Devuan 6.1

2 января состоялся релиз дистрибутива Devuan Excalibur 6.1, основанного на Debian 13 «trixie». Ключевое отличие дистрибутива – это поддержка систем инициализации, отличных от systemd. Дистрибутив поставляется по умолчанию с окружением Xfce. Пакеты собираются для архитектур i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, ppc64el и riscv64.

Дистрибутив сопровождает около 400 пакетов, позволяющих функционировать без systemd, такие как например, elogind, OpenRC или runit. В целом, дистрибутив сохраняет совместимость с Debian, за исключением данных моментов. Доступны также окружения: Cinnamon, KDE, LXQt, LXDE, MATE и Sway. Система инициализации по умолчанию – SysVinit, можно перейти на OpenRC и runit. Также присутствует возможность работы без D-Bus. В качестве...

Text-to-Speech on your PC: running Chatterbox Turbo locally on Windows – clean setup + known pitfalls

Running modern text-to-speech models locally on Windows is anything but trivial. This step-by-step guide walks through a clean Chatterbox Turbo setup, from Python and virtual environments to PyTorch pitfalls, showing how to get reliable audio output without guesswork.

Updates 2025/Q4

This post includes personal updates and some open source project updates.

As the year comes to a close, I’d like to begin this update by sharing a famous (and sadly now gone) tweet. My goal is not only to remind those who have seen it before, but also to introduce it to those who haven’t, along with the thoughts it inevitably sparks. It’s a way to preserve this rare gem of social media for posterity. Below is the original post, with added speaker information for easier reading.

Warning: This text is a bit long. If you’d rather skip ahead to the next part of the update, click/tap...

Five Fun Experiments With a $5 Tesla Coil From Amazon

A Physics Weekend Project

Continue reading on Never Stop Writing »

IoT For Beginners: Gentle Introduction To The ESP32

Let’s Start With MicroPython and Arduino IDE

Continue reading on Level Up Coding »

Year-end donations round, 2025 edition

One more year, one more year-end donations round before reaching the next one. As every year, I highly encourage you to do the same. Please think about organizations that make a difference to you and software that you may use every day. Your contribution may make a difference to them in return.

This year I went with:

Signal because I still use it every day. In reality, I’ve promoted this donation to a monthly recurring one and I’ve been donating throughout all the year, but I’m still mentioning it here.

KDE because I’ve recently switched to it on my personal computer, just to...

Grub no longer detected my Windows installation

Christmas Eve 2025. It’s late at night and I should really go to bed because Santa is coming tonight. I’m installing a new hard drive in my computer to replace my existing Fedora Linux drive. The new one is larger and faster, and I decide to start from scratch with a new Fedora 43 KDE Plasma Desktop Edition installation. After the system is installed (super-fast!) I copy data over from my old drive into my new one. Mostly the home directory and a few other bits. Grub is showing me the kernels for the new OS installation, as well as options to boot several kernels from...

2025-12-24

libgrapheme 3.0.0 released: download

The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News

I was initially torn about whether to publish this story, as I don’t have a clear or constructive recommendation on how to resolve the issue. I also didn’t want to come across as a paranoid conspiracy theorist – birds aren’t real, by the way. However, after repeatedly witnessing firsthand how Y Combinator’s Hacker News platform influences the spread of information and, consequently, opinions within the tech scene, I believe this topic deserves to be discussed, even if only briefly.

I approached this subject rationally, aiming to explain certain metrics I observed in my log files. I began exploring the Hacker News algorithms, along with related posts by other authors and,...

Holiday IoT Project: Playing Music With a Tesla Coil and ESP32

Let’s Make Some Sparks

Continue reading on Level Up Coding »