Opensource

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)....

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....

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....