Blog Posts
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MTP Speculative Decoding on Strix Halo: How I Made It 3x Slower Before I Made It Faster
A short follow-up on the Strix Halo miniPC: turning on MTP speculative decoding with its default settings made qwen3.6 generation 3x slower. Tuned for an A3B MoE it is 18–26% faster, and the whole ...
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Strix Halo vs an A30 vs the Frontier: What the miniPC Can (and Can't) Actually Do
I benchmarked my Strix Halo miniPC against an A30 GPU and frontier API models. The short version: locally-hosted qwen3.6-thinking scores 62.2% on the Aider Polyglot benchmark, sitting right between...
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Running a Frontier Coding Model on an Under-$3K Mini PC
I got Qwen3-Coder-Next (80B MoE) running at 46 tok/s on a under-$3K mini PC. It took a full OS reinstall, a firmware downgrade, kernel parameter archaeology, a thermal crisis, and throwing out abou...
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Rescuing "Unsupported" Enterprise SSDs with Custom MegaRAID Tools
I picked up a pair of refurbished Samsung PM1643a SSDs for my Dell R740 Proxmox server, but my PERC H330 showed them as "Unsupported" with 0 KB size. They had 520-byte sectors from their previous l...
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Vlog??
Once upon a time I had a youtube channel. I mean I still do but most of my videos are now private and I stopped posting. I dont really want to reactivate my channel and be a YouTuber again, but I a...
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Astrophotography Datasets Site
For a while now, I’ve been sharing my astrophotography datasets on a really basic mid-90’s-looking site I threw together. It was ugly, it was hard to use, it sucked. But it served its purpose and I...
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Warewulf Home Lab Setup
This cluster is something I setup to learn more about HPC. My initial project is using the cluster to do astrophotography image pre-processing/calibrating/integrating.
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Obligatory HomeLab Writeup
Don’t judge my local fire-hazard. I’ll get this out of the way first: You do not want rack servers in your home. They’re *really* loud. I am just a crazy person. Ok, now that that’s out of the way,...
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Mounting my miniPC and Powerbox
I recently got a Pegasus Pocket PowerBox Advanced for my astro setup, and while I was at it I moved my miniPC up to attach on the telescope instead of onto my mount. I did this using the accessorie...
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Achieving better telescope balance
On the astrophotography Discord server I hang out on I’ve seen lots and lots of folks struggle with balancing their telescope. I think a big part of the reason why this is so difficult is that a lo...
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Network Setup
WiFi: NetGear Orbi RBRE960 (AP mode, 3AP Mesh)Router: Custom MiniPC pfSense Router (10GBit LAN, 2.5GBit WAN)
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