1. The Internet is NOT Forever

It is a common misnomer that websites will last forever. They absolutely DO NOT!

GLAMWalk operational rule: SAVE! SAVE! SAVE! Then save a backup of that save!
The longest lived, largest free data storage resource on the internet currently as of 2026 is likely the Internet Archive. It has been around a very, very, very long time. I remember first experiencing it when I was in college in the 1990s! The Internet Archive has something called a Wayback Machine, which is sort of a time travel idea of a backed up website. If you find you have a website you like that you want to keep a copy of download it locally using save html from a web browser, scrape it with python, or use local indexing tools such as httrack. Httrack hammers a site with request, so if you are dealing with something like response limited api as we were with GLAMWalk httrack is likely NOT the correct solution. Scraping can be handy if done legally. Be careful to not republish stuff you don't own copyright or trademark, or likeness to. There are reasons photographers have people sign releases before they start shooting... Other archiving websites besides internet archive do exist, but many of those have disappeared over time as they were abandoned like so many sites that the IA records in wayback...

2. Free isn't necessarily free!

GLAMWalk operational rule: PAY ATTENTION TO LICENSES!

It is said that if something is free, you ARE the product. This adage is very true in relationship to the internet in many cases. Ads burn your time. Free software may have malware. Opensource free software may have different types of licenses, some of which can be used privately, some commercially, some don't allow re-publishing without very strict rules or attribution. Watch licenses on any and all things and keep track of what you can do with it so you aren't bitten by a snake in the grass lawyer one of these days!

3. AI ain't the devil...

Many people are afraid of Artificial Intellegence (AI) but they should not be. Electricity works very simply with electrons flowing from one place to another. Behind the illusion of the interent is just a bunch of on and off switches, albeit some move extremely quickly. Humans have been using technology since the dawn of time. Art in caves weren't just thrown on there, in many cases the charcoal was spit on there by someone as the first 'airbrush.' Particles were flowing through the air artificially by someone using intelligence...
Every single day you likely use a computer to visit websites. Many of those are just databases smartly designed, which suprise, is AI. Every time you snap a picture of your family or freinds with your cell phone camera you likely are using a autofocus, guess what, that's AI... AI is a tool, not much different than a shovel or screwdriver, or a gun... Use it properly and it's not a problem... Use it to kill someone and dig their grave and well... uh...

4. Look under there...

Ha, Ha, made you say it!

In a closet things hide way in the back not easily seen when you first open the closet door. In a bank valuables are hidden in a vault. The internet is not much different. Open Access APIs are nice when they work, but they are also hurdles for you to overcome to find the gems. Jewels can be hidden in plain sight but hard as hell to find. The entire GLAMWalk project started as a way of creating a list of pretty museum assets that everyone should be able to find since many are in the Public Domain. In working through all of the open access api that we worked through in the last few months of this project we have found that sometimes it's easier to open the book instead of judging it by the cover...
In many cases we began by creating lists of text files, or csv files, and then slowly expanded that to sql databases when data got too unweildy for simple csv to handle. Keep urls and keep looking as many times errors, internet traffic hurdles, and other things will keep you from finding the good stuff you are after... but persistence and using the sorcerer's secret of try, try, and then tray again will get you through. It is said that for every successful business there are at least 35 failures that lead up to that success. Working through things and overcoming obstacles IS the journey. Enjoy it and work persistently to get to your goal. All things are possible given enough time, love and tenderness. Be easy on yourself when things don't work out the way you want on the first try.

5. Use the right tool for the job.

During the course of creating Glamwalk I initially was trying to use the free tier of chatgpt. The free model on that at that point in time was stupidly self confident. It made you think it knows what it was doing when it really had no idea what it was doing. When I first switched to using Claude free level Claude solved a problem I was working on with Chatgpt for over a week in 5 minutes or less! That having been said Claude can be clunky too... There are multiple levels of Large Language Models (LLM) being used behind the scenes at websites like chatgpt, claude, gemini and others. Some are better at one thing than others.

Chatgpt is primarily good at organizing strategies like outlines, and things. It is also a bit of a chatter bot because it'll get attitude with you like a coworker trying to tell jokes from time to time. I think of chatgpt like an low paid intern. Claude is more of a strict coder who has many years of experience. However, Claude is only good at structured data work mainly, not doing things organized in ways us humans like them to be like chatgpt. That's why many developers use chatgpt for top level things, and claude for more detail work many times on many different projects. If I had the budget to have both I'd likely do something like that. However, other llm exists, like Ollama that you can run locally, or various models listed in the comfyui community on places like huggingface, etc.

I worked with free level of chatgpt in early days of the project from about March-April or so of 2026. I worked with free level of claude about a month or so after that. I then did a month of Claude paid subscription in June, quit paying about a week, and then went back to another paid month of Claude after that... then nearing the end of that time chatgpt gave me a free month to preview it so I took them up on that offer. Tomorrow, 9/18/2026 is my official last day of that free month...

so I pushed hard the last few days to get chatgpt to help me write html and odt files for our book to work through some of the many details. Now I begin the long journey of testing each script in the book(s) and ensuring each one works as expected. We accomplished a lot over the last few months of explroing open api structures across various providers worldwide. Just because a place has has open access does NOT mean it's easy to use. That's what we discovered over and over and over again. The books primary focus is on explaining what we did, why we did it, how we fumbled, and worked through the problems over and over and over again. Whether or not I'll do more subscriptions to AI monthly pay models in the future is to be determined...

Gemini is genuinely better at image creation than both chatgpt or claude. Chatgpt is catching up slowly. Claude is hundreds of miles behind since it can only do svg manipulations so it's ok for flowcharts and things but really chatgpt is better for that stuff. Claude is more of a database oranizer type that can handle big data. Local llms were used in much of the work we were doing to interpret things. Locally we installed janus-1b, moondream2, qwen 2.5-1.5b instruct, qwen2-vl-2b-instruct, and mainly used z-image turbo and qwen for comfyui. We kept to an older version of python because one of the older janus models that I sometimes use in comfyui for captions relies on it. I only have 8 gb vram, so am sort of limited in what we can do with gpu power at the moment until we can sell millions of books and afford a better gpu or pc, lol. That having been said, the hurdles of working on low gpu machine has been good since it teaches us through on hands experience that anyone can accomplish this sort of stuff even if you don't have the top of the line bleeding edge technology. DON'T USE BLIP UNLESS YOU HAVE TO! We did experiment in using blip to do captioning at one point in time during this entire endeavor. It's only does like 3-5 word descriptions of an image while janus (deepseek) or qwen can do much better jobs of describing the scene even though they have more overhead in vram use. It's much better to get a paragraph or multiple paragraph long description of a scene than it is to get something that simply says 3 words...

In my humble opinion chatgpt is tolerable, but not on the free level... It's mostly too dumb on free tier to know what it's doing... It's about at the lowest smartness model Claude has. Claude has several models, with Haiku being the lowest currently. DON'T EVER USE THAT if you pay for the sevice since it's horrible. The next level up, which was Sonnet is ok for most work. More advanced levels eat tokens like crazy. You are only given so many free uses per day and week on Claude. It has a timer of a certain number of tokens it can use, which resets in 5 hours. In many weeks of paying for Claude the weekly token limit would be reached in about 3 of the 7 days paid for (it's a monthly 20.00 fee unless you buy a full year to get a few dollars off). In that regard chatgpt is genuinely a better bang for your buck since it'll continue working with you and won't just cut you off completely like claude.

Remember you can still have free tier even if you pay for the service(s)!

6. YOU ARE HUMAN!

Bots like chatgpt, gemini, claude, qwen are machines. You are NOT! Remember to sleep when you get a chance. Don't stay up every blasted night trying to rush through projects. Also remember to rely on family, friends and loved ones. Typing in to chatbots and staring at screens all day can accomplish things, but it's not all this world is about.

Social Media can be helpful... Below are some facebook groups and other social media links that I found handy through out this process and in general everyday use in working with comfyui and computers in general, or for my various hobbies.

https://www.facebook.com/bondanisty - This guy has some of the best illustration prompts on the interent for gemini, but they might be useful for other LLM too like comfyui, or various others

7. Free to a point...

Below are some other useful links we found in this process that might be useful...

https://sketchfab.com/ - one of the biggest places on the internet for free cc0 models of public domain artwork in 3d. Several Musuems have amazing work on here!

https://blendswap.com/ - great place for free or cheap blend files for blender. Some are cc0. Sadly, there are limits on how many you can download daily.

https://www.daz3d.com/free-3d-models - free models from Daz3d

https://actorcore.reallusion.com/3d-motion/free - Free motion data from Real Illusion

https://objaverse.allenai.org/ - bunch of 3d images, beware some are not cc0

https://www.turbosquid.com/ - One of the oldest 3d markets on the internet. I uploaded a few stock photos to them back when I had my very first digital camera, which was a top of the line bleeding edge 1.3 megapixel camera at the time!

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3708098 - Thingiverse is an amazing 3d printer archive. Many of the models there are cc0, and can be used in Blender.

https://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html - virtual apple. Great way to play old games like Oregon Trail

http://truespace3d.free.fr/ - TrueSpace 3d program (one of the cheap go-tos before Blender really got fully developed)

https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d/plugins/mixamo-in-blender.html - Adobe's Mixamo Blender Rig

Mixamo - Adobe's Free animated fbx models for use in Blender, Motionbuilder, and similar types of animation packages (manually clicking on each one to download is time consuming, but there are python scripts you can build to bypass this a little)

https://www.synfig.org/ - open source 2d animation package

https://huggingface.co/datasets/museado/smithsonian-data/tree/main - Huggingface Repo of Smithsonian urls - We used this in creating our local Smithsonian urls early on to shortcut the api. If you are just after a list of urls of various items without a lot of metadata this can be handy.

https://www.w3schools.com/html/ - HTML tutorials and coding tutorials on a lot of the topics covered in our research. Very handy stuff to have as reference material or if you are only working through this kind of stuff the first time.

https://harthur.github.io/dichoptic-tetris/?fbclid=IwAR051QouAikoi-DvY9GbD-ZiQXSw2S5oJNPeZZaEQ_x795mKkfS0aZC4Um8 - this one is not really GLAMWalk related but I'm posting it here since it can be good link for many people. It's a TETRIS game created for people who have eye issues as it trains your eyes if you use old red/blue 3d glasses when playing it because it makes both eyes work together to train your the muscles in your eyes. For people with lazy eye or other similar issues this is handy and is a link a lot of people don't know about.

https://www.infinityfree.com/ - this is a web hoste provider we used early on. They offer a free tier, but it is very much something I'd suggest to avoid if you can afford to pay for cloudflare as cloudflare is only a handful of dollars a year.

https://www.namesilo.com/ - This is s domain name marketplace. We purchased our domain name for soretruth.com and a few earlier domains early a few years ago. I suggest using this place in coordination with cloudflare. If you can find a domain that no one else is using it'll run about 17.00 bucks a year. If you want one that has been around that someone else is selling it can be much more than that potentially. Search around to find something unique and maybe you can lock in something for a cheaper rate.

https://thomannjeff.gumroad.com/ - online marketplace. This is one of the places we sell assets. It's free to join so go ahead and do that if you have something you are interested in selling.

https://payhip.com/buyart - This is another online marketplace. Many of our art packs and ai related art created in comfyui as well as some of our public domain book projects are listed here. Payhip is free to join and does not have up front seller costs that places like etsy or ebay do. I'd definitely suggest it to anyone looking to sell digital assets!

https://jeffreythomann.wordpress.com/ - This is our blog. I don't post daily but sometimes do frequently. Wordpress is free so that's another one I'd suggest you use. They do have a paid tier with better options but free works for me for now...

https://www.kingsdrone.com/oem-parts-for-voyage-aeronautics-va-1000-mini-hd-streaming-drone - This link is here solely for my own reference. If might be handy if you had the same style of drone we have. It's where they sell parts like the propeller for the Voyage Aeronautics VA-1000 mini. So far it's the only place on the internet I've found that sells this stuff! I keep it here because someday I'm sure our propellers are going to need to be replaced...

https://draft2digital.com/ - This is a self publishing place. If you write your own books I'd suggest using them. They can help you get book sin to Barnes and Noble and on Kobo.

https://willitrunai.com/image-models/best-for/8gb - a nice list of various models fo use with ComfyUI. Models for use with Comfyui, Stable Diffusion and similar diffusion generative ai are constantly evolving. Over the last few years I've switched between several. Due to the fact that I'm currently on 8 gb vram I'm limited in what I can do. GGUF models that are quant versions of bigger models that run on less vram is what I typically have to settle for. In the early days of Stable Diffusion I used A111, which is not even developed any more. Then I switched to Comfyui, and for a time Forge, but keep going back to the portable version of Comfyui since it seems to be easiest one to think about programmatically as it allows full use of your command terminal or powershell, when other variants limit you in various ways. Being able to modify things in terminals is handy sometimes if you need to add in dependencies, install certain things to make things work properly, etc. I like to use commercial use models as I sometimes sell output on payhip and other places. This GLAMWalk process has me doing automated publishing of old books or public domain or remixed books and things so we need to be able to according to license put output in to the proper channels... I used to use sdxl, then I used flux a while, nowadays I'm using z-image turbo which is 'good enough' for us at this time. There are newer models and other various models we have explored over the years, but this is what we are using currently.

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1J5tXAvCJx/ - Another prompt sharing group. This one is more minority based

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/19QSxK9tbg/ - Comfyui facebook group

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/19hYACqPMT/ - Another Comfyui group

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1QWKsSk2qp/ - HO Slot Car Enthusiasts facebook group

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1GYM6teEfu/ - Budget Railroading DIY group

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1bmGQcMWWq/ - 4x8 Layout Builders Group

https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1Bjdp65Tyf/ Hotwheels Batman Collectors Facebook Group

I'll probably add more facebook groups and other social media links here over time... Bookmark this site for more secrets that will be released over time. Many Open Source Apps are listed over here...

Thank you to whoever you are that attempted to create that 4 museum browser that you mentioned in reddit. You gave me inspiration when I read that and was still fiddling with chatgpt and claude in the free tier era before I started doing monthly subscriptions! Wish I had the link to that url but unfortunately I don't right now... maybe it'll pop up one of these days since I did come across that reddit page a few times in this research.

Freebie Secrets!

https://store.epicgames.com/ - Epic Games Store gives away 1-3 FREE games every week! They change the weekly freebies out most Thursdays at about 10:00 AM Central Standard Time. I'd suggest bookmarking this site and adding each week's freebies to your account there. Some of the freebies are not too impressive, but in the past they have released some triple A games like Grand Theft Auto V, A pack of all Castlevania Games, and several other titles that normally would cost quite a few bucks normally. If you have a teenager, or are a teen at heart, or just love playing video games or experiencing different gaming experiences this is a great way to increase your library! Now you know the secret!
While you are there you may want to download the Unreal Game Engine if you are in to programming. It's FREE to use until you make at least a million dollars!

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/368667/download-and-license-vmware-desktop-hype.html - On November 11, 2024 Broadcom announced that VM Ware Desktop Hypervisor (VM Ware Pro & VM Ware Workstation Pro) is now available for FREE! If you need a hypervisor to run alternative operating systems in a virtual machine this is one of the best on the market. It wasn't always free, but it is now. Now you know the secret!

http://truespace3d.free.fr/ - Truespace (initially by Calligari) is free as well. This is a 3d package I used to use many, many years ago before I bought Lightwave 3d, and very many, many, many, many years before Blender evolved to the point it is at today that allows for similar type of work to be done freely. It's from the era when 3drad, another 'lifelong subscription' package I fell for back then was paid for that is now free and obsolute, much like playon was... (I paid for playon lifelong subscriptions in the era when the Wii first came out and recently a couple of years ago just in time for a new version of windows to come out that made that lifelong payment obsolete...)... I guess the rule of thumb secret to learn here is DON'T PAY FOR SOFTWARE if there's any hint of a lifelong wording anywhere in the advertisement for it since it's a scam as it's only the life of that particular version of the software, not your life, the developers life or anyone else's actual life... life long fees for anything is a scam. Hell, even Life Insurance is a scam, but that's another story I suppose.

The entire Lightwave Thing was another story all together... I legitimately paid for Lightwave 7.0, and later upgraded to a package deal to update to 9, getting 8.0 and 8.5 as digital downloads. In one of the delivery issues somehow the delivery guy screwed it up and delivered it to a house about 2 doors up the street from where my Parents lived.  Later in that week or month (timelines get foggy thinking back that far to the 1990s-Early 2000 era) that house had some sort of major standoff issue due to a domestic dispute I think, and it involved an actual swat team that was in my Mom and Dad's yard. To this day my Mom still has stories about the 'moving bush' that was really just a swat guy in camo in her front yard telling her to go back in the house when she wanted to get in to her driveway to go to the grocery store... so Yes, it appears Lightwave 3d costs enough that it actually caused a standoff at one point in time, or at least that's what I tell myself for laughs.  

Around that same era I thought I was going to start Mid-MO Mocap (my dream of a Motion Capture Studio Indie Development in Mid Missouri in either Columbia area or Boonville Area - Cooper County, or as it's called locally CoCoMo - you know the place song is about, right... ) and bought in to Motionbuilder 5.0 and upgrade to 5.5 that 3d buzz was hyping heavily at the time (sadly Buzby passed away not long ago, but a lot of his 3dbuzz stuff still lives on in the Internet Archive)... I did work with Chatgpt heavily about a week or so trying to locate old installers for Lightwave 7, and Motionbuilder 5 and 5.5 during my free month of chatgpt but never found the full installers for each. Newtek does have installers for later versions that I have downloaded - well sort of... I have the old cds, they just put the license key things on the website... and customer service is pretty not so helpful as usual. I have an old cd for 7.0 but it's scratched so the modeler won't install even though the Lightwave exe does.  I am having issues getting the old Lightwave versions to run on Windows 11 so may try them on vmware with older versions of Microslop Windoze eventually after the GLAMWalk book is finally published in the near future..  I did get Vue to install but never really dug in to using it much (it was a part of the Lightwave upgrade thing)... 

It's really been odd watching the entire 3d, cgi, and graphics industry over the years.  Kaydara had some legitimately great software for indie production market like Motion Builder that got bought out by Autodesk, gobbled up and made much more expensive.  Macromedia had some similarly legitimately great software in Flash and Freehand, got gobbled up by Adobe and made impossibly expensive for freelancer startup kids to afford as well... if you look at the entire dot com era and later this happens over and over and over and over.  Look to open source softwave as that is the key to the future!  There is a lot of freeware or opensource variations of almost every software out there if you dig deep enough.  Blender handles fbx, and several other software packages that are open do as well. Gimp is a nice replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Krita is nice little alternative to Illustrator.  Theres tons of free or low cost shareware (even though it's not really officially called that anymore) versions of things everywhere all over all of the industries if you look deeply enough. Sometimes finding it can be difficult, but like finding dx signals on OTA back in the pre-cable days and like finding signals in FTA satellite with a motor and dish on your roof, the journey is the fun part. The quest for the info, data, or signal IS the journey. Enjoy the quest ye seeker of knowledge! (regardless of if it's related to GLAM or something else entirely... The Journey IS the adventure. Oft Hope is Born when all is forlorn.)  

Oh yeah, Torque Game Engine  - another now freebie that I intially think I paid for at some point in the past... Oh well, money comes, money goes... guess a few bucks going to a dev beats money going down the drain or out in the trash can when people in my home throw away some food, beverage, or soap or shampoo when there's still 1/3 of a bottle left as happens all too often...