Self-Hosted Speech-to-Text That Is Actually Useful

parrot: a minimal macOS dictation daemon. Hold Fn, speak, release - text appears at your cursor. Whisper on the Apple Neural Engine, fully on-device, running as a login daemon - plus a hotword hack that routes “Jarvis, …” straight into Claude Code.

August 19, 2026 · 6 min · 1154 words · David Twizer

Self-Hosting Immich on EC2, with the Photo Library on S3

How I run my own Google Photos: Immich on a Graviton EC2 box, originals on an S3 rclone mount, hot data on EBS, private over Tailscale, with a real Let’s Encrypt cert and zero open ports.

July 26, 2026 · 4 min · 648 words · David Twizer