Nice! Those AllWinner boards are a little tricky to get going and have some quirks, but the price is great for the extra horsepower you get. Granted, I use the latest Armbian since the manufacturer’s images are all quite old.

130GB for the entire thing? And the pi doesn’t choke on indexing / searching it?

That was my thought. I knew it couldn’t hold it in RAM but thought it would be doing crazy IO and limited by being on SD, but it seems to not be a problem. Like I said, I don’t know how ZIM does it, but it does it well. Must have some kind of index that lets it fast travel to the correct blocks or something. I dunno lol.

how capable is the search engine (I assume it has one?)

Yep, it has search. It’s…okay but kind of primitive. It’s not slow, and if you’re searching for something that’s fairly unique (as far as keywords go), it does well. But if you’re searching something like an acronym where it shows up as a regular word in other entries, it’s a lot more hit or miss.

Yep, and I love it.

I’ve got a little Banana Pi M4 Zero (PiZero form factor but much more powerful and with 4 GB RAM) loaded up with, among other useful tools, Kiwix and the full Wikipedia dump. I just refreshed it with the 2026-02 full dump, so I’m caught up for the year. I’ve also got a lot of other offline docs loaded up (React, Bun, and the devdocs for several libraries I use) and it’s nice to have local copies of those instead of googling every time.

Surprisingly, the full ~130 GB Wikipedia dump works fine on a regular Pi Zero 2 with 512 MB RAM. I don’t know how ZIM works but it does work very very well.

I get that it isn’t the same but when all you have is a garbage version of a memory, I’m not sure or really matters whether the representation is the original garbage or something that makes you feel less regret over not having something better.

In my experience, the worse the photograph the better my memory of it. Probably because my mind is already used to filling in the blanks in the garbage version, so it’s constantly refreshing the memory in my mind to keep it vivid. YMMV obviously. I’m also not much of a shutterbug and prefer to commit moments to memory than try to fight with my phone to snap a photo I’ll probably never look at.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

Audio transcribing should be the little “waveform” icon at the right of the text input:

Image generation, I’m not sure as that’s not a use-case I have and don’t think the small-ish models I run are even capable of that.

I’m not sure how audio transcribing works in OpenWebUI (I think it has built-in models for that?) but image generation is a “capability” that needs to be both part of the model and enabled in the models settings (Admin => Settings => Models)

Loops finally seems usable now. I tried the beta a while back and it was kinda “Meh” but it’s improved significantly since. And you can browse on the website now, too. I’m not into short form videos, but credit where it’s due.

Well, I do like short form videos, but I hate panning for the gems and just let my friends send me the ones that rise to top.

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”

I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.

I don’t disagree, but prioritize to what people need to know in daily use instead of burying the lede in a sea of boilerplate.

I’m old, so I remember product info/safety labels before they turned into this. If you need gloves for something, step 1 was usually “Put on gloves”.

Exactly. And cut that in half if you’ve consumed any alcohol in the last ~12-24 hours.

That’s the kind of information that should be front and center without having to search the tiny text in the whole label.

Ugh, I’m not optimistic enough to dispute that. Surely there must be a sane middle ground between unregulated free-for-all and forcing people to read through a whole MSDS just to see if they should take 1 or 2.

Safety regulations are written in blood, but warning labels seem to be written in stupidity and litigiousness.

https://github.com/marytts/marytts

I’ve used MaryTTS semi-recently. It’s older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.

On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I’m not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.

My air fryer never leaves the counter, but it’s also a toaster oven and grill. I can easily cook for the two of us with that and haven’t baked anything in the big oven in months.

The grill plate works great but it’s a PITA to clean up after grilling something that splatters a lot, so I don’t use that much.

Haven’t had those in forever but you could probably pop them in the air fryer or even the toaster oven for half that time.

The last time I recall eating a Hot Pocket was in like 2014 during a week-long power outage. Was using a propane heater to not freeze to death and put the hot pockets over top of that on a wire rack. They came out surprisingly good 😆

Didn’t know that, but I rarely buy name brand these days.

The actual seasoning crumbs are still sealed in a bag (for now? lol). It just doesn’t come with the “shake” bags you pour that into in order to coat the food.

Honestly not sure. I’d have to splurge on the name brand to compare.

Just an x64 box running OpenWRT.