#open-source

I was wrong about Aqua Voice being the ceiling for fast dictation. Ghost Pepper is fantastic, and my Aqua subscription is cancelled. It's free, MIT-licensed, 100% local (WhisperKit plus a small Qwen model for cleanup), and astoundingly fast on Apple Silicon.

The measure that matters is developer-speak. Saying "tilde slash dev" should produce ~/dev. Saying "eich mack or jay double-you tee" should produce "HMAC or JWT". Ghost Pepper gets both right, every time.

Key bindings

The defaults ship as hold-Control to talk, but my muscle memory is from Aqua: right Option as push-to-talk. Reusing those keys worked fine. Aqua's double-tap-to-go-hands-free mode is the one feature I miss, and Ghost Pepper doesn't have it yet, so Shift+RightOpt is standing in. On my Keychron K2 the M1 macro key handles it nicely. Might take a swing at adding the double-tap toggle upstream.

The cleanup model is a little too honest

Aqua quietly filtered out coughs, keyboard noise, and other non-speech. Ghost Pepper does not. [keyboard clacking] and [snorts] have both shown up in my output, courtesy of Whisper's annotation habit leaking through the cleanup pass. Guess I'll have to be a little more civilized at the desk.

I open sourced Blorkobot, a chatbot for our local Bay Area MeshCore LoRa mesh radio network, and put it in the public domain via the Unlicense. That's my new default for any vibe-coded (sorry, "agentically engineered") funsie project that someone could reproduce in an hour by pointing Claude Code at the same problem.

The bot exists to increase chat activity on the mesh, which helps stress-test the network without anyone having to manually spam it. It's about 3k lines of Python, written as a plugin for the Remote Terminal MeshCore client. Nothing exotic.

Why I hesitated

The SoCal MeshCore folks asked if I'd open source it, and I sat on it for a while. Releasing trivial code feels strange. Anyone with an AI coding agent and an afternoon could rebuild this from the README. What's the point of a repo for something that's nearly free to recreate?

I released it anyway, because the value isn't the lines of code, it's the hours of trial and error already baked in: the plugin shape that actually works with Remote Terminal, the commands that turned out to be fun on the mesh, the ones that didn't.

Why Unlicense and not AGPL

The first response after I pushed it was "have you thought about AGPL?"

Setting aside the copyright theory, the AGPL question is really a question about effort. AGPL is the right tool when you've poured serious work into something and want to make sure derivatives stay open. That's not this. This is a weekend project that any competent operator could regenerate from scratch. Defending it with a copyleft license would be cosplay.

Public domain matches the actual situation. Take it, fork it, paste it into your own bot, don't credit me, I genuinely do not care. Unlicense says that cleanly.

That's the rule going forward for the easily-reproducible stuff: Unlicense, no ceremony, no strings.