Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time
I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my stuff. So I built one. It's called Nova, it lives on my LAN, and nothing it hears has to leave the property. The interesting part of this project wasn't the tool itself. It was making…

I Stopped Doom Scrolling By Building My Own News Feed

I Stopped Doom Scrolling By Building My Own News Feed
A few weeks ago I stopped using Reddit. Not because the content was bad. There's genuinely useful stuff there, but because I had no control over it. I was just overwhelmed with irrelevant content, negative content and constant suggestion of threads I have no interest in. I was full on doom scrolling daily, with a very bad signal to noise ratio. The problem is that once you identify doom scrolling for what it is, you…