Tech Shinobi

iPhone Talks There are a many cellphones that make me feel nostalgic. None of them is Android nor iPhone. Some of them are QWERTY, some are flip phones. Phones were much interesting back in the days when Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Sharp, Blackberry and more are still competitive in the market. Today’s smartphones are indifferent and rather being “boredphones”. And all of these boredness are rooted in the “iPhone Moment”. Despite how much I dislike iPhone’s disruptive innovation and its market breakthrough as well as Apple’s philosophy behind it....

Lately, there is a need of private chatbot service as a complete alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. So, I decide to implement one at home and make it accessible to everyone in my household alongside with my network printer and NAS (OpenMediaVault). In the past, I used to recommend people using Llama series for English tasks and Qwen series for Chinese tasks. There was no open-source model that’s strong enough in multilingual tasks comparing to proprietary ones (GPT/Claude)....

As a lifelong self-learner, I use all sorts of methods to learn new things, and AI is what I’m currently into. Although I’ve been in the game since 2022, my background wasn’t focused on AI. So, like everyone else, I had to do some “AI For Dummies” level study in order to get more involved. Below is a list of learning materials that I find very helpful for myself to get started with and might also be helpful for someone else in the same situation....

Days before mini-PC become a thing, there was no NUC, MinisForum or Beelink. It was the time of thin client and SFF (small-form-factor), manufacturers such as Shuttle, Dell and Lenovo were made a lot of these. Back then, the performance of SoC was too weak so that even laptops wouldn’t use them. But my first dedicated home lab machine was an Atom D525, which was called embedded industrial computer. It served as a router rather than server due to its performance and heat....

Windows Nostalgia A recent video on Windows 7 as daily driver OS by Brodie Robertson was hilarious but also arguable. For me, XP is the best OS ever made by M$. However, it has became not so useful nowadays neither for retro gaming (which 98SE is the king) nor for day-to-day usage, due to both hardware and software incompatibility. The compromise would be Windows 7. I agree there are too much of accumulated unpatched security vulnerabilities, but there are tricks to mitigate most of those either technically or strategically....