brethap VS mblaze

In 2017 I spent a while messing around and creating a system to code and control my computer via voice. I was experiencing RSI pain at the time, and thought I should be proactive and have a strategy where I could still work and use my computer in case it kept getting worse and it became an impedance to create such a tool. I tried every voice to text I could find, and unfortunately for me the only acceptable one in terms of quality was Dragon Naturally Speaking, which was commercial and Windows only (I use Linux). I decided to build a virtual machine running Windows XP which ran the voice -> text translation, and then run a local server on the Linux side which would receive packets of text from the virtual machine. It was then a matter of parsing the string for language primitives, as you'd need a custom alphabet of keywords to do certain actions like type any given key combination, and inventing your own primitives for this reduces ambiguity (voice detection is only so accurate and the use case here means it's going to be less accurate than usual since you are not speaking in expected english, plus you want everything to be single syllable).

The process of building a dictionary of primitives and shorts was very much akin to what court reporters / Stenographers do to type fast, and was also probably related to my RSI given that I started my career out as a Stenographer. Something I regret in retrospect.

In terms of voice coding, things really have gotten so much better since then where we now have amazing free and open source options for text to speech, and we've also seen a proliferation of apps used to code via voice. I'm partial to Talon, though I don't do any voice coding today. https://talonvoice.com/. Github also just announced a voice to code copilot type thing, and at this point given the advances we're seeing in AI I'm sure I'll be okay if my RSI gets bad. This video was one of the things I watched and helped me in building the system, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

I'm also building a video game, and plan on building many more. I'm writing it in a monorepo where I have a common shared foundation, and then apps using and building on that foundation. I believe in dogfooding my code, and have built a bunch of things with it towards that end

The thing I'm happiest with and use the most is a small and simple music player. I never could find a replacement Foobar2000, so I wrote my own. It runs nearly 24/7 on my PC's.

I've also built a breathing app after discovering that breathing exercises were like magic in terms of improving mood and reducing blood pressure. The one I built was modeled after https://github.com/jithware/brethap, and I mainly built it because it was trivial to do and Firefox kept putting the web tab to sleep. If you have high blood pressure, I 100% recommend exploring different breathing exercises.

I've also built two different GUI wrappers around image generators. The first app was built around VQGan+Clip back before Stable Diffusion, and it supported swapping the backends to change generators. I built it as a web app with Svelte, and it let me explore the images and auto-generate based on a theme or with a given sentence structure where parts of the sentence could be sampled from a pool. The second one was much the same, but it was built with my monorepo, it was built around Stable Diffusion, and I added an image-to-image component. The usefulness of this project is near 0 as there are better open source versions out there.

I also built a static website generator in Ruby for my personal website. I've since soured on Ruby though, and my website is no longer online. There are other things but I'll leave it there because this is already too long.

Brethap (version 1.0.1): Control your breathing during meditation.

I'm so close to being a full-time mblaze user, it is truly excellent. There is something so smart about being able to use your standard shell tooling and interaction facilities to interact with mail. It is like everything that was a good idea with mh¹/nmh decades ago, just better all round and with a nicer message format.

Even if you don't like the idea of using command line tools as your MUA, you can easily make mblaze interactive with common tooling. For example, you could use mlist via fzf along with its --preview window as pretty awesome interactive client. Everything works as you'd expect, and you have all the power of every single tool you use to mangle that mail at any point.

I just seem to fall back in to mutt too easily in the end, I can't get over the final hump. I've even implemented a chunk of mimicry bindings so that I shouldn't even notice, but mutt pulls me back in for "that one minor feature" every now and then. I've been doing this dance for at least a few years at this point², but I think it may be longer.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

² https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze/commits?author=JNRo...

I combined mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze), fzf and standard UNIX tools to build my own CLI MUA in under 300 lines, most of which is shell scripts.

When UNIX is your platform you don't need a complex UI framework with thousands or millions of lines of codes, and you get to reuse knowledge you've already built elsewhere.

I need to write more about it

If you like Himalaya, you'll probably like mblaze as well (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze)

I also find fzf to be very good for building simple UIs. In fact I saw ways to do 80% of burgr with a few lines of fzf; composable tools really are the bee's knees

I self‐host mostly because local copies of things give me some privacy (sites won’t know what my IP is searching for), and it also lets me work easily when Comcast is down… which is annoyingly frequent in my neighborhood.

All of these machines are running OpenBSD, except the gaming machines and the HTPC.

• Outgoing Email: OpenSMTPD, with mandatory TLS. Since I’m the only one sending email from my domain, the outgoing relay is hidden behind my LAN and my DKIM keys never leave my network. Outgoing mail gets routed via Wireguard through a VPS so it doesn’t look like it’s coming from a residential IP block.

• Incoming Email: OpenSMTPD on my MXes, with MTA‐STS and DNSSEC/DANE so as many senders use TLS as possible. Delivers to Maildir on my LAN, which I access directly using mblaze over SSH (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) and IMAP via Dovecot (which supports Maildir backend).

• Roundcube webmail.

• DNS zones: NSD running on two VPSes, slaves pulling their config via WireGuard from the master which runs in a VM on my LAN.

• Public webserver, with personal (public) homepage, Git repositories (clonable and browsable via CGit), photo gallery, files/images/random files when I need to share them by sending a link in IRC, etc.

• Matrix: Synapse for the server, Element for the client. Besides hanging out in Matrix rooms I use this for one‐on‐one audio calls with my friends (generate a link, send it to them, and chat through the browser).

• Pleroma, so I can interact with the Mastodon network.

• Apertium for text translation. The range of languages is a bit limited but for supported pairs it’s nice to avoid Google Translate.

• A home theater PC in my living room running Kodi, which pulls all my Blu‐Rays from a home NAS.

• A powerful gaming machine that uses Steam to stream games to either the HTPC or my Steam Deck. I only use this at home… I wonder how bad the latency would be if I connected to it when on a trip?

• My music collection, whether ripped from CD or bought digitally, is automatically tagged and sorted with Beets, and I run the web plugin to access it over the web. Beets’s web interface is kind of primitive; I would love to replace it with something like FunkWhale.

• Full mirrors of websites with free content: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Stack Overflow, Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks

• Full OpenBSD package mirrors

• OpenStreetMap, running OSRM (routing) on top of an open source Leaflet/Mapbox demo I set up years ago. I’ve been meaning to update this to something more modern and less reliant on Mapbox software.

• Radicale for CalDAV/CardDAV, so my calendar and contacts are synced across all my devices automatically.

• Home adblocking with Unbound (what most people use PiHole for I guess). DNS lookups for my home network are anonymized with DoH over Tor (CloudFlare provides documentation for how to do this).

• Ways to access my home network when away from home: WireGuard VPN in a roadwarrior configuration; public‐facing SSH (with WebAuthn‐backed keys); failing that, an HTTPS proxy with Squid. (Yes, I have been stuck at conferences where the wifi network blocked SSH, WireGuard, and all traffic that wasn’t HTTP/HTTPS or DNS from the blessed server!)

You're probably looking for notmuch, which integrates very well with other tools. There's also mblaze (https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze) that might be of interest.

For parsing mails in the shell mblaze can be nice sometimes: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

mblaze is nice once you get used to it. Pretty neat how you can compose simple pipelines interactively or just using simple scripts for repetitive tasks.

Aerc looks amazing, but I am still waiting for threading support before making the jump [1]. To the best of my knowledge, it supports everything else I would need.

[1]: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/94

My current stack is: Mutt, Neovim, fdm, msmtp, Syncthing, notmuch, lynx (for HTML conversion), mblaze [2] (for scripting), and a tiny pair of scripts to snooze and unsnooze e-mails. Here is an interesting observation, although a pipeline like this may look terrifying, it makes swapping in Aerc to take it for a spin trivial since it all interacts with a Maildir.

[2]: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

There is also mblaze https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze if you are so inclined.