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 →

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 →

wpa_supplicant spam

Ubuntu 24.04 is spamming several of these entries in syslog: wpa_supplicant[1736]: wlp3s0: CTRL-EVENT-SIGNAL-CHANGE above=1 signal=-62 noise=9999 txrate=390000 The solution is to raise the wpa_supplicant logging level and restart networking: mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/wpa_supplicant.service.d/ vi /etc/systemd/system/wpa_supplicant.service.d/log.conf # add these lines [Service] LogLevelMax=4 # save & quit systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart wpa_supplicant.service systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

Android: “something went wrong and you need to sign in again” loop

I recently had trouble setting up a Google workspace account on my Android phone. Symptoms:- The phone persistently displays "Something went wrong and you need to sign in again". On clicking that, you get the same message again.- The phone persistently displays "android account action required". On clicking that, you get the same message again.- … Continue reading Android: “something went wrong and you need to sign in again” loop →