I have a couple of hobbies these days… and also a guilty pleasure named Arma Reforger. I really don’t have time for it, but when I do… I play as FIA, the outnumbered and doomed resistance fighters. IYKYK… (OK, sometimes I also play on modded WCS servers too – but playing FIA is more my kind of “fun”).
Introducing FIA CaM – The FIA Cache Mapper. Open the web app, take a photo of the FIA shopping list in your inventory on your phone, watch the map populate by the magic of OCR with the location of the five caches. You can even share a link to the populated map of the caches in the current game session with your FIA buddies.
It’s not cheating when you’re doomed already, right? Right?!
Find, use, share location on map with team, resupply, and protect it!
Latest release: 1.68 Oct 2. 2026. Continuing the completely refactored strain, NOW WITH 100% MORE AI AI AI AI AI AI!!!!
What’s new:Vibe-code your own optical looks with an AI assistant using the included Preset Authoring Kit with ZERO technical skills needed (give your AI chatbot the files, ask it to generate presets for ldb for the look you want to see), alongside flexible prism distribution, smoother causally ordered optics, expanded aperture and bokeh range, and clearer preset editing, new Edge FX Internal Field preset.
Summer time is… Hobby time, I guess? So I’ve indulged a bit in my other hobby again.
Introducing Lens Debaser OFX – Debase perfectly good optics in post.
A highly experimental AI slop OFX plugin for DaVinci Resolve, Apple Silicon (Metal) only for now, mimicking vintage optics kinks. At least that’s the idea…
Why? In 2026 „cine“ image acquisition is solved & commodified. Like Gerald Undone said, all cameras are good now. I say TOO good. So I made this for you to debase perfectly good optics in post – because perfect modern optics is for OnlyFans – not for ABSOLUTE CINEMA!
How it started: Above, my original Lens Debaser power grade on graded iPhone 17 Pro 4K Open Gate Apple log2 RAW, shot with a ghetto cheapskate 1.55x anamorphic lens. Here, MTF (my old compound node power grade – BUT Lens Debaser can do MTF too now, it slices & dices!), Halation, Bloom, Gran and a look + print grade is applied to my original power grade. (The flare is from the optics itself – and that’s not all: Ldb now also can do anamorphic colored flares too, if that’s your kind of kink!)
WARNING – This is highly experimental software made with AI. It might be full of lies, stolen IP, and broken dreams. It may explode your computer, ruin your projects, and wear your underwear when you’re not at home.
I made an original “Lens Debaser” for myself as a Power Grade some years ago because I love me some exotic dirty vintage optics – and perfect modern optics is for OnlyFans, not for ABSOLUTE CINEMA! However, as a rinky-dink amateur hobbyist digital cinematographer & color grader I just couldn’t keep justifying (to my wife, tbh) spending a fortune on more and more old glass, so I made myself a digital power grade that simulates a few of my favorite vintage optical “cine” kinks as a cope.
Now my old power grade still works, but it’s kind of a one-trick pony. So this new thing here came to be as I was thinking about how I could turn my old jury-rigged “Lens Debaser” Power Grade into something with a bit more features – like into a single plug-in or something. But I’m too old & lazy to start learning new SDK tricks just to program a little Resolve plugin for myself, so one night I happened to leisurely ask Altman’s golden doomsday calf if it could explain how the physics of chromatic aberration in vintage cinema optics work to me like I’m 5. Next thing I knew, we were knee-deep in the science of MTF, getting pitched on the virtues of Codex learning the OpenFX SDK for me, soon tokens started flying, context windows started breaking – and things got seriously out of hand from there…
As you can clearly see by the insane and depraved amount of possible optical parameters available by now.
How it’s going: Above, same-same, but different – with my new Lens Debaser OFX plugin added to a node instead of the OG power grade, “Internal Field Edge FX” preset applied.
Nobody noticed I made a completely entirely different first version of this thing, but that one turned out to be a piece of total junk unsustainable for further development – so I did a complete new refactoring, starting from scratch, using a brand new unadulterated context window actual references and science and shit. I guess the time wasted on the first version was just the ticket of admission to even barely start to scratch the surface of this domain. If anything, this new version is insanely faster when compared to my previous abject failure “preliminary study” – and it produces usable effects most of the time too (in my highly subjective dunning-krugered sunken-cost-fallacious opinion).
The idea was to make a plugin that could emulate most common exotic and vintage optical kinks without insane render times required, preferring fast “good-enough” emulations over scientifically accurate GPU-melting raytracing. I’m not trying to win a science-fair prize here. (THIS IS NOT A RAY-TRACER!). Conceptually, I wanted to create an emulated synthetic model of most cine optics first, then figuring out what the hell to do with it later. That’s why Ldb let’s you adjust an obsessive amount of parameters, presents the user with loadable and saveable presets of parameter states instead of limiting it to hardcoded and pre-defined lens makes or models to tweak. This may end up being a stupid approach – but it’s mine and I’m owning it. I think it’s more fun, inviting the user to explore effects and looks this way.
When the kind of engine able to handle many if not most traits was (finally) emerging through umpteen iterations, I started to think, why should I be the only one having to put in the work to create usable presets you also not be able to easily create that special optical kink you’re craving yourself? So I made an additional package for your AI chatbot to make you Lens Debaser preset files based on your own reference images and kinks tastes as descriptive text input to directly create it with AI, load and test in Resolve. Now with 100% vibe coding for you too!
Yes. I made some AI slop with AI for your AI to make more slop for you! It doesn’t get much more zeitgeist-y cringe than that… but it might actually work. Kind of. Try it and report back to me. (One feature on the optional road map is to enable a user-based living community repository, like you may know from e.g.soft-synth apps already for sharing presets. I think that’s neat. But with a community of one to date, this is currently folly).
Aside: If you came here to gripe about AI stealing your job, I hear you and I get you. Can’t say I disagree with you. Probably. However, this is the new lay of Darwin’s land – isn’t it? Insert that “always has been…” meme image here. At least I’m not pretending it’s something I came up with completely on my own – I’m not claiming it’s something other than slop (that might actually somewhat serve its advertised purpose).
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0source on GitHub (tl;dr you can pretty much use and abuse this project in any way you want as long as you attribute sources and keep it non-commercial)
View the User Guide – complete with visual examples of what Ldb can do featuring before/after sliders to inspect its effect on test charts and actual footage.
Compare the OG Lens Debaser power grade to Lens Debaser OFX:
Left, OG Power Grade. Right, Ldb OFX (4k scaled down to 1080p)
Recently I had the pleasure to once again hold a couple of startup entrepreneurship workshops for select alumni of DAAD and the Humboldt community!
Above, ChatGPT re-interprets the Zoom workshop. ;)
On Zoom / remote to an eclectic and international group of over 40 academics, I held one workshop on evidence-driven problem discovery and using AI in that process. A second on Customer Discovery & assumption testing, including how we can test our critical assumptions behind our ideas for a business using validation experiments and tests – and also how to use AI to build validation experiments and MVPs.
Alumniportal Deutschland is a non-profit online social network of “Germany Alumni” that is designed internationally for people who have studied, researched, worked or completed further training or a language course in Germany or at a German institution abroad.
The primary non-profit and non-governmental organizations responsible for creating, maintaining and promoting Alumniportal Deutschland are the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD – the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers), and the Goethe-Institut. Since 2019, the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) is responsible for funding the portal.
Recently I had the honor and pleasure to win the international bid to tender with +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES to help EU4Innovation East & Expertise France help their selected batch of startups for VIVATECH 2026 in Paris prep for the conference, including investor pitching, competition pitching, and startup conference planning & strategy for reaching their goals and maximising the ROI of attending.
EU4Innovation East is a regional project enhancing the competitiveness of the startup ecosystems in five Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. At its core is a comprehensive strategy to foster high-performance incubators, expand funding and market opportunities, strengthen community ties and amplify the visibility of EaP startups.
Expertise France is the French public agency for international development cooperation. It is a subsidiary of the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) Group and the second-largest agency of its kind in Europe.
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