Hardware

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....

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....

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....

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....