AI Weekly Malaysia

A software mod unlocks the 64GB of VRAM on Nvidia's CMP 170HX, a $250 crypto-mining GPU that originally had its display outputs and general compute capabilities locked down. The mod repurposes these surplus mining cards for AI workloads, where VRAM capacity is the primary bottleneck for running large models locally.

Why: If you're priced out of A100s or H100s for local LLM inference, a $250 card with 64GB VRAM is a genuine alternative worth testing — but the source text is mostly site boilerplate, so reliability, driver support, and actual inference performance remain unverified from this article alone. Builders should treat this as a lead to investigate, not a validated deployment path.

A developer found a locked Cricut Maker in e-waste and bypassed its deactivation by intercepting USB CDC communication between the cutter and computer using Wireshark, then building an RP2040-based USB proxy (running TinyUSB Arduino examples, overclocked to 240MHz) that rewrites the serial number in transit. The serial number packets had no checksumming or crypto, making the proxy straightforward. Replacement rollers were cheap and readily available, restoring full functionality.

Why: If you ship connected hardware that phones home for activation, this shows how trivially a USB man-in-the-middle can defeat server-side lockout when the device protocol lacks signing or checksums. Founders and engineers building IoT or cloud-locked devices should treat this as a concrete lesson: any device-level identity sent over USB without cryptographic integrity can be spoofed with a $1 microcontroller.

A GitHub programmer ported playable Doom to a Canon EOS 550D DSLR camera using the open-source Magic Lantern firmware, running it on the camera's 3-inch TFT LCD with the camera's physical buttons as controls and sound output.

Why: This is a fun hacker-novelty story with no actionable takeaway for builders; it demonstrates that Magic Lantern firmware still enables deep hardware hacking on aging Canon DSLRs, but nobody should change their tooling or roadmap because of it.