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Installing NixOS on a Surface Go 1
The Microsoft Surface Go 1, with its compact size and versatility, used to be an excellent choice for users seeking a portable computing solution. Unfortunately the performance is as is it’s size, limited. My goal is to have a useable tablet sized linux device.
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Azure AI Speech: Text to Speech, improving pronunciations with AI
Azure AI Speech, a cloud-based service offered by Microsoft Azure, has been at the forefront of Text-to-Speech (TTS) capabilities. Text-to-Speech technology has come a long way from its early, often robotic-sounding, iterations. With advancements in deep learning and neural networks, AI has played a pivotal role in refining the naturalness and expressiveness of synthesized voices. Azure Speech employs Neural Text-to-Speech (Neural TTS), a cutting-edge technology that utilizes deep neural networks to model the complex patterns and nuances of human speech. This approach enables the synthesis of high-quality, natural-sounding voices that closely mimic the cadence, intonation, and rhythm of human speech. While the results are generally very good sometimes there are some challenges with person- and location- names in Dutch. Luckily Azure AI Speech supports fine-tuning speech output with Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).
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Enabling Distributed Builds on NixOS
NixOS, known for its declarative and functional approach to package management, provides a quite easy way to enable distributed builds. Distributed builds involve distributing the compilation workload across multiple machines, often connected over a network. NixOS achieves this by utilizing the Nix package manager’s built-in support for distributed builds.
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Degree Days with Occupancy adjustments in Home Assistant
Degree Days (or Graaddag in Dutch) allows you to benchmark energy consumption in relation to temperature.While it definitely is a useful benchmark it falls short into taking account if people are home or not. Based on the Degree Day calculation, and the # of hours anyone is at home, I will calculate a new metric:
(DD/gas m3)*(1+(24-hours))/(1+24). -
Home Assistant: Map Card, a new leaflet based map with WMS and other advanced features
Introducing ha-map-card a new lovelace card, serving as an enhancement to the native Home Assistant map-card, bringing a host of advanced features to the forefront. Built on the foundation of leaflet. The main features are: Custom Tile Layers and WMS Layers Support.