GadgeteerZA

“Vital Signals thinks its Signal Ring is accurate enough to replace traditional blood pressure cuffs for the almost half of U.S. adults who live with high blood pressure. The new wearable is thicker than the average ring, not unlike Oura’s older smart rings, but its on-the-spot and continuous blood pressure monitoring laps competitors like Samsung, Apple, and Whoop—if you’re willing to pay $399 to use it.” The other big differentiator though is that no blood pressure cuff calibration is…

“The goal of the so-called OpenStrap project is not to re-create the WHOOP app. Rather, the algorithms and processing methods are developed from scratch, based on public research. It’s all calculated locally on a 1 Hz interval, based on the data the WHOOP 4.0 device feeds the app. As such, the health data collected from the watch, never leaves the phone. While not the main goal of the project, the privacy improvement of the app’s serverless nature cannot be overstated. However, to display…

“In Disney movies, if you wish really, really hard for what you want, it happens. In British courts, not so much. Prince Redmondia really, really wanted to stop the evil barons from reselling on-prem Office and Windows licenses, and made a fairy tale argument in court to make it so. Our hero did not get its wish, not then, and not now with the UK Court of Appeals.” I just had to post this, as my very favourite saying was the conclusion of the linked article: be careful what you wish for. That,…

“Barely a month goes by without an AI laboratory declaring its latest model the smartest ever built. For anyone simply trying to keep up, or trying to pick a tool that drafts a decent e-mail, fixes broken code or turns a prompt into a usable image, the noise is deafening. This is the first instalment of TechCentral’s AI Barometer, a recurring, evidence-based snapshot of which AI models and platforms lead in the tasks people actually use them for. No vibes and no vendor marketing: every verdict…

This is a very feature packed and functional keyboard. I’ve found its word suggestions as good as GBoard and other Big Tech keyboards. I managed to import an Afrikaans dictionary and HeliBoard handled multilingual typing well. There are also quite a few layout tweaks that can be applied, it can pop up more word suggestions, clipboard history, do split keyboard, etc. Interestingly too, in the About menu there is a page that shows a description of hidden features that may go unnoticed. That is a…

“The reality, of course, is that attempts to integrate AI into education have been consistently disastrous. As it turns out, a technology that spits out a confident mixture of fact and fiction without challenging the user to track down or digest information on their own isn’t conducive to particularly effective schooling.” Yep, lack of context has been its Achilles heel. And because of this novel length books, taking over many jobs, proper education, etc are completely beyond it. It has…

“Android has come to dominate the global smartphone marketplace, and a large part of why this has happened is thanks to its open-source nature. Any phone maker can put Android on its phones with no licensing fees, and its adoption has also spawned a massive app ecosystem, so unless you’re a trillion-dollar company like Apple, going a different way isn’t sensible. But is the Android operating system on your phone really open source? The short answer is, technically, “yes.” However, the phone in…

“Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent’s stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they’re happy or sad. Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an…

“So far, around 5,000 staff are using their new FOSS tools for chat, video conferencing, and groupware, but the plan is to roll it out to more than 50,000 public employees. It is also using OpenProject. For now, the plan is to keep Microsoft client OSes, changing the groupware tools first. This is not a Linux migration… yet.” Which is the best-practice way of implementing such a migration. Start with the applications, and test out cross-platform alternatives on your existing OS. Once those are…

Wallos is a free and open-source application that you can self-host and which will help you track what subscriptions you currently have, what they cost (with auto-conversion to your currency), when they renew, notify you before they are due for renewal, and it will also optionally use AI to give you recommendations on what you could possibly save money on. In the video I also spend some time showing what subscriptions I saved R5,800 (about US$438) per annum on. Wallos will show you where your…

“Copy-on-write (CoW) changes that bargain in a way that almost feels like cheating. Instead of rushing to overwrite old blocks, a CoW file system writes the changed data somewhere else and then updates its map. That simple shift is what makes snapshots, cheap clones, rollbacks, and smarter backups possible.” I like the advice in the article about creating a test partition or drive to test this out first. I made the mistake in the early days of putting my entire 1 TB plus /home partition only…

“Earlier in May, the Texas Attorney General’s office sued Meta for deceiving users on the level of security offered by end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp. E2EE is used as a catch-all term to describe secure messaging features across a lot of different apps, but these apps each apply different implementation standards and the level of security is never the same. You should not assume that all your communications are safe from interception just because your messaging app supports E2EE.” Worth…

“South African-born pioneer of the British tech industry David Potter, the man behind the iconic Psion pocket computers, passed away on 28th June, six days before his 83rd birthday. Potter was the founder of the company of the same name, a pivotal firm in the British technology industry from the 1980s to the 2000s. Psion supplied software for the early computers from Sinclair Research, the ZX80 and the ZX81, including a Flight Simulator that you can play online. In 1982, Psion supplied the…

OK this was not “me” obviously, as I run Linux as my main OS. But interesting as I always thought CrystalDiskInfo was the best tool out there for SSD checking (or maybe that was the marketing PR that stuck in my head?). Commands like this are actually useful, as I use similar ones to extract specific data I want to monitor, and I display it on a Conky window on my desktop. See https://www.howtogeek.com/i-ran-the-same-ssd-health-check-on-linux-and-windows

I use the Snoozz extension to park browser tabs for later action. I also have some tab that I open at regular scheduled times to do things. So I rely on those tabs to pop up in a week or in a month’s time. Obviously I have no way of recalling right now exactly which tabs they are, as that is why they are parked for later. So imagine my extreme irritation this morning, when I find that Brave has just broken my workflow without any warning at all. The notice just says “The extension was turned…

“A sealed scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, has finally given up its secrets, thanks to a combination of machine learning and high-resolution CT scans. According to the research paper, the ability to make out the entirety of the scroll was thanks to high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France – an improved imaging technique over prior…

Clone voices from a few seconds of audio, generate speech in 23 languages across 7 TTS engines, dictate into any text field with a global hotkey, and give any MCP-aware AI agent a voice of your choosing. The two cloud incumbents sit on opposite halves of the voice I/O loop — ElevenLabs on output, WisprFlow on input. Voicebox does both, bridges them with a bundled local LLM for refinement and per-profile personas, and runs the whole thing on your machine. Apart from full privacy, as you are…

I see it arrived just on a week ago now, and although I’ve been using it a lot with testing apps, exercising, monitoring sleep, etc the battery is only now dipping below 50%. It is supposed to be good for about 3 weeks of use. Isn’t this what a smartwatch should be all about! With all my Apple Watch, Samsung Watches, LG watches, etc it was always about 2 days max battery life. Pebble Apps’s Battery view I did have one glitch that was really worrying me, and that was the movement detection was…

“Open source software has always been a cornerstone in scientific applications. From supercomputers to CERN labs, handling some of the greatest discoveries of humankind and accelerating particles beyond imagination, open source software has provided the framework for all necessary technological usage. Bringing it down to a simpler level, KDE’s Step provides you a platform to test out some of the most important basic concepts in physics, like simple motion, electrostatics and gravitation, and…

“Strava has been a big part of my fitness workflow for one big reason. I don’t really care about leaderboards or social features, but it acts as a great hub between devices, apps, and services. I use an Apple Watch and I also use a Garmin, and Strava lets me bridge all of these together. That setup has become a lot harder to maintain after Strava removed access to its free API tier for most consumer use cases. Since I also dabble in a range of other wearables that don’t really sync directly,…

“Guards at the gates of estates, complexes, office parks, or gated communities should not make digital copies of your driving licence, as it could infringe on the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). This is according to the Information Regulator of South Africa’s latest draft Code of Conduct for the processing of personal information at gated accesses.” The takeaway being they can scan your car license but not your personal ID. For visitors to complexes they can record:– Name–…

“You can now use1 Firefox’s free built-in VPN without a monthly data limit – but only until August 31, 2026. Mozilla is also temporarily expanding the list of VPN server locations available to proxy your browsing traffic via, up from the current set of 5 locations to a more generous 28 (including South Africa). On September 1, the Firefox VPN will drop back to a 50 GB monthly data limit and a reduced set of server locations for free accounts.” Even 50 GB per month is a pretty good amount of…

“On Friday Google announced it was making a relatively unknown feature of Google Earth available to a wider audience. The desktop version of Google Earth has had a hidden flight simulator mode since 2007, but it’s now easily accessible through a web browser without having to download or install any apps.” Yes it’s not exactly new, but is a lot more obvious now. The site has a lot more too, such as data analysis tools, historical imagery, explore building and solar designs, a measurement tool,…

“No company sets out to make a product that exceeds its purpose and becomes a legend. In some cases when it happens, the company might even regret it. I recall a few NVIDIA GPUs, like the 8800GT and 1080 Ti that were so good for the money that people didn’t upgrade their cards for a decade. That’s great for PR, but not so great for shareholders. Well, among network routers, the Linksys WRT54G was a cheap, unassuming Wi-Fi router that ended up becoming a cult classic for a very weird reason,…

“There is currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products,” the declaration reads, advising policymakers to “consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.” When it comes to AI I believe mathematicians know more about the accuracy of AI than governments do. As the article also points out, there is a trend…

“According to a report from Wired, Meta has been quietly installing facial recognition in its Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses for the last few months. Internally called “NameTag”, the feature, if activated, will use AI to identify people captured by Ray-Ban Meta’s camera, alert the wearer when it recognizes someone, and store faceprints on users’ phones.” Such technology could of course assist the sight impaired positively, but the bigger problem is two-fold. Firstly, Meta is…

Whilst exploring Google’s NotebookLM product I decided to try pointing it to my GadgeteerZA YouTube Channel, and I did the one-click generate an audio podcast about this source. The result was the audio channel you’ll hear on this video. This gave me the idea to actually use this as a Channel About video, so I’ve done an intro and added a lot of relevant graphics from my channel videos, as well as some Gemini images that go with the topic being discussed. Given the audio is restricted to the…

Don’t get me wrong, I think AI has very many useful things it can be used for. It can also be cloud based or self-hosted. But medical records, personal discussions, and most especially therapy sessions, really do require proper consent and understanding for recordings. The reason being, anything that goes into the cloud, especially if it goes to an AI service, is just not going to stop there and stay dead private. That’s a fact! We’ve already heard of secret keys getting recycled and bits of…

“Unlike earlier experimental systems that relied on expensive sensors or specialised equipment, the new method works with ordinary WiFi hardware already found in most homes and businesses. Previous approaches often depended on channel state information (CSI), which measures how radio signals change after bouncing off walls, furniture, and people. The new technique instead takes advantage of normal communication between WiFi routers and connected devices.” This a bit more problematic than…

I did a post about a week back when I started investigating a possible migration from Meshtastic radio to MeshCore radio network. I won’t repeat that post here, but I’ll mention two issues that often came up about MeshCore, and why this is just no longer true. Myth 1: MeshCore is not open source – since about January 2026 there is an excellent fully open source mobile app called MeshCore Open. It was so impressive for me, that I’ve actually made it my daily driver, even though I’d paid for the…