Producing an audiobook with Kokoro on a Mac mini
I wrote a thriller novel. I wanted an audiobook of it. The traditional path is ACX with a human narrator, six to twelve months and a few thousand…
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Using AppSync as a pub/sub fan-out without any data source
I had two clients — a web app and a native iOS app — both polling my backend every few seconds to learn that an assistant reply had finished. Polling…
Read →An OpenAI-compatible shim so Home Assistant could talk to my agent
I wanted
Read →Lidarr returns HTTP 500 on PUT /album/monitor mid-add
A note for anyone scripting Lidarr through its API: there's a race in the
Read →I got the push but the chat was empty
Recurring complaint from myself: the assistant pushes a notification that it's done, I open the app, the conversation is there, the assistant bubble is…
Read →Cold-start 500s from leftover Composer dev dependencies
A PHP function on Lambda started returning 500 on cold start after a routine deploy. Warm invocations were fine. The error in CloudWatch was specific and…
Read →Moving off OneDrive onto a Syncthing mesh
I had been sync'ing my ~/code folder through OneDrive for years. It worked until it didn't. The breaking point was Xcode and git both fighting OneDrive…
Read →The CT-is-running-but-the-app-is-dead 502 pattern
Recurring failure mode on the homelab: the assistant's domain returns 502 from every browser, but pct list says the LXC is running and systemctl status…
Read →A keyword router that lied about which mode it was in
My assistant has a cheap classifier that routes short, simple questions to a fast model without tools, and harder questions to a tool-capable model. The…
Read →Patching boot.wim with chntpw to no effect
I was building a custom Windows 11 install ISO and trying to do a clever registry tweak inside boot.wim to make in-place upgrade scenarios work the way I…
Read →When the upstream CDN just isn't reachable from your house
I needed to download Windows 11 25H2 ISO bits via the UUP build flow. Aria2c started fine, pulled the small metadata files (a few hundred KB total), and…
Read →Bref 2 to 3 and provided.al2 to al2023, the gotchas
AWS sent the usual EOL notice for the provided.al2 Lambda runtime. I had 13 functions on Bref 2 / al2 spread across two serverless projects. The…
Read →Reverse engineering a Bluetooth-only irrigation controller
I have an Orbit B-hyve XD irrigation controller. It's Bluetooth-only — no Wi-Fi hub built in. Every existing integration (Home Assistant, pybhyve…
Read →USB 2.0 Billboard means the cable is charge-only
Plugged an ESP32-class dev board into the Mac. Instead of a serial port, macOS showed it as a USB 2.0 BILLBOARD device from VLI Inc., vendor ID 0x2109…
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