Dude! Sweet!
I built my current house server back in 2019 . It had an upgrade from the original Ryzen 2700 to a 5700G in late 2021, but otherwise is still running with the original setup. Back in November it developed some erratic behaviour (initially manifesting as problems with the TPM, which is ironic as I’ve spent a bunch of time at my day job trying to improve TPM reliability), culminating in unreliable…
I had intended that the next release of onak, my OpenPGP keyserver, would be 0.7.0, and include OpenPGP v6 support ( RFC9580 ). However events conspired to make a 0.6.5 release a really good idea. Firstly, I threw an LLM at the code base and asked it to review it. This isn’t intended to be a post about LLMs, but there’s a considerable amount of pressure at work to be “AI native”. I’m very much an…
Given we’ve entered a new year it’s time for my annual recap of my Free Software activities for the previous calendar year. For previous years see 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 + 2024 . Conferences My first conference of the year was FOSDEM . I’d submitted a talk proposal about system attestation in production environments for the attestation devroom, but they had a lot of good submissions and…
I bought a NanoKVM . I’d heard some of the stories about how terrible it was beforehand, and some I didn’t learn about until afterwards, but at £52, including VAT + P&P, that seemed like an excellent bargain for something I was planning to use in my home network environment. Let’s cover the bad press first. apalrd did a video, entitled NanoKVM: The S stands for Security (Armen Barsegyan has a…
21 years ago today I wrote my first blog post . Did I think I’d still be writing all this time later? I’ve no idea to be honest. I’ve always had the impression my readership is small, and people who mostly know me in some manner, and I post to let them know what I’m up to in more detail than snippets of IRC conversation can capture. Or I write to make notes for myself (I frequently refer back to…
A bit delayed in terms of an announcement, but last month I tagged a new version of onak, my OpenPGP compatible keyserver. It’s been 2 years since the last release , and this is largely a bunch of minor fixes to make compilation under Debian trixie with more recent CMake + GCC versions happy. OpenPGP v6 support, RFC9580 , hasn’t made it. I’ve got a branch which adds it, but a lack of keys to do…
The last (software) piece of sorting out a local voice assistant is tying the openWakeWord piece to a local microphone + speaker, and thus back to Home Assistant . For that we use wyoming-satellite . I’ve packaged that up - https://salsa.debian.org/noodles/wyoming-satellite - and then to run I do something like: $ wyoming-satellite --name 'Living Room Satellite' \ --uri 'tcp://[::]:10700' \…
People keep asking me when I’ll write the next instalment of my local voice assistant journey. I didn’t mean for it to be so long since the last one, things have been busier than I’d like. Anyway. Last time we’d built Tensorflow , so now it’s time to sort out openWakeWord. As a reminder we’re trying to put a local voice satellite on my living room Debian media machine. The point of openWakeWord is…
To build our local voice satellite on a Debian system rather than using the ATOM Echo device we need something that can handle the wake word component; the piece that means we only send audio to the Home Assistant server for processing by whisper.cpp when we’ve detected someone is trying to talk to us. openWakeWord seems to be one of the better ways to do this, and is well supported. However. It…
Having setup an ATOM Echo Voice Satellite and hooked it up to Home Assistant we now need to actually do something with the captured audio. Home Assistant largely deals with voice assistants using the Wyoming Protocol , which describes itself as essentially JSONL + PCM audio. It works nicely in terms of meaning everything can exist as separate modules that then just communicate over network…