Building a smart-home TTS stack on hardware you already own — no GPU, no cloud API, no bill. We wanted text-to-speech for automation triggers that runs locally, on existing CPU hardware, without sending every doorbell announcement through a third-party API. So we built a FastAPI service around Kokoro ONNX with voice blending, dialogue scripting, and […]
Every prediction someone makes online deserves accountability. We built Since — a self-hosted temporal claim tracker — to register predictions, record past events, attach evidence, open disputes, and verify outcomes over time. The stack is deliberately lightweight: React 19, PocketBase, Express.js, and Docker. Here’s why we chose each piece, what surprised us, and what we’d […]
Every agent architecture article talks about LLMs, tools, and skills. Nobody talks about the thing that actually makes them work: the harness. It’s the runtime that takes your prompt, decides what tools to call, manages context, handles errors, and returns a result. Without it, you have components. With it, you have an agent. This is […]
Most AI agents today are still just chatbots with a tool call bolted on. They can chat, but they can’t reliably do specialised work. The ones that ship real value — document editing, brand compliance, data analysis, deployment — have something the others don’t: Skills. Agent Skills are an open standard from Anthropic for packaging […]
AI models are powerful, but they’re stuck in a box. They can reason about text, generate code, analyse data — but they can’t click buttons, query databases, or publish content without help. Every team solving this problem was building the same integration over and over: custom glue code, per-model adapters, brittle workflows. Model Context Protocol […]
Comparing self-hosted AI to cloud APIs for South African businesses. Real cost analysis with 2026 pricing, infrastructure requirements, POPIA compliance, and when each approach makes sense.
Bringing GPU Support to NeuTTS-Air — A Dev Diary This is the long one: the full post‑mortem, the war stories, the trade‑offs, the CLI commands, and the benchmarks. Read this if you want to know what actually happened when we added ONNX GPU support and a benchmarking suite to NeuTTS‑Air. TL;DR We added auto device […]
The Build Log: Wrestling Chrome into a Local-First TTS Engine (v0.2.0) Version 0.2.0 is live. But a changelog doesn’t tell you the pain it took to get here. This is the story of how we fought Manifest V3, race conditions, and GPU drivers to build a local-first TTS extension that actually works. When we started […]
AI has moved from sci-fi fantasy to an everyday productivity tool. Whether you’re a developer, content creator, or business professional, the right AI integrations can save hours weekly, reduce mental load, and let you focus on high-value work. Here’s how to make it happen — with tools and workflows you can start using today. Updated: […]
Hands-Free, Privacy-First Dev Tooling VibeType: Building a Local-First Voice Coding Companion VibeType is a Windows-focused desktop assistant that keeps every syllable on-device while translating your voice into code, commands, and realtime status updates. Below is the full story—how it works, why privacy matters, and what comes next. Origin Story: From Dictation Fatigue to Flow State […]
