CHANGE WAKEWORD IN NEONAI PERSONAL VOICE ASSISTANT
Neon.AI is a channel partner and software alternative for Mycroft AI, an open-source voice assistant. Since Mycroft’s announcement that they will be closing software operations, Neon has taken over those responsibilities for the Mycroft private personal voice assistant ecosystem. Neon is considered the commercial option for the current ecosystem of voice assistants, which also includes Mycroft Classic Core (unmaintained and several years out of date), Mycroft Dinkum (not compatible with the existing ecosystem of Mycroft skills, only functions on Mycroft Mark II hardware, and introduces several breaking changes that are incompatible with other voice assistant platforms), and OpenVoice OS (OVOS).
NOMAD HOMELAB
In my ongoing quest to become a mad scientist, I realized I had a bunch of compute sitting around my home, largely unused. I could try to choose what runs on which machine and track and manage it all… So instead, I embarked on a quest to make it all part of one big Nomad cluster at home. The Nomad server is a single qemu VM running on my Synology NAS system, which is also on a UPS to keep it running until my generator kicks on.
INSTALLING HASHICORP NOMAD CLIENT ON A MAC - PERSISTENT
I’ve been setting up Hashicorp Nomad as my scheduler for my homelab, which includes numerous Raspberry Pis, a few Linux VMs, an Ubuntu laptop, and several Macs. Getting the server set up was fairly straightforward - I’m taking an iterative approach with a single bootstrapped server for now - but I had trouble finding much in the way of setting up persistent clients. This blog is me leaving breadcrumbs for my future self and any other folks who want to take advantage of the power of Hashicorp Nomad clients on Macs in their own homelabs.
THE CLOUD RESUME CHALLENGE - AWS
The Challenge Ever since Forrest Brazeal released his original Cloud Resume Challenge, I’ve been curious to take it for a spin. As a former educator who pivoted into a career in technology, with the vast majority of it in cloud, it hit all the sweet spots for me. Clear, concise, project-based, relevant, and challenging enough to demonstrate all the competencies that a cloud engineer would need to be successful. I finally sat down to do the challenge myself.