This Thursday Homelab Brisbane is meeting online on our Jitsi server at 7.30 p.m. The @techman and @GregY are presenting.

I have been building a personal system where I can literally *talk* to my blog. Press a button, speak a thought, press stop — and it's transcribed, filed, and committed. The voice interface simply announces what's happening ("press to record, stop to commit"), so it stays out of your way; it doesn't dictate or edit; just captures the raw thought faithfully and keeps the history safe in version control. It all runs on local hardware — no cloud dependency for the core work flow.

It's very much a live demo, and an honest look at what's practical with local AI today: where it's genuinely useful, and where the limits still are. Questions are welcome and we can take the conversation wherever attendees want to go.

Boat Monitoring & Automation with Signalk/RPi

We live on our Flybridge Motor Yacht for 3+ months each year, and travel overseas multiple times a year for extended periods (with the boat at home) & hence remotely monitoring critical systems provides peace of mind and actionable intelligence.

With dedicated navigational and electronic systems on board that support dedicated marine data protocols, it requires a specialised automation and monitoring system that can ingest this data.

The “signalk” system of open source software provides this exact environment and can run on low powered hardware with a large and growing support for marine hardware and software applications.