Smarthome & Home Lab

Build a Home Assistant garden watering automation that reads temperature, rainfall, and rain forecasts to water your garden exactly when it truly needs it.

A reader asked for a map of the whole Manifold environment and the functional capabilities of each part. I have described this system across three posts, a piece at a time, but never in one picture.

Manifold is evolving into a proper framework for building meshes of picos, and Home Assistant gives those meshes an interface. A new Home Assistant integration proves out three pieces at once: an OAuth workflow on the pico-engine that lets outside software into the mesh on the owner's terms, a mature interface rather than a custom one, and a pattern that lets specialized communities extend the platform.

AI-powered smart home control through the Model Context Protocol

Microduck is a 25 cm biped robot with 15 motors, a camera, LiDAR and a grasping beak. Playable out of the box, and its open-source stack lets you train new behaviours in simulation and run them on the robot. Pre-order at $399.

Run your own Git host with no open ports, no public DNS, and no certbot. Forgejo behind a Tailscale sidecar container, real HTTPS on your ts.net name, and the state volume, node key expiry, and port 22 details that decide whether it works.

Allbert Assist is a local-first assistant runtime for long-running personal work built in elixir/otp, jido agents etc - lexlapax/allbert-assist

Notes on how my use of AI has changed over three years, and what's working and what isn't inside LocalCents.

Free, open-source AI router with auto-fallback. 268 providers, one endpoint, 95 MCP tools, 18 routing strategies.

Save hours on your literature review. Use ResearchRabbit to find related papers, build citation maps, and track research trends — powered by AI.

How we connect Claude Code to Storyblok and PostHog's MCP servers to answer content-performance questions conversationally. No instrumentation, no CSV exports.

This may say more about us than the current state of the telephone network, but unless your Grandma is still kicking, how many phone calls do you take that are actually worth picking up? Around her…

immurok is a small wireless fingerprint authentication device for Mac and Linux desktops. It is designed for people who use external keyboards, Mac desktops, Linux machines, and terminal-heavy workflows where password prompts interrupt the flow. The Linux side uses a CLI/TUI app plus PAM integration for sudo and system authentication. The Mac side includes a menu bar app, PAM integration for admin prompts, and a separate helper path for lock-screen workflows. Project goals: - wireless desktop fingerprint key - fingerprint matching on the device - Linux sudo/system auth through PAM - Linux CLI/TUI app - Mac desk setup support - source-available firmware/software (BSL 1.1 → Apache 2.0 in 2030) - elegant enclosure suitable for daily desk use This project log will cover firmware, BLE, PAM integration, CLI/TUI design, enclosure iterations, security model, and preparation for a Kickstarter hardware launch.

Once upon a time, there was a bit of a fad for fingerprint authentication in laptops and desktop computers. It has long since faded, but [superdog] wanted just such a device for Linux and Mac machi…

Optical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and …

Monorepo for Tangled

Bring your own code, and run CPU, GPU, and data-intensive compute at scale. The serverless platform for AI and data teams.

We OCR'd 100,000 pages with open-source vision-language models in 1hr for $223, roughly 9–27× cheaper than the comparable-quality proprietary APIs.

Let’s stop for a moment and pause to consider the smart bulb. Imagine going back 20 years and telling yourself that people will be putting computers capable of acting as web servers into ligh…

A privacy-respecting, open source and secure TV ecosystem

Masthead is an open-source, multi-tenant publishing platform for blogs and small business sites. Custom domains, Markdown or HTML, themes, and automatic HTTPS.

Glean Inspiration from Information Overflow - Smart RSS Reader with AI-Powered Content Filtering

Versatile X Window Manager

The volume is up. More PRs, more pings, more incidents, more asks coming from more directions. I used to have 8 directs that dealt with most things, and organized and routed information to me for w…

Browse public datasets compatible with Hister. Filter by tag, license or author and download what you need.

Build predictive applications on Aito — the predictive database designed around the premise that the user should never make a decision the data has already made for them. Three live reference applications prove the pattern: predictive accounting, predictive ERP, predictive e-commerce.

Need to copy the text you see in a photo or picture? This guide shows how to extract text from an image on your desktop or mobile device.

Trace requests through architectures. Watch failures in real time.