USB Tethering a Portable Router into a Mobile WiFi Hotspot

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....

November 25, 2024 · 2 min · Jun

Self-hosting RustDesk Server via Docker Compose

RustDesk is my favorite remote desktop tool which is the best alternative to any closed-source solutions, such as TeamViewer and Anydesk. It’s kinda like Bitwarden in the post-breach era of the cloud password manager (LastPass/1Password) market. As a light user of RustDesk, I use it only occasionally. So I didn’t setup my own RD server on VPS even though I suppose to. For some reason, one of my RustDesk client got blocked to the official servers....

November 3, 2024 · 2 min · Jun

Experimenting Lip Syncing Deepfake Tools

AI-Generated content can be fun or “slop” according to Simon Willison, but also can be malevolent due to its abuse in phishing attacks. Some of my readers may have already known that recently I’m working on a side project , which based onchatgpt-html and uses LLMs to detect phishing emails. I think at some point, the tool should be able to detect phishing attempt from video content too. Because deepfake technology is so accessible nowadays and its generated content can be quite convincing....

May 8, 2024 · 4 min · Jun

Updating ThinkPad C13 Yoga

2024 Update MrChromebox.tech had a major update a few month ago, so I decide to move on as well. But before that, use Clonezilla or rsync -aHAXS to back up the 32 GB emmc first. Run in terminal, install “Full UEFI Firmware” cd; curl -LO mrchromebox.tech/firmware-util.sh && sudo bash firmware-util.sh After reboot, a full version of coreboot is installed, by replacing the previous SeaBIOS which is partial and limited. This makes this laptop now with a free firmware....

February 16, 2024 · 17 min · Jun

A Deep Dive into Voice Cloning with SoftVC VITS and Bert-VITS2

A Deep Dive into Voice Cloning with SoftVC VITS and Bert-VITS2 In the previous post, I have tried a little bit of TTS Generation WebUI and found it’s interesting. So, I decide to train a usable model with my own voice. This voice cloning project explores both SVC for Voice Changing and VITS for Text-to-Speech. There is no one tool does all jobs. I have tested several tools for this project....

January 27, 2024 · 11 min · Jun