u/47th-Element

I understand that other solutions like Google's find hub are still available but I need to understand the technical reason why the pre-installed Xiaomi's find device system app ceases to work after bootloader unlocking, because it really feels like some sort of punishment or an attempt to discourage bootloader unlocking which wouldn't be fair when they could warn about the potential vulnerabilities that come with it so people are informed, while still maintaining the functionality of remote find device app.

This technically works on normal linux environments too, but it's made for termux. I wanted to experiment with local ai models but I got a half assed decade old phone so not a decent power horse for AI so I was stuck with small weak models that often lack knowledge about lots of stuff.

And since I wanted the setup to be local, I had to come up with something creative and here's how it went down:

1. I downloaded Wikipedia simple English no pics offline library (literally 1gb only), and another library about cooking (but you can download anything else you like from kiwix public library).

2. Compiled spacy in termux (it was hell!) along with llama.cpp.

3. Loaded spacy's small fast model: spacy.load("en_core_web_sm"), this is the fast engine that will be used to extract keywords for offline searching.

4. Wrote a simple script that uses libzim.search to find an article or a snippet of text that contains keywords in a couple of seconds (I'm not very good with python so this part was AI assisted)

And then I made a front end using node-red, with two modes:

I. Basic: [PROMPT] -> [AI Model] -> [RESPONSE].

II. Advanced (search): [PROMPT] -> [SPACY KEYWORDS EXTRACTION] -> [ZIM SEARCH] -> [AI Model] -> [RESPONSE].

Both the search and spacy only take a couple of seconds to work if you keep spacy engine loaded in the background instead of loading it every time. The results were quite satisfactory, the ai model is a bit smarter, but that depends on how good the Library you downloaded, and the context window for the model you're using, if it's too tight the model will get confused and hallucinate!

The experiment was inspired by this repo but it works way faster (I control the amount of text provided to the ai, and no need for LLM python library overhead).

You can call me old but back in the good old days when I installed Chainfire's SuperSU (it was the primary root manager at the time) on my very first Android device, a 0.5GB ram Samsung Galaxy, and ran this exact root checker on the left side of the picture and got the congratulations, I was ecstatic!

Fast forward to 2026, root detectors now show warning signs, exclamation marks, risk or threat detected messages, it's crazy how some odd 10 years changed our perspective on root detection from good to the exact opposite. There isn't really a point behind this post, I'm just an old power user ranting and reflecting on the change, and yes slightly missing the good old days.

For the love of tech!

I had this good old Tecno KD6 phone for about 6 years when I noticed that the storage chip (emmc) was stable but heavily worn (90-100% of estimated lifetime), so I had to buy a new device.

However I didn't want to just throw this little soldier in a drawer, so I came up with the idea to use it as if it was a Raspberry Pi (but offload heavy writes to ram or sdcard) after all, they both run the Linux kernel.

So here is how it went down:

I started with surgical debloating, removing every little package and application physically, until I was left with nothing but SystemUI, which I ultimately disabled, now the screen doesn't show anything (e.g. the phone is headless).

Then I rooted the device with Magisk, installed a few modules (busybox, advanced charging, etc), and wrote a script in /data/adb/service.d that runs fstrim, undervolting and some other kernel level tweaks, then starts another script I wrote (init) inside termux, which starts a daemon I wrote that works very similarly to SystemD on Linux distros, it initiates all my enabled self hosted services, and starts a wifi repeater.

As of now, I have access to all of the following features whether locally (within the wifi repeater) or remotely (through my domains):

1. a feature rich, good looking dashboard with real time stats about the device and access to most of the services (Node-Red)

2. A remote root shell.

3. Extensive control over wifi, the wifi repeater, speed limits for clients and blocklist.

4. Self hosted AdGuard Home for blocking ads on the WiFi repeater network.

5. Remote filesharing: local SFTP, remote google drive like filesharing (using FileBrowser web binary), and remote/local book library (self hosted Kavita).

6. Remote and local two-way audio streaming using WebRTC logic, with self hosted stun server, works like audio calls without a sim card or any social media API.

7. Remote control over the camera (using Termux-API).

8. Remote media play and TTS voice messaging to the headless device, supporting multiple languages (espeak-ng, robotic I know, but fast).

9. Remote download service (Aria2), to start downloading remotely to the SD card of the headless device.

10. Remote unlimited OCR (the only limit is the device's CPU speeds), supporting multiple languages.

11. Remote format conversions (FFmpeg as backend), allows for converting various video and audio formats.

12. Remote OSINT (usernames, emails, phone numbers), using three different backends (educational purposes).

13. Remote hash cracking frontend (John as backend), also for experimentation and educational purposes.

14. Local/remote self hosted Sillytavern (a website for AI chatting, with one or more models in the same time).

15. Fully offline voice assistant with a local AI model, capable of performing predefined voice commands.

16. A job schedule front end (Crond as backend) to schedule jobs and tasks.

17. A cloud VM (debian armv7 chroot) accessible locally or remotely through pinggy or cloudflare browser rendering, with hardware acceleration (gl4es and Virgl) and TurboVNC for display.

18. Local and remote ssh (through cloudflare tunneling).

19. A task manager, theming settings, and other stuff. Along with Auto start (interacts with my systemd script to enable/disable services).

20. Local wireless adb + remote adb (cloudflare as well).

21. Advanced power menu with confirmation dialogs.

The best part? Completely free! I didn't pay anything, even the domains were free. I just gladly spent some time and effort into something I love, I hate for an old piece of hardware to sit in a drawer, that's why I did all this. It's not time for this good old soldier to retire yet!

P.S. if it wasn't clear, all the pictures you are seeing are captured from another device, the main one that is hosting everything is headless.