Voicebox is a local-first AI voice studio — a free and open-source alternative to ElevenLabs and WisprFlow Clone voices from a few seconds of audio, generate speech in 23 languages across 7 TTS engines, dictate into any text field with a global hotkey, and give any MCP-aware AI agent a voice of your choosing. The two cloud incumbents sit on opposite halves of the voice I/O loop — ElevenLabs on output, WisprFlow on input. Voicebox does both, bridges them with a bundled local LLM for refinement and per-profile personas, and runs the whole thing on your machine. Apart from full privacy, as you are running it locally, you do not have the token limitations of many online cloud services. There are some good YouTube videos showing how to get going with Voicebox, and also featuring what all it can do. It is not just a simple text-to-speech processor. See

GadgeteerZA

Voicebox Is A Local-first AI Voice Studio — A Free And Open-source Alternative To ElevenLabs And WisprFlow

Clone voices from a few seconds of audio, generate speech in 23 languages across 7 TTS engines, dictate into any text field with a global hotkey, a...

#ai #alternativesto #opensource #technology

Strava killed its free API, so I built my own fitness platform with Endurain and FitPub instead “Strava has been a big part of my fitness workflow for one big reason. I don't really care about leaderboards or social features, but it acts as a great hub between devices, apps, and services. I use an Apple Watch and I also use a Garmin, and Strava lets me bridge all of these together. That setup has become a lot harder to maintain after Strava removed access to its free API tier for most consumer use cases. Since I also dabble in a range of other wearables that don't really sync directly, this has understandably made it harder than I expected to get my fitness data synced to a common place. That pushed me to look for alternatives.” Strava has been incredibly useful to so many athletes, but that reason is because there is a mass of users using it (ever tried getting someone to leave Facebook for Nostr?) and it has a good API allowing more crowdsourcing of data from other apps. But we are all on borrowed time with Strava as it is a proprietary platform and is apparently filing for an IPO soon (remember when Facebook had open APIs to embrace all the 3rd party networks, and then starting shutting that access down?). So we don't know the full implications of this yet, but Strava will become more restrictive as things go forward. As the linked article points out, you could self-host Endurain for similar stats for yourself, but if you are into sharing exercise stats, wanting to see similar stats, and following friends, then FitPub does look pretty good (see

FitPub - Federated Fitness Tracking

But, of course, like with Facebook, your own friends won't be on it! If they are anywhere on the Fediverse though, which uses ActivityPub protocol, then they can still follow you. The challenge is to get your exercise data in easily (no complicated file syncing etc). From what I see on Pebble watches you could use an app called GadgetBridge, Garmin users are best off as Endurain natively syncs with that service, Polar uses could sync to intervals.icu and there are hooks to then pull into FitPub. Apple users may be able to use Ride Journal which can sync to FitPub. The post mentioning the Strava API changes is at . See

GadgeteerZA

Strava Killed Its Free API, So I Built My Own Fitness Platform With Endurain And FitPub Instead

“Strava has been a big part of my fitness workflow for one big reason. I don't really care about leaderboards or social features, but it act...

#exercise #health #opensource #openstandards #technology

Warning about guards scanning driving licences at estates and offices in South Africa “Guards at the gates of estates, complexes, office parks, or gated communities should not make digital copies of your driving licence, as it could infringe on the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). This is according to the Information Regulator of South Africa’s latest draft Code of Conduct for the processing of personal information at gated accesses.” The takeaway being they can scan your car license but not your personal ID. For visitors to complexes they can record:– Name– Purpose of visit– Vehicle registration (only if driving in)– Time of entry/exit It is considered excessive and unnecessary (in other words not compliant with the POPI Act) to record:– ID copy or photo– Home address– Email address– Personal phone number– Employer details See

GadgeteerZA

Warning About Guards Scanning Driving Licences At Estates And Offices In South Africa

“Guards at the gates of estates, complexes, office parks, or gated communities should not make digital copies of your driving licence, as it coul...

#privacy #southafrica

Firefox’s free VPN lifts data limit, offers 28 server locations “You can now use1 Firefox’s free built-in VPN without a monthly data limit – but only until August 31, 2026. Mozilla is also temporarily expanding the list of VPN server locations available to proxy your browsing traffic via, up from the current set of 5 locations to a more generous 28 (including South Africa). On September 1, the Firefox VPN will drop back to a 50 GB monthly data limit and a reduced set of server locations for free accounts.” Even 50 GB per month is a pretty good amount of data, unless you're streaming movies or using Steam Games. Still it is worth testing in case you are paying elsewhere for a VPN service. See

GadgeteerZA

Firefox’s Free VPN Lifts Data Limit, Offers 28 Server Locations

“You can now use1 Firefox’s free built-in VPN without a monthly data limit – but only until August 31, 2026. Mozilla is also temporarily expa...

#privacy #technology #vpn

Google Earth’s flight simulator is now available in your browser “On Friday Google announced it was making a relatively unknown feature of Google Earth available to a wider audience. The desktop version of Google Earth has had a hidden flight simulator mode since 2007, but it’s now easily accessible through a web browser without having to download or install any apps.” Yes it's not exactly new, but is a lot more obvious now. The site has a lot more too, such as data analysis tools, historical imagery, explore building and solar designs, a measurement tool, and a detect changes over period tool. See

GadgeteerZA

Google Earth’s Flight Simulator Is Now Available In Your Browser

“On Friday Google announced it was making a relatively unknown feature of Google Earth available to a wider audience. The desktop version of Goog...

#flightsim #gaming #technology

How one GPL lawsuit accidentally created the homelab router that changed networking forever “No company sets out to make a product that exceeds its purpose and becomes a legend. In some cases when it happens, the company might even regret it. I recall a few NVIDIA GPUs, like the 8800GT and 1080 Ti that were so good for the money that people didn't upgrade their cards for a decade. That's great for PR, but not so great for shareholders. Well, among network routers, the Linksys WRT54G was a cheap, unassuming Wi-Fi router that ended up becoming a cult classic for a very weird reason, that had little if anything to do with the actual hardware.” I still have my WRT54G, and actually the reason I originally bought it, was because I could reflash it with Tomato. So, in actual fact, the sale of the hardware was made because I could open source firmware on it. That is surely a win for a hardware company. It was interesting to read this linked article to get the backstory on how it actually came to be. See

GadgeteerZA

How One GPL Lawsuit Accidentally Created The Homelab Router That Changed Networking Forever

“No company sets out to make a product that exceeds its purpose and becomes a legend. In some cases when it happens, the company might even regre...

#opensource #technology

Over 150 Mathematicians Warn Governments Not to “Believe the Hype” About AI “There is currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products,” the declaration reads, advising policymakers to “consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.” When it comes to AI I believe mathematicians know more about the accuracy of AI than governments do. As the article also points out, there is a trend amongst AI companies, who need to make a profit, to overestimate the abilities of their AI. AI is NOT ready to decide the fates of citizens, or government policy, or making war, or anything like that. I have used AI quite a bit over the last few months, mostly to solve server issues, various configurations in YAML, and sometimes research for purchase decisions. It always sounds confident and plausible, until I catch it out guessing (hallucinating). Despite its profuse apologies it still continues to make the same mistake. Luckily I now see quite quickly when I think it is going astray, and when I ask it if it is guess, it says yes I caught it out. In a recent case, it instructed me to change a config label, and then took 2 hours plus trying to solve the problem. When I eventually drove it into a corner, it admitted it made a guess about that label. As soon as I restored the label, my application was working again. The point is, it is just not ready for real responsibility at all. Those who want to just “believe” it, are going to make serious mistakes. To use AI effectively, you need to tweak its default prompts, you need to be highly cynical about AI, and you need to double-check what it suggests. Most importantly, you also need some general awareness about the topic you are working on. In other words, YOU need to be the contextual awareness for AI. Governments must not yet think that AI is some magic bullet to solving all productivity or diplomatic problems. It does need some savvy to use AI, and for that you do still need skilled workers. What we do need, is more training about how to use AI effectively, and what guardrails to have in place when using it. I've seen my own government swallowing the hype from Big Tech many years ago. Some great digital sovereignty projects were abandoned back in the late 2000s because Big Tech convinced government to decide on buying their products instead. It has cost my government billions since then, and worst is, today they own none of what they have paid for. See

GadgeteerZA

Over 150 Mathematicians Warn Governments Not To “Believe The Hype” About AI

“There is currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products,” the ...

#ai #government #technology

Meta Quietly Added Facial Recognition to Its Smart Glasses “According to a report from Wired, Meta has been quietly installing facial recognition in its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses for the last few months. Internally called “NameTag”, the feature, if activated, will use AI to identify people captured by Ray-Ban Meta's camera, alert the wearer when it recognizes someone, and store faceprints on users' phones.” Such technology could of course assist the sight impaired positively, but the bigger problem is two-fold. Firstly, Meta is probably the Big Tech company I least trust out of all of them. I cancelled my WhatsApp account after they shifted their terms and conditions for the “Information We Share with Others” section which allowed sharing of metadata with (phone number, how you interact with others, mobile device information, IP address, location, etc) with third-party service providers. They have been repeatedly skirting over the edges of abuse of privacy and have been fined for it by the FTC, have appeared before the US Congress about it, and I've made numerous posts about their behaviour relating to user data. Secondly they are in a country where it is quite legal for data brokers to buy private data and then resell it to anyone. Up to now that has mainly affected your own data that you choose to share, or not share, with Meta services. The not share refers to when they used the Facebook Pixel and other means to spy way deeper than just on actual Meta sites. The big problem with AI glasses is that it can capture everyone everywhere without their knowledge, and the data is being processed by a company who cannot be trusted with private data, in a country that does not have any safeguards enforced over the privacy of personal data. What could possibly go wrong. And if we don't yet get what this is about because of some form of patriotism for Western countries, think of the same technology being rolled out by ByteDance from China or VK in Russia. Would you trust it? Meta's track record has proven that it really cannot be trusted when it comes to handling metadata. It is not about the technology, but rather about what a company, and its governing country's record around privacy looks like. What comes to mind is a saying often used, when something good just gets abuse, and ruins it for everyone else, and then the service/product gets banned: This is why we can't have nice things, because people break them. Technology can be a force for great good, but it can also cause great harm. See

GadgeteerZA

Meta Quietly Added Facial Recognition To Its Smart Glasses

“According to a report from Wired, Meta has been quietly installing facial recognition in its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses for the ...

#ai #meta #privacy #technology

Woman Alarmed When Her Trusted Therapist Starts Recording Her With AI — Where Is Her Voice Going? Don't get me wrong, I think AI has very many useful things it can be used for. It can also be cloud based or self-hosted. But medical records, personal discussions, and most especially therapy sessions, really do require proper consent and understanding for recordings. The reason being, anything that goes into the cloud, especially if it goes to an AI service, is just not going to stop there and stay dead private. That's a fact! We've already heard of secret keys getting recycled and bits of code that get re-used for other outputs. A person's voice can be matched and profiled, and personal sessions like a therapy session need explicit permission for recordings. Most therapists are not very technically clued-up, and I doubt they have much idea about where the data is actually stored, what all the T&Cs are, and what the data could be used for. It is perfectly true that if just session notes are needed, a self-hosted OpenWhispr service will that for free, and completely in private and locally. Even Google's NotebookLM service (cloud) that can transcribe an audio recording into text notes, does not get used to train AI models, but you'd be relying on the terms and conditions stated for NotebookLM. The OpenWhispr service is pretty guaranteed to stay private. So apart from declaring and requesting permission first, a therapist also needs to be fully aware of what the permission entails. We read too often about investor-backed startups in the USA being profit driven and there seems to be very little privacy protection granted in that country (it's where Facebook declares in writing it shares user data with upstream providers). Too many jump on the AI bandwagon without realising all the consequences, whether that be to privacy or company data. AI is just not mature enough yet around privacy, unless you use it strictly offline, and do not give it direct access to any of your files. See

GadgeteerZA

Woman Alarmed When Her Trusted Therapist Starts Recording Her With AI — Where Is Her Voice Going?

Don't get me wrong, I think AI has very many useful things it can be used for. It can also be cloud based or self-hosted. But medical records,...

#ai #privacy #technology

MeshCore SAR – The final hurdle has been reached for MeshCore I did a post about a week back when I started investigating a possible migration from Meshtastic radio to MeshCore radio network. I won't repeat that post here, but I'll mention two issues that often came up about MeshCore, and why this is just no longer true. Myth 1: MeshCore is not open source – since about January 2026 there is an excellent fully open source mobile app called MeshCore Open. It was so impressive for me, that I've actually made it my daily driver, even though I'd paid for the official MeshCore app and the MeshOS app. Myth 2: Because it does not flood fill locations you can't use MeshCore for search and rescue (SAR), hiking, EMCOMM, etc. Well the open source MeshCore SAR app blows that out of the water now. MeshCore SAR has: Rapid mesh chat for both 1:1 and group coordination On-demand voice (Codec2) and image (AVIF) transfer tuned for low-bandwidth links Offline-first mapping with tactical overlays and SAR incident markers Live team location, movement trails, and shareable tactical drawings It goes as far as low-res image sending as well as short voice clips too It is not intended for daily use though, as it could be easy to abuse the limited duty cycle requirements in the license-free bands that MeshCore uses. I did some wardriving today using the Meshmapper app, and managed to get a line of site ping from a repeater 111 km North of Cape Town. So our testing of MashCore so far has just been green ticks all the way. See

GadgeteerZA

MeshCore SAR - The Final Hurdle Has Been Reached For MeshCore

I did a post about a week back when I started investigating a possible migration from Meshtastic radio to MeshCore radio network. I won't repe...

#emcomm #meshcore #opensource #sar #technology