Est. 2002

Notes on tech, food, and everything in between.

x2q is a personal blog that has been online since 2002 — 24 years of notes on software, Linux, payments, home labs, cooking, and the side projects that keep appearing.

Online since 2002·Author X2Q·Get in touch →

Latest posts

Jun 7, 2026
Extending video clips with AI on a 12 GB GPU — six models compared
You have a short machine/action clip and want it longer. 'Extending' a clip is really image-to-video: take the last frame and generate a plausible continuation. I fed the same shot to six models — Wan2.2-TI2V-5B, Wan2.2-I2V-A14B (GGUF), Stable Video Diffusion, LTX-Video and CogVideoX-5B — all on a single 12 GB RTX 4070 Ti. The interesting part isn't which looks best; it's the memory-offload tricks that make a 14B video model (and 720p) fit in 12 GB at all.
Jun 6, 2026
8-digit BINs explained: what the IIN expansion means for card BIN lookups (2026)
The card networks expanded the issuer identifier on a payment card from 6 to 8 digits. For anyone doing BIN/IIN lookups it means a 6-digit prefix is no longer guaranteed to identify a single issuer — you often need 8 digits to disambiguate. Here's the what, the why, and the practical fallout.
Jun 5, 2026
Find which process is using a port on Linux (ss, lsof, fuser) — 2026
When a server won't start because the port is taken, you need the PID holding it. ss is the modern one-liner; lsof and fuser are the alternatives. Here's how to find the process and free the port.
Jun 4, 2026
Local speech-to-text with whisper.cpp — a self-hosted Google Speech API alternative (2026)
Years ago I ran transcription through the Google Speech API. In 2026 you don't need a cloud API for that — whisper.cpp runs OpenAI's Whisper models locally on a laptop, CPU or GPU, with no keys and nothing leaving the machine. Here's the full path from clone to transcript.
Jun 2, 2026
Five ways to get b-roll from one ride — all on a local GPU
B-roll is the cutaway footage that makes an edit breathe — and onboard POV footage from a single camera has none. I tried five ways to manufacture it from one ATV ride: CV auto-mining of the real footage, generative stills (SDXL-Turbo → RealVisXL img2img), AI Ken Burns via Depth-Anything-V2 parallax, true generated motion via Stable Video Diffusion, and optical-flow slow-motion. All local on a 12 GB card. Here's what each is good for, and the gotchas.
May 31, 2026
Stitching drone panoramas: OpenCV vs Hugin, benchmarked
63 DJI Phantom 4 Pro frames over Randers, two stitching pipelines. OpenCV's Stitcher is fast and hands-off but leaves a wavy horizon and ragged edges; Hugin + enblend is slower but gives a dead-straight horizon, seamless blend, and a clean rectangle. Hugin wins.
Apr 22, 2026
bchunk — convert .bin/.cue images to .iso and .wav on Linux and macOS
bchunk (binchunker) splits a .bin/.cue CD image into .iso for the data track and .wav files for each audio track. The canonical tool for turning a mixed-mode BIN/CUE into something you can mount or burn.
Apr 22, 2026
binlist.net — how a Fuerteventura holiday side-project became iinlist.com
In 2013, sitting on a balcony in Playitas, Fuerteventura, I built binlist.net as my first ever Go project — a free HTTP API for looking up the issuer of a credit card from its first six digits. It hit 1 million queries/day by 2015. Thirteen years later it's still free, and its commercial sibling iinlist.com is the one we run the business on.
Apr 22, 2026
My CM3588 project — a 4-NVMe ARM64 home NAS on 10 W idle
FriendlyElec's CM3588 NAS Kit turns an RK3588 compute module into a 4-bay NVMe home NAS with 2.5 GbE. About 10 W idle. Debian on mainline kernel, ZFS on root, Samba, Tailscale.
Apr 22, 2026
fcrackzip — recover lost zip passwords on Linux, macOS, and Windows (2026)
fcrackzip is a small, old, command-line tool that recovers passwords on classic-ZipCrypto-encrypted .zip files. Brute-force or dictionary, runs everywhere, still useful in 2026 — with hashcat/john as the modern follow-up when it isn't fast enough.

About

How it started

x2q started back in 2002 as a plain ~cc homepage on the university server, while I was a computer-science student (stud.scient.) at Aalborg University. It was the usual student mix: Linux notes, write-ups of semester projects, and whatever I happened to be tinkering with.

Over the years it moved off the university server, through a few different engines and domains, and became x2q.net — but the habit never changed: notes to my future self, published in the open. You can still see the very first version at cs.auc.dk/~cc/ in the Internet Archive.

Notes on tech, food, and everything in between.

Extending video clips with AI on a 12 GB GPU — six models compared

8-digit BINs explained: what the IIN expansion means for card BIN lookups (2026)

Find which process is using a port on Linux (ss, lsof, fuser) — 2026

Local speech-to-text with whisper.cpp — a self-hosted Google Speech API alternative (2026)

Five ways to get b-roll from one ride — all on a local GPU

Stitching drone panoramas: OpenCV vs Hugin, benchmarked

bchunk — convert .bin/.cue images to .iso and .wav on Linux and macOS

binlist.net — how a Fuerteventura holiday side-project became iinlist.com

My CM3588 project — a 4-NVMe ARM64 home NAS on 10 W idle

fcrackzip — recover lost zip passwords on Linux, macOS, and Windows (2026)