Resale

TL;DR I added an “Enhance” button to my photo viewer, backed by RealESRGAN running in ComfyUI on the Mac Studio. Its stated job was to help me read model plates and serial numbers in blurry surplus photos. I benched it against a plate where I knew the right answer. At small glyph sizes it did the opposite of its job: crisp, confident, wrong text. G1312B-60050 came back as 01D12B-(0)00. It is not a bad model pick. Four different upscalers garbled the same lines the same way. The usual advice (pre-upscale with a classical filter first) changed nothing. The failure is the generative prior, not a starved input. What I do now: the original pixels stay the source of truth, there is a text-safe sharpen view that invents nothing, and the AI view composites real pixels back over anything that looks like fine detail. A wrong model number off an enhanced photo is a wrong comp, which is a wrong bid. This one was worth catching before it spent money. Why I wanted it The most valuable pixels in a surplus lot photo are the smallest ones. The difference between a generic median price and an exact-model price is often a part number on a data plate, shot from a few feet away at a resolution where a 13-point label is about twelve pixels tall. I already pull the full gallery for every lot and archive it, so I had the best pixels the seller provided. They just were not enough for some plates. ...

TL;DR The screens on eight surplus all-in-ones show an ops board: bids, ship queue, pickups, repair backlog, cluster health, weather and traffic. They sit on desks around the office and do double duty: a workstation when someone sits down, the board the rest of the time. The same machines are on their way to becoming k3s worker nodes (one has joined so far), and that build gets its own post. It’s one static HTML page in Chrome kiosk mode. No framework server, no Kubernetes workload. Ansible deploys it. 15 scenes sit in a weighted registry and rotate off the wall clock, about 34 seconds each, so eight screens agree without talking to each other. When a fetch fails the page keeps the last good data and shows its age. A board with stale data and a warning beats a blank screen. It’s a different animal from my older home signage system, which is a k8s app with Raspberry Pi kiosks. One real thing it did: on 2026-09-06 the home cluster’s daily Longhorn backup had stopped completing, and the board’s home-cluster card showed the critical alert. Not the same project as the home signage I’ve written about digital signage on k3s before: an Angular app, a handful of Flask services, MQTT, Raspberry Pis driving displays. That’s a proper application and it lives in the home cluster. ...