If you utter “Siri”, “Alexa” or “OK Google” in Jonni Bidwell’s home, all the lights go off and the router disconnects.
Yep, we’re pretty cynical about voice assistants here at LXF Towers. Our (nameless) sister magazines rant and rave about the latest Alexa additions and how they make ordering tat from Amazon even easier. They quietly forgive the chaos that ensues when Siri’s name is spoken on the television, as all the fruity phones within earshot frantically start offering to help.
Tech pundits wax lyrical on the importance of shoving a network stack deep into every single appliance in your house so that it can be ‘smart’, so that the ‘smart’ appliances can all chatter among themselves about their dumb masters. If you’re in the isolated enclave known as the UK, your utility providers would dearly love you to have smart meters installed.
They tell you this will help monitor your usage, save money and not be subject to wildly varying usage estimates. That may be true in individual cases, though we bet a lot of people will find their water bill increasing post-smart meter. But mostly it’s because they can generate more profit by not having to pay people to drive around reading meters. Instead they’ll have to pay people to drive around fixing them on a regular basis.
Be that as it may, voice assistants and network gadgets are here to stay, and as the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ’em, make an open source equivalent and have said equivalent control your home. So here’s our guide to the FOSS-powered smart home, featuring the Mycroft voice assistant, openHAB, Home Assistant and more. Let’s get to it…
Introducing Mycroft
A Pi-powered, friendly-looking home helper on the scene. Actually, there are two – and you can use their code.
The Mycroft Mark 1 launched in 2016 and was powered by a Pi 2, but things have moved on and it now ships with a Pi 3 at its heart. It’s a
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Create your first WebSocket service
Mihalis Tsoukalos explains how to use the Go programming language to work with the WebSocket protocol.
Fantastic Mr Firefox
Nick Peers takes a trip down memory lane to reveal the story behind the rise - and slight fall - of Mozilla's popular web browser.
Set up your terminal and email like it's 1983
Jump in the hot terminal time machine with Mats Tage Axelsson who emails from the command line using the latest technology.
Universal layer text effects with GIMP
Posters use them, films and presentations are hard to imagine without them: text effects. Attract attention with Karsten GÃŒnther and GIMP.
Jump to a federated social network
Nick Peers reveals how you can get up and running with this free, decentralised and non-profit alternative to Twitter.
Free our SOFTWARE!
Taking anything for granted is dangerous, so Jonni Bidwell and Mike Saunders revisit how the free software movement got started to help free us from proprietary tyranny!
Master RPI.GPIO
Les Pounder goes back to the early days of the Raspberry Pi - and his career with this classic library! -
Waveshare Zero to Pi3
Transform your Pi Zero into a Pi 3, they promised Les Pounder, but it's more like adding on go-faster stripes.
The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!
In an attempt to trigger controversy, Michael Reed and Neil Mohr unequivocally state these are the greatest free software apps ever. Probably. Weâre just trying to be helpful.
Linux-Mandrake 7
Simplicity and a wide range of applications make this a great distribution for all Linux users.