#Hardware

Coldcard Wallet Vulnerability: Around 1,367 BTC Stolen

Some Coldcard firmware releases seeded keys from a predictable software pseudo-random number generator, which means private keys could be brute-forced offline.

GPU Mining in 2025 with an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti: My Earnings Log and Whether Mining Still Makes Sense

Can you still mine with a GPU in 2025? What are the returns? I recently tried mining with an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti, and after a few days of mining I'm here to break down whether it's still viable.

Self-Hosting an AI Server: PVE GPU Passthrough, Drivers, CUDA and cuDNN for Running Local LLMs

With open source LLMs and the tools the community keeps shipping, AI is finally within everyone's reach. Plenty of people can now run large models on a local laptop — but laptops are underpowered, and they have other work to do; you can't keep a model running on them around the clock. I prefer PVE, so here's my deployment walkthrough, a guide for my future re-deploys.

Intel Chipset Generations: Compatible CPUs and DDR Memory Reference Table

If you work in IT, you know the 'e-waste scalpers' crowd. I'm one of them — used enterprise hardware is cheap and performs well, and nothing epitomizes it like the Xeon E3/E5 lines: multi-core, multi-thread CPUs for a few dozen yuan, sometimes just a few. But by the law of board-and-CPU pricing, the cheaper the CPU, the pricier the motherboard. So I put together a rough compatibility table of Intel chipset generations, the CPU generations they take, and the DDR memory generations they support, for my future junk-picking reference.

Teardown: Western Digital WD40NMZW 4TB Elements Portable Drive (2060-800041-003)

If you like tearing things apart: this drive served me four years and couldn't be saved. Today I'm taking it apart to show you, letting it give off its last bit of warmth and leaving DIY electronic enthusiasts with some final bits of knowledge.

Notes on Building OpenWRT (LEDE) Yourself

I bought a small industrial PC and started playing with soft routers. Here's my write-up so the next person can skip the pitfalls I hit. This post covers building OpenWRT (LEDE) yourself; follow-ups will cover automating the build with GitHub Actions Workflows and installing the x86 soft router system.

Thunderbolt (Lightning) Port Security Flaw Exposed — Computers Made Before 2019, Beware

According to foreign media, security researchers recently discovered a new security vulnerability that could make millions of computers manufactured before 2019 easily susceptible to physical attack, targeting a common component: the Thunderbolt port. According to researcher Bjorn Ruytenberg, the so-called "Thunderclap" vulnerability exploits the direct memory access (DMA) granted by Thunderbolt peripherals to access the target device. Unless proper protections are in place, hackers can use this access to steal data, track files, and run malicious code. "Hackers can read and copy data on a PC within minutes, even when the computer is locked or sleeping."

How to Choose Ethernet Cables for Home Wiring and Daily Use — What Are Cat5e, Cat6, and Cat6a? Picking Cable for 100M/1G/10G Networks

When renovating a home we pre-bury Ethernet cables, and we also buy some in daily life, but the market is a mess — Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a, Cat7, even Cat8 and Cat9. How not to get ripped off by shady sellers? Today I'll explain how to choose Ethernet cables.

Raspberry Pi System Installation and Essential Initial Setup

AntRouter R1 Setup, Configuration and Installation Illustrated Guide