Just a quick note: the HP z620 supports booting without a graphics card, but it's hidden. Steps to enable: enter the BIOS -> replicated setup -> save to a FAT32 formatted USB boot some computer, attach the USB, edit the file: there's a "Headless Mode" section with two options, "Enabled" and "Disabled" and a silly … Continue reading Headless boot HP z620
Author: George Georgovassilis
Auditing VRAM: Ensuring Every Gigabyte is Real
Counterfeit storage devices, such as USB flash drives and SSDs with modified controller firmware that report false capacities, rely on address wrapping: writes beyond physical memory silently overwrite earlier blocks modulo the actual capacity. With increased interest in home AI labs, one could imagine similar practices to start appearing in the second-hand GPU market. While … Continue reading Auditing VRAM: Ensuring Every Gigabyte is Real
VScode copilot: No lowest priority node found
I've found the vscode copilot error "No lowest priority node found" to be about a context overflow somewhere in the chain "inference engine" -> "LLM" -> copilot. Some/all of the workarounds you can try when that happens: Reduce/disable agent tools Increase the input window in chatLanguageModels.json, eg. { "id": "gemma-4-12b-it-qat-q4_0", "name": "gemma-4-12b-it-qat-q4_0", "url": "http://localhost:11434", "toolCalling": … Continue reading VScode copilot: No lowest priority node found
Acer Nitro V15 login hangs
When trying to enable the discrete NVIDIA GPU of the Acer Nitro ANV15-41[ANV], the graphical login screen "hangs": the OS works fine, but won't accept keyboard or touchpad input, which makes it unusable. It took me a day of wrong paths taken to realise that X11 picks the wrong input devices. The fix is to … Continue reading Acer Nitro V15 login hangs
Running even larger LLMs on small hardware
In a previous post [GM4] we ran gemma4 12B on a 16GB RAM budget; today we'll push the envelop and run deepseek-r1:14b-qwen-distill-q4_K_M on the same budget. While last time we got away by fiddling with the model definition, today we'll have to reconfigure the OS itself (in addition to fiddling with the model definition). While … Continue reading Running even larger LLMs on small hardware
