Dehaunting OnePlus Nord N30 5G

Last year, I bought a Metro locked Oneplus Nord N30 5G (CPH2513/CPH2515) for $60 during a very slick deal. However, this phone was completely unusable due to it is haunted with tons of bloatware and spyware. So I decided to let it sit in a drawer for 180 days and then see what I can do with it. A few days ago, I unlocked it by simply go to About Phone then click Unlock....

February 3, 2024 · 2 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

Cheapskate's NAS Migration from Unraid to Openmediavault

Cheapskate’s NAS Migration from Unraid to Openmediavault For decades, I come across a lot of abandoned computers and recycled parts out of them. This article is about the recycled Dell Vostro 220s with LGA771 to LGA775 Mod I mentioned in the last post. It was running Unraid with a low power Xeon L5410 and 2 GB of RAM for many years. The only repair was a PSU replacement two years ago....

January 21, 2024 · 3 min · Jun

Cheapskate's Homebrew AI Lab

Old Stories The computer hardware used to be more playful and worth tinkering. My favorate platfom from a decade ago, Sandy Bridge on LGA 1155, can still be powerful even today. Back in the days, I used to repair people’s electronics for free. Because of that, I also received a lots of spares and e-waste in exchange. One of the best was a LGA 1155 motherboard with i5-2300 on it. Then, I bought a cheap E3-1245 and GTX 750 Ti to make it a gaming rig....

October 23, 2023 · 19 min · Jun

Recovering from Data Loss due to LUKS Failure

Background Story Last week, I experienced a major data loss on my daily driver computer due to encryption failure. Last time I had encountered this sort of situation was over a decade ago with TrueCrypt on an external HDD and unfortunately lost everything that weren’t backed up. I’ve recovered everything from backup this time so I decide to document it. The entire storage on my daily driver is encrypted with LUKS and it suddenly fails on boot decryption....

September 24, 2023 · 3 min · Jun