Translated from the Chinese original. Over the past year or so, I’ve used AI to write quite a few tools for myself. It started with wanting to solve one small, specific problem, and somewhere along the way I ended up with a fairly complete information processing system. What I’m sharing today has some value right now, but that value lies more in the ideas. The specific code isn’t that important. At the current pace of Coding Agent development, I suspect this code will be worthless in a few months. ...

Translated from the Chinese original. A few days ago I followed Several Ways for Chinese People to Apply for a US EIN – VPS Dawanjia and applied for an EIN by phone. This is my record of it. Although I have an ITIN, applying for an EIN actually requires neither an ITIN nor starting a company. Online Application with an ITIN: Possible in Principle, Not in Practice Following my usual principle of not making a phone call if I can solve something online, I first tried to apply for the EIN by filling in the online form. ...

Translated from the Chinese original. Background Some time ago my girlfriend started a master’s program. The lectures are entirely in English and full of technical terms, so sometimes her comprehension can’t keep up with the pace of the lecture. Reviewing with class replays/recordings has therefore become a weekly must-do. But rewatching a full three-hour class is obviously unrealistic, so converting audio and video to text became a necessity. Choosing a Solution Most commercial ASR services struggle to deliver high-accuracy transcription I’m a Feishu Miaoji (Feishu Minutes) member, so when this need came up, the first thing I thought of was trying Miaoji. ...

Translated from the Chinese original. Today I was testing Memo’s translation service and found that it kept failing, so I wanted to capture the traffic to see why. I naturally opened Fiddler on my computer, but, unexpectedly, I couldn’t capture any HTTP requests from Memo at all… (HTTPS capture was enabled, and other software tested fine.) I searched around and found that it might be because of Electron. So, following Packet Capture Tips (1) - Zhihu, I tried capturing with Wireshark. Unfortunately, Wireshark showed far too much information, and even after filtering by IP and protocol there were still a huge number of requests… so I gave up. ...

Translated from the Chinese original. Test Devices Windows WeChat 3.7.6.44 Android WeChat 8.0.34 Redmi K50, MIUI 13 Background I have a habit that has lasted three years: backing up that week’s WeChat chat history every week. But WeChat’s backup feature is really badly done, and I often run into network problems: “The current network is complex, please try another network” A prompt saying the phone and the computer are on different networks (even though both are clearly on the same Wi-Fi, and the network name shown on the backup screen is identical) … I searched the internet, and the solutions amount to nothing more than: ...

Translated from the Chinese original. A long time ago, the H265-related problem I ran into on Win10 was thumbnails not showing. The fix is fairly well established online: just install Download K-Lite Codec Pack. Recently, for work, I used “Yao Ni Ming San Qian” to download a lot of watermark-free videos from Douyin/Kuaishou. Some of them are H264-encoded and the rest are H265-encoded, and previewing them in the Win10 File Explorer is no problem. But of all the bad luck, I needed to drag them all into Eagle for management, and Eagle can currently only collect H265 files, but cannot preview or play them ==… So I needed to convert the H265 videos to H264. The conversion itself isn’t complicated; HandBrake: Open Source Video Transcoder does the job. The problem is: how do you find the H265 videos in a folder that mixes H264 and H265 files? Otherwise, once the number of videos grows, converting the H264 ones is just wasted time. ...

Translated from the Chinese original. Last night, while eating out, I found that two teachers I’m interested in were both livestreaming on WeChat Channels. I wanted to hear both, but I only had one phone and couldn’t be sure a replay would be available afterward, so I came up with the idea of downloading the WeChat Channels livestream to watch later. Downloading a WeChat Channels livestream can roughly be divided into three steps: ...

Translated from the Chinese original. I recently got a Miwu Art keyboard, which has a voice wake-up key. On Win10, though, it wakes Cortana by default, and as everyone knows, Cortana is basically useless on Win10. So a natural idea came up: how do I replace the Cortana wake-up with Xiao Ai (Xiaomi’s voice assistant)? First, key detection showed that the keyboard’s voice key actually simulates the Win+C shortcut to invoke Cortana. So the question became: how do I make Win+C wake Xiao Ai instead? ...

Translated from the Chinese original. Background I recently bought a pair of Edifier RT-1700 as desktop speakers. They can connect via wired input or Bluetooth, but switching between the two requires the bundled infrared remote. For a lazy person like me, that is really too inconvenient. Naturally, I figured I could bring them into Mi Home by simulating the infrared signals. I happened to have a Xiaomi AC Partner 2 at home, so I used Mi Home’s “Custom Remote” feature to replicate all the functions of the speaker’s remote. ...

Translated from the Chinese original. Over the May Day holiday I spent about a day migrating my old posts from WordPress to Gridea. There were quite a few pitfalls along the way, so here is a record of them. Basic Workflow The whole process has roughly the following steps: Configure Gridea’s GitHub repository and the network environment for local sync. Export the posts from WordPress as a series of Markdown files. Import the old posts into Gridea, and change each new URL based on the old URL. Add a JS script to the 404 page to approximate a 301 (redirect). Since most of the process can be found online, I’ll only record the places where pitfalls tend to appear. ...