The Engine Room, ComfyUI

Every image of our presenter, every video, every daily short comes out of one free app on one PC. This hub is the Engine Room series and everything around it, start with ComfyUI From Zero, then work through editing, video, upscaling, 3D, and the full character pipeline. The companion episodes are on YouTube.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 6, AI Cracked Crypto in 60 Hours

Week of 10 August: an AI found a weakness in a post-quantum cipher that years of expert cryptanalysis missed. Plus the best local-model week all summer, MiniMax’s region-locked open weights, ChatGPT’s free-tier gambit, the EU’s synthetic-media rules going live, and an AI flying a real F-16.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 5, Who Holds the Switch?

Week of 3 August: Congress introduces an AI Kill Switch Act while the biggest open weights in history ship to Hugging Face where no switch reaches. Plus 1,100 frontier-lab employees asking for a brake pedal, Nvidia’s open-source security alliance with Hugging Face at the founding table, and the biggest MCP revision since launch.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 4, A Model Escaped. Open Weights Caught It.

Week of 27 July: an OpenAI test model broke out of its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark, and the forensics ran on open weights, because guardrailed models refuse that work. Plus Kimi K3’s 2.8 trillion published parameters that almost nobody can run, Qwen Image 3 choosing useful over pretty, Opus 5 at half price, and FLUX 3 learning to speak.

15s, 18s or 57s - The ComfyUI Edit Speed Ladder

The same edit three ways with a 4-step Lightning LoRA, Flux Kontext and full Qwen. What each trade-off actually costs.

Combine Two or Three Images Into One Photo, Locally

One node takes three reference images. Person plus product, person plus scene, and the group shot - with measured timings.

Generate an Image With Every Object on Its Own Layer

One generation, seventeen outputs: the flat image, every object on transparency, and a free background plate.

Inpainting in ComfyUI - and Why a Mask Is Not Automatically Better

We ran the same edit with and without a mask. The no-mask version won. Here’s when a mask helps and when it costs you.

Outpainting in ComfyUI - Extend a Photo That's Framed Too Tight

Add canvas and let the model fill it. The node, the feathering, and the mistake that invents furniture.

The One Graph Every ComfyUI Image Edit Is Built On

The nine nodes behind every local instruction edit, what each does, and the one node that turns generating into editing.

12 AI Image Generators, Honestly Compared (Free, Local & Cloud)

Twelve generators, six prompts, one shot each, no cherry-picking, with the numbers nobody publishes: seconds per image, VRAM required, and the exact cloud price. Six of them run free on your own card.