A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 10 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • Huh, is the cloud really just someone else’s computer?

    And yes, I’ve managed to cut out Microsoft of my personal life entirely. I mean what would I need them for? I’ll click on a Teams invitation… But I don’t really rely on that, or send them out myself. Other than that I have enough other operating systems, storage devices, Office suites…



  • Yes. And places like North Korea do have a lot of soldiers. Because every male gets to waste a substantial amount of their lives on military service… But reportedly, most of these soldiers don’t get handed any bullets. Because a) The country can’t afford munition. And b) they could do a coup against the leader with working weapons.
    So I don’t know whether they should get any representation in a chart. These soldiers will just yell “bang, bang” in a war. Maybe they’ll yell it loudly and in a “powerful” way. But that’d hardly kill any enemies.



  • Sure. You write numbers with the most significant digit to the left, and least significant one to the right. That’s kind of how we all write all numbers, so it should be the same with dates 😉 Though we have all kinds of crazy people and they’ll say it’s “dreiviertel fünf” and nobody has any clue what time that’s supposed to be… I’d argue it should not be that weird, though 😅



  • Aren’t the rules fixed since 2022? As far as I know the way it works is, legislation / the EU comes up with rules. It’s the companies job to make their products abide by law. And then it’s down to lawyers / jurists to determine if they comply by law? I don’t see how they as a company need to wait for the European Commission to do something… Seems the commission sent them a notice a year ago, how their lawyers don’t think the fee models conforms to law. But that’d be Apple’s job to fix. Or have their legal team come up with something?!




  • You could plug in some USB fan, light, … and see if there’s power on there. Maybe prepare a harddisk on another computer, boot Linux and look at the debug logs. See if the USB chip gets recognized. And maybe learn something about the topology… If it’s just a single controller or multiple ones in there.

    First thing I’d do is reset the BIOS. Maybe the previous owner disabled all USB ports for security reasons. That’d be an easy “fix”. Or they threw it out because they don’t work.




  • Also got a nice Dell 7390 for a similar price a year ago. Though you really can’t compare a laptop bought in 2019 with a laptop bought 6 years in the future. You’d need to compare it to a refurbished one available for a similar price in 2019 and then factor in how that turned out for you a few years later. I mean technology always progresses and you’ll always get more a few years later. But yes, I’ve always been a fan of refurbished enterprise-grade laptops instead of the super-cheap consumer ones which include as much cost-cuttings as possible and a legacy CPU which is upmarketed because it’s cheap. I think my old desktop Celeron N4500(?) was like 40€ when it was new, because it was leftovers in production. At that point you can always buy a used processor for the same price with double the processor cores.


  • I mean if no single software fits your bill, maybe go for a combination of them? Post your blog posts in a Ghost installation, your podcasts in Castopod and have your community on a NodeBB forum? The Fediverse kinda includes the idea it’s all one big network anyway. So you don’t have to squeeze everything on a single server and one CMS.

    Other than that: Wordpress is open-source. You could also wait for the enshittification to happen. We’re fairly sure someone is going to fork it and maybe they’ll provide a seemless migration. So if you’re patient enough, you might be able to stick with your current setup. Just that you Wordpress will some day have a different name and developer community. These things happen all the time. I’ll just switch from Firefox to LibreWolf once I’m unhappy with Mozilla’s decisions. Solves the user-facing part of the issues, and there’s almost no effort involved.


  • Nice, thanks for the link! I wasn’t aware of that. Sadly as with all shiny new things it doesn’t fit all my requirements… I’d really like to speak to my house in my native language. But I figure English will do. I’m gonna try that.

    Not sure if an ESP32-S3 is fast enough for more advanced DSP plus the rest of an voice assistant. At least I found some ESP32 libraries with noise reduction, echo cancellation… There is the ESP-ADF and a project called ESP32-SpeexDSP. But I didn’t try that yet. The Rockckip / Luckfox development board looks nice as well. A Cortex-A7 and a few hundred megabytes of memory might come in handy. And whatever the NPU does. But I don’t have a clue what kind of software and libraries we got for embedded Linux or custom processing units.

    Anyway. I think the production-grade stuff mostly uses multiple microphones and a combination of beamforming and echo cancellation. I got 4 inmp441 microphones here. But I lack the software/libraries to tinker with that kind of signal processing.


  • Uh, noise cancellation is hard. First of all, the audio pipeline currently isn’t able to resample the microphones, so mic and output need to be connected to separate i2s buses, or it won’t work simultaneously in the first place.

    And then I had some luck with the microwakeword component. It often triggers correctly even with noise in the background. And I have an automation that mutes all media players and the TV when the wake word is triggered. That’s my “noise cancelling”.

    I think more elaborate noise cancelling is going to require some dedicated hardware (or maybe some proprietary ESP-ADF functions) and a microphone array. But that’s probably as expensive as an Voice PE?!

    I’m not in a good place with the voice assistant anyway. Don’t own a graphics card. So it’s slow. And Whisper never gets all the words right for me. So it’s down to the speech-to-phrase addon. And that seems to be broken as of now. At least I get more connection errors than commands through. I think I’m going to do the Sendspin media player first. And then maybe add a microphone and voice assistant later.


  • I’m currently doing it the other way around. Assemble multiple satellites and spread them through the house. With upcoming Sendspin and Music Assistant this might do whole house audio soon. But I don’t own a Voice PE. I just bought some microcontrollers plus MAX98357A codec/amplifiers and connect them to random old speakers I have in my e-waste / upcycling bin. The one thing with an 3.5" audio jack might just go into the preexisting soundbar or stereo in the livingroom.




  • No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄