What a disgrace. It is harder to setup ESP32 unit tests running on the laptop than to write embedded code. It's been 30 years and this development environment still feels like 1995. Fantastic.

The experience of using Claude AI on the command line is pretty wild. In the old days it would literally take me days to debug how to compile some obscure C++ project on my machine, now the machine is running all the commands by itself, upgrading the toolchain, testing the results, adjusting and improving at a speed and quality that no human could reach. Any programmer versed on using them will get a 10x boost at minimum on his performance. Haters will always hate AI. This is a new tool and we are engineers, just learn to use them well.

Cheap 20 EUR walkie talkies are not meant for 24/7 data communication. If we want build a world without internet nor IP addresses, these cheap walkie talkies will have to perform just on those harsh conditions. Since last night that it has become possible to send text messages on a web browser through radio, using the speaker and microphone built into the smartphone/laptop. This means communications that belongs to you and the other people around. It is still early. Still missing to properly receive text messages on cheap walkie talkies too (quite hard), slowly we are getting there. A true off-grid communication network without fancy hardware.

Handling radios is hard. So difficult to get conditions of transmission and reception to be stable on both ends, even more difficult to make this easy and stable for others without the capacity to fine tune them.

1:1 and group messages are now added on the web app at

geogram

For the moment these messages are using normal internet. The next step in terms of offgrid is send and receive messages/using the browser connected to a cheap walkie-talkie. I'm not a talented developer, therefore please have patience as the code and UI gets improved over time. Text messages and groups are easy enough and done plenty by other projects, the goal here is that person/group has their own collection of chat rooms, forum, web pages, messages and files to share with others. Basically what a person needs in standalone mode without depending on clouds or multiple providers. At the moment these files are hosted on my own server, in the future the data should be hosted by users themselves on their phones without needing the main website/domain for anything.

ZPAQ is a zip archive that permits to keep several versions of files inside the same archive. This means for example to keep several backups on the same compressed archive instead of multiple copies where only what changes is added (big storage saving).

GitHub

GitHub - fcorbelli/zpaqfranz: Deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests. Swiss army knife for the serious backup and disaster recovery manager. Ransomware neutralizer. Win/Linux/Unix

Deduplicating archiver with encryption and paranoid-level tests. Swiss army knife for the serious backup and disaster recovery manager. Ransomware ...

Wow.. the geogram server was inactive this morning which is common because it isn't yet mature but this was the first time the error was due to lack of disk space. 40 GB of disk space have been used to hold about two months and 320 million radio messages from across the globe. This means about 240 GB on current rates to hold a year worth of messages. After geogram is fully running this value should be around 1 TB per year, still quite feasible with common hardware.