Migrating Linux VM to a Portable Live USB

Last time, I mentioned Creating Ventoy VDI for Linux Live USB , however, it may not boot on some strange hardware and I unfortunately have quite a few of those. So in such cases, it’s better to boot Linux natively. By doing this, we need Rescuezilla/Clonezilla to extract the Linux system out of Virtualbox’s hard drive (VDI/VMDK). Download and load the ISO of Rescuezilla, a GUI version of Clonezilla, it’s larger but eaiser to use....

March 19, 2025 · 2 min · Jun

On iPhone, Design and Jailbreak

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....

February 2, 2025 · 5 min · Jun

Self-hosting Local LLMs (DeepSeek-R1) Easily with Harbor (Ollama+Open-WebUI+SearXNG)

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)....

January 26, 2025 · 5 min · Jun

My AI Learning Materials and News Feeds

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....

January 20, 2025 · 4 min · Jun

Reviving ThinkCentre M58p in 2024

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....

December 14, 2024 · 3 min · Jun