Pebble (Hacker News):
Introducing Pebble Index 01 - a small ring with a button and microphone. Hold the button, whisper your thought, and it’s sent to your phone. It’s added to your notes, set as a reminder, or saved for later review.
Index 01 is designed to become muscle memory, since it’s always with you. It’s private by design (no recording until you press the button) and requires no internet connection or paid subscription. It’s as small as a wedding band and comes in 3 colours. It’s made from durable stainless steel and is water-resistant. Like all Pebble products, it’s extremely customizable and built with open source software.
[…]
What if the speech-to-text processing misses a word or something?
You can always listen to the each recording in the app.
This sounds good, but I don’t want another device. I try to do this with my Apple Watch, but it doesn’t work as well as I’d like. Apps, of course, can’t repurpose any of the hardware buttons. I don’t know of a complication that lets you just press a button to record audio to be transcribed as text. The Reminders complication takes 4 taps (complication, Add Reminder, microphone button, Done) to add a reminder via voice. Siri works without any taps but often screws it up by trying to interpret what I said. If I mention anything that sounds like a meal, a time, or a location, I might end up with that text removed and instead have the time and location fields set on the reminder for when I arrive at that place, which is never what I want. This also seems to confuse OmniFocus and prevent it from importing the reminder.
Julian Chokkattu:
There’s no way to recharge the ring. Migicovsky says he didn’t want yet another gadget to charge every day, so instead, the Pebble Index has non-rechargeable silver oxide hearing aid batteries designed to last two years with average use. Once the device’s battery is nearly dead, users will receive a notification in the app, and the idea is you’ll buy a new Pebble Index—an idea that’s easier to get behind knowing the ring costs just $75, though the price will jump to $99 after the first batch.
Ryan Whitwam:
Core Devices, the new home of Pebble, says the Index is designed to be worn on your index finger (get it?), where you can easily mash the device’s button with your thumb. Unlike recording notes with a phone or smartwatch, you don’t need both hands to create voice notes with the Index.
[…]
After you record a voice note, it’s beamed over Bluetooth to your phone (Android or iOS), and it stays there. The recording is converted to text and fed into a large language model (LLM) that runs locally on your device to take actions. The speech-to-text process and LLM operate in the open source Pebble app, and no data from your notes is sent to the Internet. However, there is an optional online backup service for your recordings.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Environment iOS iOS 26 iOS App OmniFocus Pebble Reminders Siri Speech Recognition watchOS watchOS 10
Matt Massicotte (Mastodon):
We’re in a protracted period where not only are settings very important, they are also deeply and persistently misunderstood.
The settings you use can have a profound effect on your code.
But there are a lot of them! And I think it’s pretty reasonable that you might not want to dig into every single one. So, here an attempt at some guidance.
Previously:
Compiler Programming Swift Concurrency Swift Programming Language
Mike Rockwell:
I’ve been a happy Linode customer for years, but they experienced an outage Sunday morning that took my Cloudron server offline, impacting my Mastodon and Pixelfed instances. As of this writing they’re still offline and I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss.
Manton Reece:
I didn’t get a warning about data loss. This outage did wreck a sizable part of my Sunday, which was already stressful for unrelated reasons. And worse, it affected my customers’ weekends. I try to be patient with hosting providers because I’m one too, and I know how frustrating and unproductive it can be to feel piled on with complaints. But this outage was likely the most significant I’ve seen in the 10+ years I’ve been using Linode.
These events are a time to revisit past decisions. I was already feeling that I was overpaying for Linode. With a bunch of servers and databases, it’s a lot of money for a tiny company like Micro.blog, money that I could use to pay myself more or hire someone.
This year we’ve expanded to servers in Europe, hosted by Hetzner. I’m also now consolidating more of our S3-like storage to actually use AWS.
John Brayton:
Some of Unread’s functionality requires server infrastructure. I run servers to support both Unread Cloud and Unread’s webpage text functionality.
Linode was my hosting provider of choice for a long time, but I recently moved these systems to Hetzner. I wanted to write a bit about how Linode and Hetzner compare.
These are all much less expensive than DreamHost (after its introductory period).
Much of Unread’s server work consists of accessing feeds and webpages from websites. Hetzner’s instances at the pricing above are available in Nuremberg, Falkenstein, and Helsinki — all of which are in the European Union. Some websites outside the EU that do not have international audiences block access to clients in the EU, presumably because those websites do not want to comply with EU privacy laws.
[…]
My solution for Unread’s servers was to host a proxy in a United States data center. When Unread’s feed retrieval system or webpage retrieval system get a forbidden response, they retry the request using the proxy server hosted in the United States.
Previously:
DreamHost Hetzner Linode Micro.blog Unread App Web Web Hosting
Nikita Prokopov:
Top (Windows 95): great contrast, obvious shapes. Instantly readable.
Middle (Windows 11): shapes are still self-explanatory, but contrast is gone.
Bottom (Windows 11 Insiders): what am I even looking at? The only shape I can understand here is the Run button. Barely visible, though.
Nick Heer:
As someone who uses a Windows computer for my day job, I can confidently say this allergy to contrast affects both platforms alike, and Prokopov’s comparison offers just one example. Why this trend persists, I have no idea.
Previously:
Design History Windows Windows 11
