Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/900s ISO21

BA 1334, A320-232, 06155

Google Pixel 8 Pro 7mm f1.7 1/280s ISO21

BA 549, A319-131, 03049

BA 306, a319-131, 01222

Concorde in the background.

SONY ILCE-7C 70mm f2.8 1/30s ISO1600

Photo of fireworks launching from a foggy Golden Gate Bridge celebrating the semiquincentennial in San Francisco, California.

Fortune 2.00 is rolling out on Google Play.

I've been asked to support copying the current fortune. A new menu allows you to both copy and share. I've also been asked to allow picking fortune categories. The installed list has increased from around 30,000 to almost 50,000 fortunes and there are settings to pick which cookie files to include.

The notification now includes more of the fortune text so in many cases you can read the full fortune without opening the app.

Finally the design has been refreshed and the fortune is auto-sized so that shorter texts are more readable.

Fortune brings UNIX style fortune cookies to Android. You'll get a random fortune delivered some time between 8 and 9am every day, or you can just browse random fortunes in the app if you've run out of other things to doom scroll.

Catfood Earth 4.42 for Android is rolling out on Google Play.

With this release it's now possible to set a custom cloud layer download URL, like the composite experiment linked to from this post. Clouds are also lighter by default - you can increase transparency in settings if you'd prefer them to be less prominent. Finally, the Catfood Earth launcher has been redesigned to clarify the setup process.

Existing users will get this update automatically. If you have Android without Catfood Earth you should give it a try.

Aurora is my open source Rasperry Pi voice assistant, based on the OpenAI Realtime API. I just shipped native wake word detection, including a trained model (Aurora), a training pipeline and on-device support for gathering training data from your long suffering household ("Aurora, learn how I say your name").

When I first built this project I used Porcupine from Picovoice. They had a free one seat version that worked great for this, but sadly they're pulling the plug at the end of this month. I can't afford their commercial license for an open source assistant so I urgently needed a replacement.

OpenWakeWord is the obvious replacement and seems quite popular with the Home Assistant community. The training notebook does not work though, and some alternatives suggested in the comments wouldn't run for me either. Maybe I'll go back to this if it comes back to life but it didn't look like a good bet for now.

I turned of course to Claude Code. To start with it agreed with the OpenWakeWord intuition but after some persuasion it put together a small CNN (looking at a spectrogram of the current audio capture) and trained and tuned it based on synthetic data. This worked surprisingly well. I'm in the process of fine tuning the model with samples captured from the Raspberry Pi from various family members (kicking off a data capture session is now a feature of the assistant). The detector is a drop in replacement for Porcupine so if you're looking to replace Picovoice that would be a good starting point.

If you use Aurora upgrade to the latest code and then follow the instructions in .env.example to migrate from Porcupine. You can use aurora.onyx to get up and running immediately, or see the wake_word folder readme to train your own from scratch. If you use the Raspberry Pi sample collection copy those files into the data folder and retrain to improve the model.

I have been in a Windows software writing funk for the past year because my code signing certificate expired and during those happy three years of signing the industry changed beyond all recognition.

Code signing, or Authenticode, proves that my software came from me and hasn't been altered (as long as I'm not careless with my private key, and some alteration is possible). Windows is increasingly hysterical about running unsigned installers, and for good reason, so I have always signed anything I distribute widely.

For a long time I used K Software, who resold Comodo certificates (now Sectigo), and that cost me $70 a year with a 3 year certificate. K Software doesn't seem to exist any more, and Sectigo's list price is $715 / year. I'm not paying that to distribute free software. Part of the cost increase is that private keys either need to be on secure devices or hosted. Not a bad idea as compromised keys are an obvious disaster. There are some cheaper resellers but any palatable certificate cost seems to require a paid service for the actual signing.

When I last looked at this Microsoft had an interesting option on Azure (Artificat Signing) but it was only open to companies with three years of history, and so I gave up and worked on Android and web apps instead. This has now changed, and you can get an individual code signing service up and running for $10/month. I don't love it, but I'm willing to pay. There is a 'quick start' guide to get you up and running. I highly recommend pasting this into the LLM of your choice for a walkthrough, as it's a miserable process. I have got it going though and released a Catfood Earth update. Because it's a new certificate I'm starting from scratch on anti-virus reputation, unavoidable.

A few tips. Make sure your billing account for Azure is the name you want on the certificate first. Azure is a beast - full of things like progress for activating a service that ends up with it in an unactivated state until you refresh the page, or a mandatory selection on step 2 of a process that blocks you from completing step 1. I don't feel that this is a service they're excited to provide. Identity verification was online and fast which was pleasant (based on a drivers license for me). The person plan requires you to be in the US or Canada and supports up to 5,000 signatures a month.

I just released Catfood Earth 4.41 for Windows: download here.

This version includes version 2026b of the IANA time zone database. British Columbia just switched to permanent daylight savings time and you'll need this update if that impacts your locations or other settings.

I also made a small change to better support high resolution displays. The font size is now automatically scaled. This started affecting me with a high resolution laptop that I dock to some low resolution monitors causing the font size to be wrong half the time. You might need to tweak your font size after installing this update.

Unfortunately I also switched my code signing certificate (more here) with this release. If Windows blocks install then go to Windows Security, App & browser control, Smart App Control settings and then switch off Smart App Control temporarily while you install. This should stop being a problem as Windows learns to trust the new certificate.