Welcome to my blog!

How I got here

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Hey! I’m Hoang Xuan Phuc, but everyone just calls me Felix.

I’m a CompSci student at the University of South Florida (USF), hailing from Vietnam. Growing up, my life was basically a script: Wake up at 6 a.m., school at 7, extra school at 5, eat, sleep, repeat. That was my loop until 5th grade, when my mom gifted me an old laptop.

My first thought? Gaming on it all day long. But that dream died fast. I quickly realized I had inherited a “potato laptop” after trying to run some random first-person shooter game (you know, back when they still used Adobe Flash Player). Sure, it was playable, but the lag was so bad I’d have to be a psychic to get a shot in before getting blasted.

Being a problem-solving nerd, I got hooked on a new question: How do I make this thing not suck?

So, thanks to Google and QuanTriMang.com, I went down the rabbit hole of 20-step optimization guides. I was editing startup programs in msconfig.exe, killing services in services.msc, and even foolishly trying to “download more RAM” by messing with pagefile.sys (protip: don’t do this). Honestly, every megabyte of RAM I freed up was a bigger rush than actually playing the game.

This tinkering addiction escalated. Before I knew it, I’d installed Linux, ditching games entirely for the promise of it running faster. And man, the learning curve wasn’t a curve, it was a cliff. I spent more time fixing the OS than actually using it.

• Touch-pad scrolls too fast? Have fun digging in random config files in the /etc directory; you need to manually change the file content, because there isn’t any proper GUI to fix this.
• How to change it? Oh, the internet said I should use the vim program to edit the file. Okay, it opened, but why can’t I type anything? You have to press i to enter Insert Mode?
• Okay, copied and pasted my line there… now how the hell do I save and quit???

Yeah, it was annoying. But it was also so much fun. I realized I love digging into the guts of a computer and making it my own. Now, my life script is: wake up at 12 am, school till 6, eat, fake sleep, and then run random commands till 4am, repeat. And then, later on, I found myself not just playing around with my own laptop but playing around with other things like blocking ads on the router, self-hosted a Netflix and MangaDex at home, running Switch emulation on an iPad, hacking a PS4 to install unlimited games, …

The problem is, my brain isn’t big enough to remember all these commands and weird tricks, and they’re all so cool I just want to talk about it all day long. So that’s where this blog comes in. Think of it as my public brain-dump - a place to store my ‘hidden recipes’ and all the cool (or weird) things I find. It’s my personal notebook, a record of my journey, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll help or inspire you to break… er, I mean, tinker with your own computer, too. :wq

My “On-Paper” Stats

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Alright, enough stories. If you’re interested in my professional journey, my skills, and all that “hire me” stuff, you can find the details in the resume I’ve embedded below.