The canonical instance -- the one with her actual writing -- turned out
to be the least protected thing in the estate:
- No scheduled backup at all; the newest snapshot was a month old. Now
petal-backup.timer: VACUUM INTO, gzip, age-encrypt with the parodia
public recipient, push to the VPS over headscale with a size check,
prune both ends. Persistent=true because the box is not on 24/7.
Neither machine can decrypt what it holds; the identity is offline.
- Petal ran as a bare ./petal with PPID 1, so a crash or reboot left it
down until somebody noticed. Now petal.service, verified by kill -9.
- The Piper units retried forever without ever failing: RestartSec=3
against systemd's default 10s window means the burst limit is never
reached, which is how a dead service logged 26,800+ restarts over a
day while read-aloud silently fell back to browser speech.
StartLimitIntervalSec=300 makes a broken Piper show up in --failed.
backup-petal.sh now handles both deployment shapes (compose exec on the
VPS, local binary on millenia) and encrypts before anything leaves the
host. The VPS no longer uses it -- Petal rides parodia-backup there.
Replace the browser's robotic Web Speech API (espeak on Chromium) as the
primary read-aloud path with server-side Piper neural TTS, served by petal
and kept fully offline on millenia next to Ollama.
- internal/tts: proxy short passages to Piper, transcode WAV -> mp3/opus via
ffmpeg, content-addressed disk cache (instant re-taps). Each Piper instance
loads one voice, so language routes to its own endpoint:{voice}. Unknown
language -> 404 so the client falls back to Web Speech. UTF-8-safe truncation
for multibyte (Chinese) text.
- config: TTS_ENDPOINT / TTS_ENDPOINT_ZH / TTS_VOICE_EN / TTS_VOICE_ZH /
TTS_CACHE_DIR / TTS_TIMEOUT / TTS_AUDIO_FORMAT. Route mounts only when
TTS_ENDPOINT is set; otherwise unchanged behavior.
- web/audio/speech.ts: speak() hits /api/tts first, falls back to Web Speech on
any failure; rapid-tap-safe via a request token. Call sites unchanged.
- deploy/: Piper user systemd units (EN :5005, ZH :5006), setup script, README.
English (en_US-amy-medium) and Chinese (zh_CN-huayan-medium) are both live.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016Yr6jELuRc7hyzYLccQKZd