add new key” and it will automatically create the key for you. You can click on the name to provide the meaningful name so that you can easily remember.
You can click Share Icon to copy the access key. The access invitation is something like below.
You’re invited to connect to my Outline server. Use it to access the open internet, no matter where you are. Follow the instructions on your invitation link below to download the Outline App and get connected.
Having trouble accessing the invitation link?
Copy your access key: ss://Y2hhY2hhMjAtaWV[email protected]:9875/?outline=1
Follow our invitation instructions on GitHub: https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-client/blob/master/docs/invitation-instructions.md
Look for “Outline VPN” in Google Play Store for Android or Apps Store in iOS devices. Outline has clients for other platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux.
After you have installed Outline VPN client in your phone or OS, all you have to do is to copy the access key from the previous step starting with ss:// protocol string ending with ?outline=1, Outline VPN client automatically detected and show you to add server. Tap “ADD SERVER”, Tap on “CONNECT” and you’re basically done.
You can try searching “What’s my IP” in Google or What is my IP website and see if you’re connected to another location. You can disconnect from Outline VPN client and try to see the IP address you see with or without VPN are different.
Overall, Outline VPN is quite easy to setup for most of the normal users without having to know so much about technical scripts and server configurations. What impressed me the most about Outline is that the team behind the project has done a great job at doing everything simple for the user with step by step easy to follow guidelines. The speed and the performance is quite fast in my experience with Outline VPN for over three months. I suggest you to try it out if you want to use your own VPN server.
Let me know if you’ve any questions about Outline VPN or any other problems while installing it. And don’t forget to share this article with your friends. Thank you!
The above photos were shot with Nikon D90 using Godox flash with softbox, and 35mm SIGMA F1.4 ART for Nikon EXIF: F/7.1, ISO-100, 1/200 sec
I bought D850 in November 2019 and Sony A7 III in November 2020 a year after Nikon D850. I have a lot of things to say about this camera from this blog. Before I do, below are the shots with my old Nikon D90 with natural light blocked with the sheet from reflector.
Lately I’ve noticed that Mavericks OSX is consuming almost 8GB of memory which I have no idea why it used too much when I don’t have much app running. In order to free up the memory in OSX, you can try by typing
purge
or
sudo purge
in terminal in which OS X will free up the “inactive” memory.
This is the missing little feature in Mac that Apple doesn’t want to add it? In Windows, you can just check the show hidden files and folders in File and Folder options. In order to see hidden files and folders in Finder, open the Terminal from Applications->Utilities->Terminal. Type the following command line.
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
To hide the files and folders back, just set it to NO. I hope this help.
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
Keep it simple. Stay focused and keep shipping
Ray Chan, co-founder of 9GAG
It’s been more than a year I didn’t write or I don’t look back my blog. It was stupid to leave the blog that gave me extra income. I think it is time to organize my time to write a new post every week.