About

Mike Barta

Six screens, too many keyboards, multiple ham radios, and not a single window. The HTs, Meshtastic (now Meshcore) nodes, and Raspberry Pis didn’t even make it into the shot. Welcome to the office.

I’m a programmer by trade, a tinkerer by nature, a ham radio operator by hobby, and newer to Linux than I’d like to admit. I got into home automation a few years back, started dabbling with Linux and playing with Large Language Models (aka AI), then a job change gave me more focus and I went deep. The full story starts with the first post.

Things got crazy when the MS Windows hardware “expiration”, I had been playing just enough with Linux and started to realize I had a lot of good usable hardware (laptops in boxes, Pis in drawers, machines Windows had decided were too old) and Linux could make use of all of it. One thing led to another, and now I have a local large language model helping run the house and doing much more.

I write about it because I spent too many hours piecing things together from outdated tutorials, forum posts, and confident answers that turned out to be wrong. If I had to figure it out the hard way, I’ll try to save you the trip. I’m also not going to pretend any of the AI is magic. These are language models, not intelligence, and most of the hype is well ahead of the reality.

Tools I build along the way will go up on GitHub. After decades of learning from other people’s code and never contributing back, it feels like it is time to finally put some contributions on the shelf.

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If something here saved you time or made you laugh, you can drop something in the tip jar.

— Mike