Author: George Georgovassilis

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 →

Acer Nitro V15 battery charge level protection and Ubuntu

The Nitro V15 supports battery protection via min/max charge levels, but Ubuntu doesn't talk the hardware protocol out of the box. There's a kernel module which enables charge levels. I'm a bit in a hurry, so the TLD: the module is here https://github.com/frederik-h/acer-wmi-batterycheck it out and follow the installation instructions Tried & works under Ubuntu … Continue reading Acer Nitro V15 battery charge level protection and Ubuntu →

Visual browser automation with OmniParser

Overview UI/browser automation tests can be brittle, because tests hook into implementation details of the UI which may not be relevant for actual user interaction. Visual test automation is more robust, because it uses the UI in the same way a user is supposed to do. This post explains a solution for visual browser automation. … Continue reading Visual browser automation with OmniParser →