Tech Shinobi

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....

Eventually, I found myself with enough leisure and motivation to set up a crypto wallet. For my situation, investing time and money into my skills, knowledge, and projects yields more return and safer than in finance. But in this time, I found some good VPN deals which I would like to pay with XMR. Plus it’s convenient to have some spare crypto in wallet for making donations to my favorite creators and projects, so it’s time to set things up....

As a early adopter of Protonmail, I use their later coming VPN product as well, regularly yet lightly. Although I’m a potential customer but still not paying for any of their plan, for many reasons. Being a free account user, I’ve never done torrenting or any other heavy usage on their servers. It is not moral even though the provider allows me to. Probably because of my account was old enough so that my country selection feature wasn’t banned until latest update....

Recently I came down to want a mobile hotspot when going out of home, something like Netgear Nighthawk M series, but able to flash custom firmware (OpenWrt/pfSense equivalents) and cheap. However, there is no such thing on the market even without budget consideration. So it has to be done with DIY, like USB tethering with a router. In the case of tethering or so called Ethernet over USB, we are using a phone as a cellular modem for our router....