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 →

VLC Flatpak won’t play videos from network shares

Suddenly the Flatpak version of VLC on Ubuntu stopped playing video files directly from a network fileshare (SMB/windows share) mounted via Nautilus. The error is about VLC not being able to play "smb://" files. That's annoying because Nautilus is supposed to hide the fact that this is a network share and create then illusion of … Continue reading VLC Flatpak won’t play videos from network shares →