I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

And the auto-submitting TOTP entry form where you’re apparently not allowed to make a typo. And obscuring the TOTP number like it’s a password or state secret.

Personally, I love that layout.

I’m always at a loss for what to put up as wall decorations, and I hate rats nests of cables. Win-win!

Loops finally seems usable now. I tried the beta a while back and it was kinda “Meh” but it’s improved significantly since. And you can browse on the website now, too. I’m not into short form videos, but credit where it’s due.

Well, I do like short form videos, but I hate panning for the gems and just let my friends send me the ones that rise to top.

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”

I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.

The irony of Lennart “let’s change everything about Linux because I know better” Poettering creating a company called Amutable is not lost on me.

But also, that tracks because now it’s “I know better so now you can’t change anything” which is pretty on brand.

https://github.com/marytts/marytts

I’ve used MaryTTS semi-recently. It’s older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.

On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I’m not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.

Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).

Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

Yeah, I don’t know about pre-installed with Android that aren’t ad platforms masquerading as consumer hardware. I’d never use one unless it was supported by LineageOS or something. My comment was more “roll your own” in nature.

Maybe one of those HDMI “stick” PCs you can get? There’s x86 Android builds you can run or you can do like I did with my media PCs and boot into Openbox and just launch a fullscreen browser right to Jellyfin and control it from your phone. (My main setup uses Emby but should be able to do the same with JF).

I’ve actually got a portable Jellyfin server I take with me. Built on the OrangePi Zero 2W with a USB->NVMe acting as media storage (as well as the Jellyfin DB). It’s got several other services running as well as a second Wifi adapter so it can also act as a travel router.

For playback, I pretty much just use my laptop or phone but have thought about adding one of the “stick” PCs as a client for it.

Yep, that’s why I haven’t messed with Kubernetes either; way overkill for a homelab and especially so since I downsized due to soaring electricity costs here.

The only reason I gave up on Docker Swarm was that it seemed pretty dead-end as far as being useful outside the homelab. At the time, it was still competing with Kubernetes, but Kube seems to have won out. I’m not even sure Docker CE even still has Swarm. It’s been a good while since I messed with it. It might be a “pro” feature nowadays.

Edit: Docker 28.5.2 still has Swarm.

Still, it was nice and a lot easier to use than Kubernetes once you wrapped your head around swarm networking.

I had 15 of the 2013-era 5010 thin clients. Most of them have had their SSDs and RAM upgraded.

They’ve worn many hats since I’ve had them, but some of their uses and proposed uses were:

1. I did a 15 node Docker Swarm setup and used that to both run some of my applications as well as learn how to do horizontal scaling.
2. After I tore down the Docker Swarm cluster, I set them up as diskless workstations to both learn how to do that and used them at a local event as web kiosks (basically just to have a bunch of stations people could use to fill out web based forms).
3. One of them was my router for a good while. Only replaced it in that role when I got symmetric gigabit fiber. Before that, I used VLANs to to run LAN and WAN over its single ethernet port since I had asymmetric 500 Mbps and never saturated the port.
4. Run small/lightweight applications in highly-available pairs/clusters
5. Use them to practice clustered services (Multi-master Galera/MariaDB, multi-master LDAP, CouchDB, etc)
6. Use them as Snapcast clients in each room
7. Add wireless cards, install OpenWRT, and make powerful access points for each room (can combine with the above and also be a Snapcast client)
8. Set them up as VPN tunnel endpoints, give them out to friends, and have a private network

Of the 15, I think I’m only actively using 4 nowadays. One is my MPD+Snapcast server, one is running HomeAssistant, ,the third is my backup LDAP server, and one runs my email server (really). The rest I just spin up as needed for various projects; I downsized my homelab and don’t have a lot of spare capacity for dev/test VMs these days, so these work great in place of that.

“Does it piss you off when Google/whatever does [blank]? Yeah, me too. So I run my own versions to not have to deal with that crap. Would you like me to set you up an account on my stuff?”

Not that I’d own a smart fridge, but if I did and they started shoving ads on it, it’d look like this later that day:

Underappreciated top

That was my nickname in college.

Been playing with a Raspberry Pi Zero clone (Orange Pi Zero 2W) to make a portable travel router + app server + party box + development environment. Basically seeing what all I can cram into four 1.5 GHz cores and 4 GB of RAM in a Pi Zero form factor.

Its primary upstream is wifi (but can use ethernet or USB tethering with some reconfiguring) and also presents an access point. AP, ethernet, and USB ethernet gadget interfaces are bridged into the “LAN” segment.

Has multiple VPNs (one for privacy and one for connecting to my internal stack), PiHole for DHCP services and ad blocking, PairDrop for sharing files, CodeServer for development, MPD and Snapcast for listening to music (plus another Pi Zero to act as a satellite speaker), Kiwix with the full 120 GB dump of Wikipedia and pretty much every dev doc I could load, Calibre Web with most of my book collection loaded, and Searx-NG to provide a portable search engine that’s not infested with AI and SEO slop.

It’s also running Nginx with real Let’s Encrypt certs so all the web apps it hosts are properly running behind HTTPS.

Still working out some kinks / hardware quirks and don’t have the scripting automation complete to cast from Bluetooth to Snapcast server, but that does work on the bench.

I call it the “Quirky Turkey”.