When the annual holiday is coming up, it's not just a good time to bring the year to a close - technical gadgets should not be neglected either. One such gimmick is the programmable RGB fairy lights from Twinkly. These are available in various shapes (stars, hearts, candles, pearls) and lengths (100, 250, 400 or 600 …
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I've been using Fedora 37 (and more recently 38) on two ThinkPads (T14 G3, P14s G3) with AMD Ryzen SoC (6850U) for a few months now.

Fedora 37 originally came with the Linux kernel in version 6.0.7. Later updates brought the versions 6.1 and 6.2. The latter unfortunately also introduced random freezes on my systems. …

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Vagrant is very popular, especially for development purposes. Unfortunately, SUSE has decided to no longer offer such boxes for SLES 15 SP4 - for the previous releases SP2 and SP3 there were still corresponding downloads. An inquiry with the support has confirmed this assumption - unfortunately a corresponding …
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After more than one year of collective home office I was looking for a keyboard that as silent as possible but still allows unresting typing. As a mechanical keyboard enthusiast, conventional rubberdome keyboards were not an option. Luckily, there are plenty of options available.

The range of mechanical keyboards is …

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After roughly 8 years it was time to upgrade my desktop computer. Even though I already upgraded the graphic card two times in the mean time, processor and memory resources reached their limits. Especially computing intensive tasks and newer video games were slowd down. Fortunately, things have changed a lot in the …
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With the Pinebook Pro PINE64 offers a very interesting notebook based on an ARM SoC. Because of its price below 200 USD the notebook is a good Chromebook alternative that offers more freedom because of its Open Source designs. All components and even the operating system can be switched easily - that sounds amazing! …
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In the last part of this series, we enabled the voice assistant to read temperature sensors and checking the weather over the internet. In this article, we will ensure entainment by implementing a DIY internet radio and an API for bad jokes.

Radio streams under Linux

A commonly used function of commercial voice …

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There are plenty of radiators and fans for the small single-board computer - but how big is the impact of using cooling? Don't get me wrong - having a cooling system is always better than having no cooling at all. But I was curious about the exact difference with the current top model (RPi 4B, 4 GB).

First of all it is …

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In the last part of this series we linked Rhasspy and Node-RED to teach the assistant its first function: reading the current date and time. In this part we will focus on measuring temperature via the internet and DIY temperature guards based on ESP32 and MQTT.

DIY temperature guard

Temperature sensors are cheap and …

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In the last part of this series we checked-out and installed software for building our own voice assistant without leverage cloud resources. In this article we will focus on linking both Rhasspy and Node-RED. At the end, the assistant will learn it's first function.

Desired state

As we already know from the last …

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