Tether Brings the Apple Continuity Experience to Linux “Continuity. That is Apple's catch-all term for how iPhone, iPad, and Mac talk to each other. It covers a wide range of small conveniences. Copy something on the iPhone and paste it on the Mac. Start an email on one device and finish it on another. Take a call from the Mac even when the phone is across the room. But, to no one's surprise, there's a gap in its support. It doesn't officially work on Linux. So Zack built Tether, an open source project that replicates pieces of that experience on Linux without requiring a Mac device.” Yes there is KDE Connect, but apparently Tether goes a bit deeper than that for Apple. So this may be interesting for Apple users to try out with Linux. See

GadgeteerZA

Tether Brings The Apple Continuity Experience To Linux

“Continuity. That is Apple's catch-all term for how iPhone, iPad, and Mac talk to each other. It covers a wide range of small conveniences. ...

#ios #opensource #technology

Could flipping Raise wrist to wake and Always On Display (AOD) improve battery life? This is an interesting option to try (I have a Pebble watch, so battery life is not an issue). The theory is that raising the wrist normally kicks the full CPU on to check time, and that probably triggers quite a bit when you don't want it to. Turing off the raise wrist activation, but also enabling AOD, could result in less battery usage. I suppose this may differ between watches and people, so it is something one needs to try and see what difference it makes. The theory could make sense though. See

GadgeteerZA

Could Flipping Raise Wrist To Wake And Always On Display (AOD) Improve Battery Life?

This is an interesting option to try (I have a Pebble watch, so battery life is not an issue). The theory is that raising the wrist normally kicks ...

#batterylife #technology

Scientist learns in front of peers why we cannot trust AI Blindly “Sutter’s cringe-inducing tale perfectly illustrates how many users of AI tools are putting themselves at risk without knowing it, including in the most rarefied echelons of academia. The science world has been inundated with poorly-researched and often unedited AI slop, a major reckoning forcing academics to be responsible for everything they publish — including any potentially embarrassing hallucinations.” Don't get me wrong here, AI can be extremely useful, but its usefulness comes when it is overseen by humans. You cannot just sit back and assume AI is correct. It does often hallucinate, and needs savvy contextual checking by humans. Businesses that just let agentic AI loose, have a good chance of failing. In April 2026, the software company PocketOS lost its entire production database and backups after an AI coding agent named Cursor, powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, autonomously deleted the data in nine seconds. When employing AI, you want to ensure you do have experienced humans watching over it. I still prefer to read the outputs and then manually click allow, before letting AI just update things itself. My AI also has a standing instruction to always back up any file before it makes changes. It's quite true that AI is little more than a sophisticated next-word predictor. It appears to be very clever, and it wants to please you, but it has no real intelligence despite what marketers of AI tell to CEOs. Don't discount AI either though, as a person using their savvy with AI and who has some experience of what is being performed, is a lot more effective than someone just not using AI at all today. So I would never ridicule anyone using AI, as it is where the future is going to be, they just need to be cautious as to how it is applied. See

GadgeteerZA

Scientist Learns In Front Of Peers Why We Cannot Trust AI Blindly

“Sutter’s cringe-inducing tale perfectly illustrates how many users of AI tools are putting themselves at risk without knowing it, including in...

#ai #technology

HAMgpt Launches as a Personal AI Copilot Built Specifically for Amateur Radio “Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, HAMgpt is built around the real operating situation of each ham. It can take into account the operator's license class, country, grid square, radios, antennas and operating history, then combine that station profile with live propagation, space weather, DX activity and current on-air conditions.” This is quite interesting as it is not just a rebranded chatbot, it actually checks the various live reporting sites that many ham operators use. Just a lot quicker and more broadly, and applies that to the specific operators circumstances. HAMgpt is designed to work like a personal digital Elmer that already knows the operator's station. It appears otherwise to look like any AI chatbot, so plain English queries work perfectly, making it easy for non-technical users too. There is a free tier with five AI queries per day, but it does require registering an account. See or See

GadgeteerZA

HAMgpt Launches As A Personal AI Copilot Built Specifically For Amateur Radio

“Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, HAMgpt is built around the real operating situation of each ham. It can take into account the operator's ...

#ai #amateurradio #hamradio #technology

Image Toolbox is an open source Android app for social media creators “For you, as a content creator, the tools that matter the most are batch processing, format conversion, the 61 built-in export presets sized for platforms like Instagram, X, and YouTube, background removal, and watermarking. The latter, background removal, comes in both automatic and manual modes, with a choice of models including MlKit, U2Net, RMBG, and BiRefNet.” It has many such tools, and is available both on the official Play Store (published by ProgiX), but also on the F-Droid store. See

GadgeteerZA

Image Toolbox Is An Open Source Android App For Social Media Creators

“For you, as a content creator, the tools that matter the most are batch processing, format conversion, the 61 built-in export presets sized for ...

#contentcreation #opensource #socialmedia #technology

The Days Of Broadcast Digital TV Could Be Numbered “When the analogue TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multiplexes. ATSC for North America, and DVB-T for Europe and other places. This would deliver a multichannel broadcasting solution for the future, and this would be how those not on a cable would consume their telly. It’s a surprise then to find that some governments are already looking at turning off digital TV broadcasting, with the UK in particular wanting to put a date on the switch-off of 2032.” It always seems bad when radio rolls backwards as it is the ideal medium for disasters and emergencies, but despite that, the trend amongst consumers today is less broadcast TV (having migrated to cable TV, Internet streaming, YouTube) and the same often for audio FM broadcast radio (I listen to podcasts in the car and never the radio, whilst others listen to Facebook). But actually despite that, radio is still actively used across police, emergency services, ambulances, etc for speed and reliability, especially when teams and groups need to coordinate. One could say something like WhatsApp or Zello could be used, but they aren't used as a primary communications tool in these teams. The problem is apart from the Internet going off for any short periods, phones must have data, users must have apps installed, they must have phones available, etc. And everything short range with phones must travel via that app provider and the phone network (data). Disaster events generally also mean congested phone and SMS networks, delaying those mediums of communication. Radio bypasses all of that. Most radios don't rely on a network (apart from maybe trunk radio), don't rely on data expiring or being bought, they work instantly at the press of a button, and the devices are provided by the employer, which sets the standard for what will be used by all in the team. It's why, as much as ham radio operators also have lots of digital modes and satellites etc, we still also rely on the faithful fallback of VHF and HF phone radio — it just works across all users everywhere as it is the one thing all operators have, and were licensed to use. Given Oudtshoorn's (in South Africa) recent 4 to 5 days without power, it is not a given that power will just stay on at all times. In any disaster there is a chance that power as well as the Internet (along with VoIP phones and Microsoft OneDrive) go offline. Disaster and emergency personnel will still be using their radios and keeping essential communications alive as their initial response. If those radio networks also start to fail due to extended outages, we as ham radio operators will be responsible for re-establishing communications locally and further afield, using our “fallback radios” and our communications savvy to “make it work”. And on the topic of traditional radio, I can say now that Cape Town has over 180 MeshCore radio nodes across the city, and many of them operated by ordinary citizens without any radio knowledge. MeshCore links Cape Town to Worcester in the East, and up to Saldanha and past Piketberg 160 km to the North. It is fostering good relations across suburbs where no-one was even aware of the other person before. This has a backbone of solar-powered repeaters that will survive any extended power outage no matter how long it lasts. It is all pure radio without any Internet required. When everything else needs a network, radio is the network. Or as HAMNET says: “When all else fails, amateur radio will not fail”. See

GadgeteerZA

The Days Of Broadcast Digital TV Could Be Numbered

“When the analogue TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multip...

#disasters #radio #technology

Quest VR Headset Becomes Unlocked Hardware “The Quest virtual reality headset gets a fully unlocked bootloader thanks to the QuestStack tool, which automates a complex process of privilege escalation to provide stable, privileged access to the hardware. This solidly frees the headset from its existence as a device tied to Meta’s walled garden, although the tool only works on the Quest 1.” I was on the point on buying one of these back in the day but was not at all keen on Meta owning them (of all the IT companies on Earth). But I'm glad it is open as it can at least be experimented with now, and there is freedom to use it in other possible ways. Interesting innovations may come of this. See

GadgeteerZA

Quest VR Headset Becomes Unlocked Hardware

“The Quest virtual reality headset gets a fully unlocked bootloader thanks to the QuestStack tool, which automates a complex process of privilege...

#technology #vr

I tested out the new Elecrow ThinkNode M9 with MeshCore Decentralised Radio Network For those who don't know, MeshCore (similar to Meshtastic and same hardware LoRa radios) is a decentralised radio network that runs in the license free bands. It's a great way of being in contact with neighbouring suburbs and towns. I Cape Town we have just passed 180 to 190 nodes (chat and repeaters) and it stretches oof to the East over the mountain to Worcester, and Northwards about 167 km to Saldanha and other side of Picketberg. I just bought this newly launched Blackberry style device to use on the network. It is similar, but slightly different to the LilyGO T-Deck. It does some impressive stuff, I tried a few firmwares out on it, and there are some pros and cons to using an all-in-one device like this. I've settled on using the free and open source WADAMESH firmware, and it has quite blown me away with all it can do. There is a lot of info, as well as screen photos, that I wanted to share so it is best to view it all on my website at the link below. There is also an additional link on that page, to tips on using WADAMESH specifically on the M9. See

GadgeteerZA

I Tested Out The New Elecrow ThinkNode M9 With MeshCore Decentralised Radio Network

For those who don't know, MeshCore (similar to Meshtastic and same hardware LoRa radios) is a decentralised radio network that runs in the lic...

#meshcore #opensource #technology #thinknodem9

Jellyfin Playlist Membership — Easily browse Jellyfin Music song titles to add or remove from playlists I wanted to quickly see which of my song titles are already in which playlists, and to quickly add them to other playlists or remove them etc. There is just no view that does this inside Jellyfin, and neither in Music Assistant nor Navidrome. You can do it by opening and closing each one, but that is very messy and time-consuming. I iterated through something with Claude Code to create a simple HTML file that allows me to do this much quicker and slicker now. It also has some sort functionality, and you can play a track to hear it, and even delete it from your library to clean things up. As I have multiple folders on Jellyfin Music that separate radio shows, there is also an option filter for folders at the top of the screen. Hopefully this helps others who have had a similar challenge and wondered why this was not a built-in feature. See

GadgeteerZA

Jellyfin Playlist Membership — Easily Browse Jellyfin Music Song Titles To Add Or Remove From Playlists

I wanted to quickly see which of my song titles are already in which playlists, and to quickly add them to other playlists or remove them etc. Ther...

#jellyfin #music #opensource #technology

Moving your Linux home folder to a dedicated drive is the distro-hopping secret I wish I knew earlier “Home is where the heart is. On Linux, home is where everything personal to you is: your documents, downloads, screenshots, and configuration. In fact, your home is so special, you really ought to be showing it a bit more love. When you first installed Linux, you might’ve overlooked the option to use a custom disk setup—and nobody would blame you for doing so. But take your time to understand the benefits, and a highly portable, easily upgradable system is yours for the taking.” Although I've stopped distro hopping, I did still move earlier this year from Manjaro to EndeavourOS. It was completely painless seeing I've long had my home folder on a separate hard drive (although a separate partition is also fine). The key reasons are: No worry about overwriting your important documents, settings etc when installing a new Linux distro as /home is physically separated. Can test new distro with a separate / root with your data. I have a higher speed NVMe boot drive whilst my /home folder sits on a bigger slower hard drive. It is really well worth setting up. See

GadgeteerZA

Moving Your Linux Home Folder To A Dedicated Drive Is The Distro-hopping Secret I Wish I Knew Earlier

“Home is where the heart is. On Linux, home is where everything personal to you is: your documents, downloads, screenshots, and configuration. In...

#linux #technology

The Powerful Chinese AI Model Experts Warned About Is Here The “best” model is not always the “best” model for you. Why I say this, is because Z.ai's model is still outperformed in some dimensions by proprietary models from Anthropic for example. But can you afford to actually use that top end “best of the best” model? Very usually you cannot afford them. Now consider that the new model for Z.ai is only a few percentage points (depending on what benchmarks you look at) behind Anthropic's Fable 5, but the cost is only 25% of the cost. You end up with a situation, that what you can afford through Z.ai is way better than you'll get from Anthropic or OpenAI (given like for like payment). I have not done in-depth testing between Claude Pro and Z.ai, but I have thrown some similar challenges to both, and I got pretty good answers from them both. The difference is I'm on the free tier of Z.ai yest I have some access to their current flagship GLM-5.2 model (5.3 is only being released in a week or two), whilst on the Pro level paid Claude subscription, I'm locked out from using their flagship Fable 5 model unless I pay usage credits over and above my subscription. It also does not seem that the proprietary US based models are fully private either. Someone was recently prosecuted after their AI model chat history was produced as evidence. We have also seen that some API keys and other information got recycled as output to others. The advice has been to not feed private notes and documents with API keys and secrets to cloud based models. All I'm saying here is that privacy is also not some feature separating proprietary AI Models from open weight models. The very nature of how AI models are trained, means they have all “stolen” information from various sources across the Internet. None of them can claim to be fully self-taught without any hint of theft. There is a lot depending on the future of AI, some say that can be as much as a country's entire economy being at stake. So lots of money and high stakes, as well as the weaponisation of AI, means this is becoming a lot like politics. Who can you believe is telling the truth, who is trying to sell us vapourware, who could be spying on us through AI, who could pull the rug out from under us, etc? Either ways though, we should be thankful for two things: There is right now no “Microsoft” of AI totally dominating the market, so we are seeing healthy and credible competition. There is certainly the ability to self-host AI, not to the level of the big cloud providers, but certainly fit for most purposes and fully private. But given that, it is a difficult call to make, and to decide decisively which path to take. Where do you bet your money, as a lot of customisation and work goes into adopting whichever technology you choose? Or do you take the slower more focussed middle road of trying to enable some in-house hosting and skills development. In the latter case, you build incrementally upon what you do, and there is no sudden rug pulling out from under you. Personally, I've always been a proponent of the latter path, rather being in more control of what is built and ensuring absolute privacy. I've viewed Big Tech cloud services as land grabs and lock-ins. Yes they're convenient, they're quick, and they cost less in the short term, but that turns against you later on as your data is no longer under your control, getting it out later is very expensive and not easy, and the vendor lock-in and cost increases are very real. Which is why my own cloud subscription is only paid month-to-month. I'm ready to switch or go fully self-hosted once I can get a more mature setup. Businesses don't always have that luxury though. What I would bet on though, is that AI is here to stay. It is no passing fad. It is the same as moving from steam power to internal combustion engines. The world is moving on, and it is now just a question of which wave we ride, and how it helps leverage whatever we do. We're not going every going back to an age of no cellphones, no Internet, etc, much as I may sometimes wish we could. Yet, the more digitally instant and interconnected everything becomes, I realise too how very little we own in that world, and how it can be gone in the blink of an eye. I still fear this generation may lose the most of its heritage in the future millennia. Our innovation has outstripped our abilities to preserve the volumes of data we are creating daily. In the year 3030 or 4030, if humans are even still around, they may know more about Ancient Rome than from 2026. I'm not speaking here about Wikipedia, I'm speaking about my and your hard drives at home, and in hundreds of millions of other homes, all collecting documents, photos, memories… They're all going to become lost to civilisation within just 50 to 80 years. Clouds are also not the answer, as they do shut down eventually, and memorialised accounts just get lost. So who knows, maybe our data being sucked up (stolen) by AI, means it somehow grows and prospers on deeply embedded inside of AI, as it gets “restolen” between different AI providers See

GadgeteerZA

The Powerful Chinese AI Model Experts Warned About Is Here

The “best” model is not always the “best” model for you. Why I say this, is because Z.ai's model is still outperformed in some dimensi...

#ai #archiving #technology

Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools “In his talk Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools at Hackaday Europe 2026, Phil takes us through a series of progressively more advanced open hardware devices that he’s designed to increase the speed and accuracy of underground mapping efforts. Along the way, he’s learned a number of valuable lessons about designing hardware that’s robust enough to handle the uniquely challenging environment underground while still being accessible enough for a hobbyist to build and use.” Interesting, and entertaining, to listen to this talk about the progression of the technology being used. So true too that these environments require dustproof, shockproof, and waterproof devices. And of course all being open source, means anyone can reproduce it and improve it too. See

GadgeteerZA

Open Source Caving: 20 Years Of Making Cave Mapping Tools

“In his talk Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools at Hackaday Europe 2026, Phil takes us through a series of progressively m...

#caving #opensource #technology

N64 classic GoldenEye 007 has been 100% decompiled, paving the way for mods and ports “Rare's GoldenEye 007, which dropped back in 1997, is one of the most influential games in history. It arguably established the FPS genre on consoles thanks to its local four-player split-screen multiplayer. Before GoldenEye 007's release, PC was the dominant platform for FPS games, with titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake defining the genre. It's likely that if it weren't for GoldenEye 007, as janky as it is by modern standards, we never would have gotten first-person shooter mainstay series like Halo and Call of Duty.” So it will be like playing a piece of history actually when this port goes public. One also has to remember that this game is nearly 30 years old and the time it was the cutting edge of graphics and gameplay. It sounds like it may hit various platforms. See

GadgeteerZA

N64 Classic GoldenEye 007 Has Been 100% Decompiled, Paving The Way For Mods And Ports

“Rare's GoldenEye 007, which dropped back in 1997, is one of the most influential games in history. It arguably established the FPS genre on...

#gaming #retro #technology

Cheap USB-C chargers are actually fine—these 4 specs are all that matter “These days, buying a charger requires you to be familiar with USB PD, PPS, GaN, and a handful of other acronyms, on top of having to check wattage, making it surprisingly difficult to figure out which specs actually matter. The good news is that I'm here to help you figure out how to buy a charger that's fast, reliable, and safe without spending more than you need to.” And something many people don't understand, is that it takes three devices in the chain to deliver proper USB-C performance. That cable connecting the charger and the user device, is absolutely vital. If it does not have the electronic chips embedded on either end in the plugs, and the correct spec cable, everything is going to default to low power, and even worse, only power without any data communications. So do not skimp on USB-C cable quality. See

GadgeteerZA

Cheap USB-C Chargers Are Actually Fine—these 4 Specs Are All That Matter

“These days, buying a charger requires you to be familiar with USB PD, PPS, GaN, and a handful of other acronyms, on top of having to check watta...

#technology #usbc

nfSensei is an open source fork of pfSense, by the original creator, for Linux “nfSensei is a modern network operating system built from scratch in Rust with a React frontend, designed around a single principle: one API to rule them all. The CLI, the web UI, and the on-device AI assistant all flow through the same API surface. No drift, no divergence, no surprises. The entire system ships as five self-contained binaries. The nushell-based CLI has 400+ commands. The Kensho design system provides 40+ themes. And Clyde, the on-device AI, brings intelligence directly to the firewall without shipping your data to the cloud.” I see a lot of similarities in Scott's journey through computers to my own. As he says he has learnt a lot of lessons along the way. I spent quite a bit of time tossing up between pfSense and OPNsense before I decided to go the OPNsense route. Either ways, these systems give a lot of freedom from the commercial router and firewall vendors who tend to cripple their offerings. From FreeBSD to pfSense to nfSensei — Scott Ulrich has spent two decades of building open-source network operating systems. So I'm going to be very interested to see where this project goes, and I have no doubt it will be a major success. Interestingly, and I suppose logical enough, it has a configuration import from OPNsense and pfSense, but right now this is not ready yet for production use. See

GadgeteerZA

NfSensei Is An Open Source Spiritual Successor Of PfSense, By The Original Creator, For Linux

“nfSensei is a modern network operating system built from scratch in Rust with a React frontend, designed around a single principle: one API to r...

#firewalls #nfsensei #opensource #pfsense #technology

FairEmail is an open source privacy orientated email app “Setup was IMAP credentials for each of my personal accounts. There's no account to create with the developer or a sign-in step before you can reach your inbox. Two things in the listing made it appealing to 1 million+ users, including me. The app requires no special permissions, and it doesn't use Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is how most Android apps receive push. Instead, it holds an IMAP IDLE connection open to the mail server, so new messages arrive without Google in the middle. It's also the lightest mail client I've installed in years.” Yes, this is not for connecting to business accounts (unless they have a plain IMAP login) but it is really ideal for keeping your mail private more private. Too many services today want to suck everything up, either to protect the children, or to “enhance their offerings to you”. It's true this makes little difference if you actually have your mail service at Microsoft or Google, but I recently moved to Zoho Mail. It costs me around R115 per year (that is like US$8 or so) which is perfectly affordable, and they are not in the business of pushing ads into your mail, or hoovering it up for AI, etc. On my desktop I use BetterBird (a fork of Thunderbird) that pulls my mail and consolidates it into a combined inbox. I also use my personal domain name with my mail so I can switch providers later if I want to, without having to change my e-mail address everywhere. I've realised we have to push back against getting locked into everything all the time. We lose our privacy, we kill competition, and we lose our freedom to move away easily. See

GadgeteerZA

FairEmail Is An Open Source Privacy Orientated Email App

“Setup was IMAP credentials for each of my personal accounts. There's no account to create with the developer or a sign-in step before you c...

#email #opensource #privacy #technology #vendorlockin

I Remember These Modular Electronics Kits It's a real pity these kits are no longer around as they really “spark” an interest in building practical things, and in electronics. Mine was a 50-in-1 kit I think, and came in a wooden frame. You got all the various components fixed to the board with wire springs on the top as the connector points. There were resistors, capacitors, a variable resistor (like a volume knob), a diode, a speaker, and various other components. By connecting wires between the spring terminals, you “made circuits” for whatever project you were building. Some projects were a burglar alarm, or a radio, or an FM transmitter, and plenty more. But what it taught you, was that many complex devices are just built up from basic components wired together differently. Also, you learnt that with a few components you could build many devices that actually have a practical use. I progressed from there to etching circuit boards and building my own infrared TV remote control and more devices. Which in turn led to CB radios and other hobbies. This was all before the Internet was even known about, and also long before home computers. It was books and magazines which published such designs, and you waited until they were published, and you bought them in a store. I get that we have the Internet and computers now, but I'd really have thought that such a kit would still have interested 10-year-olds today. Learning to physically build things is a creative skill we really want to encourage today. See

GadgeteerZA

I Remember These Modular Electronics Kits

It's a real pity these kits are no longer around as they really “spark” an interest in building practical things, and in electronics.

#electronics #technology

Homelabbers and Desktop Tweakers may want to move beyond just plain AI chat The days of asking AI a question, or pasting a config file in, and then pasting (or typing) the updated file back, are no longer needed. I have over 47 running docker containers, with almost as many stopped, and when I want to create a new docker stack I'm never sure if there will be a port clash. Now I can just ask an agentic AI to check all my stopped and running containers and fix any port clashes, restart containers, diagnose why something is not working, check reverse proxy arrangements, etc. Agentic AI is a term often heard, but in simple English, it is AI that actually does stuff, not just answer questions. Sometimes there is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server to install, or a connector, or a plugin. Those mechanisms give selected access to the AI to actually do tasks like reading and updating a config file itself, check log files and advise on corrective actions (or even do those actions), etc. A chatbot AI answers questions, but an Agentic AI is a combination of AI with carefully selected tools installed, and permissions that must be granted by the user. In my earlier example with Docker Portainer, I put some code into Claude's config to connect to my Portainer instance on the LAN directly. In this way it can read all my existing container configs and learn what style I'm already using, and create something that really fits my environment with its unique volume mappings, etc. I also gave it directory access to my Conky config files (and the scripts folder for that) so that it can tweak any changes I require. I have also installed the n8n connector which has taken my breath away. The n8n service is workflow automation tool (for example I use a n8n workflow for checking my blog RSS feed, and then automatically pushing my posts out to the various social media accounts I post at). That is usually a lot of back and forth as I have to fix small issues. Now Claude uses the n8n connector and literally creates a n8n workflow from scratch for me. Yesterday it created a workflow to search my Nextcloud Notes content, retrieve it, update it, add new notes. It tested and figured out what did not work, and applied the fixes all by itself (with me just reviewing and clicking apply for the various write actions). So many possibilities open up, but there are some safeguards worth keeping in mind: Most such connectors have permissions that default to ask first. You can go a step further by granting always read permission, and keeping ask before writing, or if you are really living on the edge then permission granted for read/write/delete/overwrite automatically (and only for trusted tools). I have told Claude to remember to always back up any config file that it is going to write to or edit, but more importantly I have my own automated and independent backups that I can restore myself if I have to. Filesystem connectors require you to add specific paths first. Do not add the root folder, but stick to just specified folders you want help on. The Portainer access for example cannot access the .env files where typically passwords and API keys are stored (in Claude's case for this connector so you may want to check on what you use for this). The cloud side cannot reach inside your network or desktop without a locally-running connector. So when you want the AI to reach your LAN, filesystem, Docker socket, localhost services, etc you need to install an appropriate local connector/bridge service. Ask to review differences before applying changes. Don't give an AI access to secrets merely because a tool happens to be capable of reading them. You can often put secrets into a file elsewhere, where your scripts can put them in themselves, but AI has no access to read that folder. But start small and just give it access to one useful thing. This lets you see what it can do, and then you can decide whether you want to give it more. Even a few small automated tasks end up saving a lot of time down the road. And yes, some AI tools are better than others at some tasks. So when I asked Gemini which would be best for my types of tweaking and configs that I do in my home lab, it recommended Claude without hesitation. Chat is still also very useful for asking questions about setting up your Agentic AI capabilities, and what safeguards you should apply. I decided to also start paying for AI now as it is performing a truly useful function, and saving me money not only in time now, but also to better utilise the free self-hosting services that I have. I have already saved more than $20 per month on other subscription services (see my video about what Wallos did for me — It is not to say AI is perfect (it still needs human supervision) but it is undoubtedly a super tool to help make humans more productive themselves. For the same reason humans needed to master the use of the wheel, levers, early cars, telephones, and Internet search engines, if we don't do the same with AI, we could lose our jobs to other humans who do use AI effectively as a tool. Cars and telephones never directly threatened jobs at all, in fact they created many new types of jobs, but those who harnessed those technologies gained leverage over those who just ignored them. Whether we like it or not, the world has moved on to another level. The great advantage we have with this new tool is, we can even ask it how we can use it better and more safely (just check its answer elsewhere too!). The more worrying side we will need to solve, is how AI is being weaponised for hacking attacks, and even more dangerous, for creation of convincing AI-generated misinformation that can destabilise whole countries. This is something we need to solve, because cars, phones, the Internet, etc are also all used for bad purposes too, but they don't just get cancelled. See

GadgeteerZA

Homelabbers And Desktop Tweakers May Want To Move Beyond Just Plain AI Chat

The days of asking AI a question, or pasting a config file in, and then pasting (or typing) the updated file back, are no longer needed. I have ove...

#ai #homelab #selfhosting #technology

SoloMD is a simpler markdown open-source app that opens your whole Obsidian vault “Obsidian is probably one of the best note-taking apps out there, but it's not open-source, which is fine, there are perfectly good reasons for that. But a part of the Obsidian user base has always wanted a properly open-source alternative, one that isn't half-finished or abandoned. So when SoloMD popped up as MIT-licensed and Markdown-native with a built-in AI panel, it seemed worth a look. What it turned out to be was a Markdown editor that opens an Obsidian vault as-is without an import setup, and then it also handles a bunch of functions you'd only assume Obsidian can.” Of course, markdown being markdown, this works with any markdown files. It does not have any formatting menu bar though, so if you want to say bold some text, you do have to type the asterisks in. With its Live edit WYSIWYG mode, you do see the rendering as it should appear. That is at least something great about Obsidian too. 13 code-block languages, KaTeX math, Mermaid diagrams, footnotes, YAML front-matter, ==highlight== (including use of colour codes), and underlined text. But SoloMD plays nicely with everything, and apart from the markdown files and editing working just fine, it has built-in AI functionality. Beware though, if you point the AI to an external cloud AI provider, your note content will go out to that cloud provider, complete with any sensitive data. Although SoloMD does not have a nice WYSIWYG table editor, I did fine I could paste the table in the AI window, and asked my AI to insert an extra column in column 2. I pointed the AI to my Llama server AI and that worked just fine, as did querying it about my note, etc. But it did not just stop at pointing outwards to Llama server, as SoloMD can also expose its own built in MCP service (Exposes the open workspace as a Model Context Protocol server so Claude Desktop / Codex / Cursor can list, read, search, write your notes). Note again that you want to think about what you are exposing, but it can be handy for say Claude Code to consult your own notes about coding work, when thinking. It even has a built-in BYOK cost meter, that calculates the cost of tokens used for OpenAI or Groq (the latter of course allowing a generous free tier per day). What caught my eye actually about SoloMD, was this really rich enablement of AI into the application. You decide though what you want on or off (and everything can be off). It does its between-device sync using GitHub. They recommend using a private repo on GitHub, and it uses public private key exchange for authentication. From inside SoloMD you can opt to get a public link for any note, and share that to others for viewing. When setting up this vault sync to GitHub you can optionally enable Argon2id + XChaCha20-Poly1305 for end-to-end encryption too. SoloMD just runs git push and git pull so it can be pointed elsewhere too. It is open-source MIT-licensed, zero telemetry by default, no accounts, no cloud lock-in. Its installer is only 15 MB in size, and it uses around 80–150 MB RAM. It saves plain .md files (not using any proprietary formats) so is fully compatible with other Markdown editors. There are apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. It exports to HTML, Word, PDF, Image (PNG), EPUB, ODT, LaTeX, RTF, Pandoc Template. It does not have the massive community plug-ins collection that Obsidian has, but it is a really solid and very functional Markdown editor. One thing I'd like to have seen, was custom shortcut keys. See

GadgeteerZA

SoloMD Is A Simpler Markdown Open-source App That Opens Your Whole Obsidian Vault

“Obsidian is probably one of the best note-taking apps out there, but it's not open-source, which is fine, there are perfectly good reasons ...

#ai #markdown #opensource #technology

Track Bird Visitors With A Raspberry Pi And A USB Mic “Avian Visitors is a lovely project by Teddy Warner that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your home, and creates a colourful illustration of recent visitors on top of it all. It reports on a web interface of its own making, but what really takes things to a new level is an optional, stylish E-Ink panel that shows the last 24 hours’ worth of visitors at a glance in a collage.” The colour E-Ink display showing the birds is a really nice touch. There is quite a bit of potential for this project, and one could just start off with the identification before going for a display. See

GadgeteerZA

Track Bird Visitors With A Raspberry Pi And A USB Mic

“Avian Visitors is a lovely project by Teddy Warner that uses a Raspberry Pi and microphone to keep track of which birds have been visiting your ...

#birds #opensource #technology