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Smart Home voice assistants (also known as "smart home", "connected home") are still very much on vogue. But, regarding to Gartner's hype cycle  for emerging technologies, it's already on the falling edge of the curve and on the road to its plateau of productivity. Which means: the hype is almost over and the technology will get mature in approximately less than five years. Controlling devices at home with the voice is no future any more. It is presence. While Amazon's Alexa and Google Smart Home already recognize your wishes by voice commands in the cloud, there is a small place, where some offline voice assistants have emerged. These can process voice commands without a connection to the Internet, which is a major advantage for your private sphere - especially, if you consider that e.g. the German Home Office plans to listen to such devices to enlighten crimes. Fortunately, there is a way to protect your private sphere though you want to use smart...

Working with a database can be so easy - as long as you don't need to care about localization or languages with more or other letters than english. One of these Languages is German. And here the problem starts... Introduction Let's look at a simple scenario: Inserting a text with German letters like ä, ö, ü and ß into the Oracle 11g database. And right now there already could be a problem when trying to select it again. So what is the problem here? Actually the problem itself is very simple: The character encoding. However the solution is not as simple. I tried to connect to Oracle via an ODBC connection from Lazarus IDE for inserting german press releases with a lot of Umlauts (äöü). The result in the database was a mess. So how to solute this mess? The "problematic chain" First of all we have to consider that different operating systems have different character sets. Usually current Linux distributions have a Unicode character set in contrast to Windows, u...