George Georgovassilis writes about information technology architecture
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
I'm missing, dearly, the "Play with VLC" context menu entry in Ubuntu 24.04. There's a cumbersome workaround(open -> with -> *scroll scroll scroll* -> VLC), but I want something faster. What started as a side quest for some convenience eventually taught me how to add arbitrary functionality to Ubuntu's file manager context menus. Step 1: … Continue reading Adding an entry to Nautilus’ context menu
I like working at night, but nearly every laptop I've tried with Ubuntu can't reduce screen brightness to comfortable levels. Thankfully there is a convenient workaround. Under Ubuntu 24.04 / Wayland find Accessibility -> Zoom -> Colour filters and adjust to your liking. You probably want to pin the magnification factor to 1.00, too. The … Continue reading Minimising screen brightness in Ubuntu
On some of my (many) Ubuntu desktop installations, Hearts of Iron 4 has an annoying bug, in that right-clicking for partial border selection selects the entire border and borders can't be edited. It seems to be caused by a weird combination of Gnome session, Wayland/Xorg and using a touchpad. This command fixes the issue for … Continue reading HOI4 right-click border selection fix
Gnome's file manager Nautilus doesn't display video thumbnails under Ubuntu 24.04. Thankfully this solution still works: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1034595/thumbnails-not-showing-in-video-in-ubuntu-18-04 sudo apt install ffmpegthumbnailer sudo apt install gstreamer1.0-libav rm -r ~/.cache/thumbnails/fail Reboot Done!
George's Techblog 