Blog Posts
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Register Mapping the Ampinvt TEL-48502M100 solar inverter
The Ampinvt TEL-48502M100 doesn’t publish a Modbus register map, and as far as I can tell nobody else has built one either, so I scanned the full address space and value-matched registers against L...
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Everything I Tried on the Strix Halo That Didn't Work (and Why)
A running list of everything on the Strix Halo box that didn’t work, sorted by how it failed rather than how embarrassing it was (there was no shortage of candidates for that ranking eithe...
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Do the wins stack? MTP on top of sliding-window attention
Two decode-speed wins from this series, MTP and the sliding-window recipe, attack different costs, so they should just stack. They didn’t even get the chance - turning both on aborted at load with ...
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I got a usable 256K-token context on my Strix box
A usable million-token context on my Strix Halo box turned out to be a trap - prefill takes 4.6 hours and the tricks that make it fast make it useless. What I got instead is a genuinely usable 256K...
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One character cost me a week of long context
I found a one-character bug in llama.cpp: on the Vulkan backend,
step(0)returns 1 instead of 0, so the “drop this block” mask I built out ofstep()quietly kept every blo... -
No more melting my Strix
I’ve hard-crashed my Strix Halo miniPC on thermals three separate times across these posts, every time because the fix was manual and I forgot to apply it. So I stopped trusting myself and wrote a ...
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I told 3090 owners to skip MTP. I was very wrong.
Last time I told 3090 owners to skip MTP. Then I took my own advice and ran it on my 3090: +41%, the biggest speedup in the series, on the exact card I’d said to skip - while the same trick lost on...
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When Smaller Stops Being Faster: a Quant Ladder on the MI300X
Someone handed me an MI300X for a little while, so I walked two MoE coding models down the quant ladder - BF16 to Q4 - to answer what the Strix Halo miniPC posts couldn’t: when memory bandwidth sto...
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Network Setup (2026 edition)
Two years ago my network was a mesh router and a pfSense miniPC on one flat /8. It's now two buildings joined by 10G fiber, carved into VLANs, with a hypervisor and a NAS doing the work, and the fi...
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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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