Do you waddle the waddle?
Crowd Supply has launched a campaign for LocalDot, an open-hardware board developed by AAElectronics that converts third-generation Amazon Echo Dots into Home Assistant voice devices. The 83 × 37mm PCB uses an ESP32-S3 and ESP32-P4 for connectivity and audio processing while retaining the original microphones, speaker, buttons, and LEDs.
SparkFun today launched two ESP32-P4-based IoT RedBoards, offering either dual-band Wi-Fi 6 through an ESP32-C5 companion or wired Ethernet with Power over Ethernet. Both boards feature dual-core RISC-V processing, 32MB PSRAM, 16MB flash, MIPI camera and display connectors, and Arduino-style expansion headers for embedded and HMI applications.
LILYGO has expanded its T-Dongle lineup with the T-Dongle S3 Plus, an ESP32-S3 development board housed in a transparent USB flash-drive enclosure. The device combines a 0.96-inch color display, 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM, and microSD storage with additional features including a microphone, infrared functionality, and an optional hardware security chip.
Measuring just 100 × 72mm, the PICO-PTH4 is described by AAEON as the world’s first Pico-ITX SBC powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors (Panther Lake). The board supports up to 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, PCIe 5.0 NVMe storage, dual 2.5GbE, and Ubuntu, with up to 180 TOPS of combined AI performance.
Coming a month after GStreamer 1.28.8, the GStreamer 1.28.9 release adds 24-bit support to the level element, support for the mpph264enc (Rockchip) encoder to webrtcsink, and enables cross-compilation with sysroot for Rust plugins in the Meson build.
Coming two weeks after Calibre 9.17, the Calibre 9.18 release adds a new tool to make e-books accessible and check for accessibility problems, and adds support for viewing color previews in the e-book editor as an underline and allows Ctrl-clicking on colors to change them using a color wheel.
Sigil 2.8.5 is here to replace the outdated CSS parser with a modern, spec-compliant parser based on Lexbor, and adds support for AVIF and JPEG XL images, along with support for polyfilling JPEG XL images in the Preview window using a URL scheme handler and the JPEG format.
OpenVPN 2.7.9 adds support for setting the IFF_BACKPRESSURE flag on Linux (if available) to help the kernel TUN/TAP to apply proper prioritization (qdisc, etc.) to incoming packets if userspace is slow to process them. Without this flag, the kernel would just drop everything.
Coming almost a month after KDE Gear 26.08.2, the KDE Gear 26.08.3 release adds -- to the Ark archive manager to separate arguments and file names when dealing with CLI apps, fixes seeking in AudioTube by enforcing Opus over m4a, and no longer restarts the previous track in Elisa when switching tracks while paused.
Coming less than a week after Shelly 3.1.10, the Shelly 3.2 release enhances AppImage support with improved desktop integration to use the application’s shipped desktop-file identity, embedded update-information discovery, support for .zsync control files, and better GitHub asset matching.
Coming ten months after MPV 0.41, the MPV 0.42 release introduces Wayland session management and Wayland color management through the protocol instead of the Vulkan API, improved HDR colorspace signalling on DRM for Linux, and an AMD Frame Rate Conversion filter.
Coming six months after Artix Linux 2026.04, the Artix Linux 2026.11 official ISO release is powered by the Linux 7.2 kernel series, namely Linux kernel 7.2.14, and ships with the Wayland-only KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop environment for the Plasma edition, along with KDE Frameworks 6.31 and KDE Gear 26.08.2.
Soon
Need to raise awarness among ministers
Reproduced in full for more exposure and to make censorship harder
Promising times ahead
“Customer Service” 101 is something like “Customer is Always Right”
Way too slow, indicative of severe understaffing issues
We don’t need staff to just say “Web site” (that does not work!) or “phone” (where nobody answers!)
We got a lot done today, but it’s in pen and paper form (for now)
Another generation of addicts
No need
This morning we wrote about "Keeping Costs Low" while running a large site. Yesterday we served 1,092,447 Web hits and this costs about a dollar. That's because of principles of simplicity, which have long served us. There are business sayings like "think Chinese" (small, cheap, large quantity though) and in that sense we've long adopted this mindset. Things were horrendous when we used Drupal. █
Image source: Out With Sister