I have some crazy stuff on my 2025 bingo card, but I did not think that the sitting US president would be taking concrete action to support the #degrowth movement.
He sure seems to be making great strides at slowing down the world economy. No more consumerism of buying inexpensive, low quality trinkets from overseas. Encouraging people to buy local.
Sure, he's still a jerk about it, but actions speak louder than words.
OK, NGL, my #meshtastic #solar node is fucking sick.
It could run for years with no maintence.
6dbi fiberglass antenna, solar panel, MPPT board from DF Robot, absurdly large battery pack, discharge protection circuit, temperature & humidity sensor, remote administration...
And I plan on running the solar panel through a current sensor so I can keep metrics how much power we're generating. That's the only significant update I want to do.
I think it might soon be time to do a bulk buy and crank out these nodes. They cost about $200 each, but considering RAK Wireless is selling a node with smaller solar panels, smaller batteries and a smaller antenna for $230 that, I'd say I've done well.
Some fellow hackers from the local 2600 meet and I might crowdsource a few nodes and just provide coverage for all of central Illinois. Once we have solid coverage, it'll be more appealing for people to carry devices. Once they are carrying devices, it'll be easier to get some of them to run a solar node to make sure they're getting the best coverage possible. This could set off an unstoppable chain reaction, and I'm all for it.
I just gotta keep grinding, perfecting my hardware rig, figuring out all the gotchas with the software and documenting the workarounds, shafingb what I've learned and offering nodes to people who want to just buy one instead of putting in all the work that I did.
Does anyone have a link handy for a mapping webapp that will let me upload my #Meshtastic range test CSV to see the coverage?
Bonus points if it uses data from OpenStreetMaps.
#lazyWeb
I heard there was a sell off on Wall St lately and that bitcoin is down too.
I don't care what three day traders do, so I decided to check the numbers over the last 12 months. I did check the YTD numbers as well, and the S&P is down, but I couldn't easily get those numbers for bitcoin for comparison.
S&P 500: -4.22%
bitcoin: +6.58%
Sources:
Duckduckgo's interactive chart &
CoinMarketCap
Bitcoin price today, BTC to USD live price, marketcap and chart | CoinMarketCap
The live Bitcoin price today is $69,647.86 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $48,738,619,269.29 USD. We update our BTC to USD price in real-time.
I was walking yo the bank before they closed today so I could deposit a check. It got me thinking, why can't cash it and get out #bitcoin? Becuas the bank doesn't have any bitcoin, of course.
But why not?
They don't want to hold your bitcoin and keep it safe. There's no incentive. That doesn't make them money. What does make them money is lending it out.
But what would it look like if they could lend it out? Hear me out here.
You deposit your BTC with the bank.
Option 1: you pay them to keep it safe. Thus reduces the anxiety that comes with "what if I muff up self-custody?" You pay a fee, they pay for security & insurance. Great.
Option 2: they do all that for free with the caveat that they can lend out your coins just like they currently lend out your dollars.
What's that look like on the borrow's side? They put up their collateral and get the coin. Just like any other loan.
But what if someone wanted to borrow BTC and put up cash for collateral? (maybe they get a bigger discount for paying in BTC than they'll pay in interest). Deposit the cash, get the coin, make regular payments and slowly re-gain access to your dollars.
Next post I'll talk about putting up BTC for collateral to borrow dollars in a reduced-trust manner...
Killer #nostr client idea: allow following and muting people based on their npub AND keywords (plural)
This would enable users to follow someone, but only when they post about a particular topic.
Or, see a person's posts except when the talk about topics X, Y or Z.
This is different than following someone and then muting a particular word. It only applies to that person.
If one were really crafty, this could override muted words. For example, maybe you generally don't want to hear about pizza, so you mute that word. But when Papa Del posts about pizza, you absolutely want to see that.
Once this code is written, it makes all kinds of other customizations possible:
1. Follow "pizza" but only if it also mentions "pineapple"
2. Mute "Nixon" unless tge post also mentions "prison", "jail" or "trial".
And so much more. This is the killer feature because it puts the user in control. It gives them more power over their feed than any other social media platform.
Furthermore, because nostr is more than just social media, the same code could be reused to filter out products from a particular seller, get notifications when someone is available to do ridesharing, and so forth.
Who does this appeal to? Users (obviously) but also people who actually produce stuff. They don't have to have one account for permiculture, another one for cryptography, another for mesh radio gear, etc. They can mush it all together and the users can get juat they things they want (which very well could be all of it, as it is now). Creators could still have brand accounts, but they wouldn't be punished if they don't go that route.
Lets see if #nostr can search the web better than the big #tech companies...
I have ting fragments of a dance song in my head and I'm not even sure they're correct.
...hacienda
No habla espanol but your on my agenda
That's it. That's all that is spinning around in my head, on repeat. The song was mostly in English if that helps.
I have accidentally become the unofficial apt repo for Step CLI. I've been ruining it for years and just expanded it to include the ARM64 package (e.g. for raspberry pi boards)
For those not familiar, step allows you to:
- run your own certificate authority
- get x.509 certs (TLS)
- sign SSH host key (no more manual fingerprint verification!)
- sign SSH user certs (no more manually copying around keys in authorized_keys)
- and lots more cryptography stuff
It's pretty great.
As for the range problems, I just did an actual range test using the built-in #meshtastic module. I get intermittant coverage on my property (~1/10 acre) and spotty coverage about 30 feet beyond that. Everywhere else is a dead zone.
It's as if the antenna isn't even connected. So when it stops raining and the roof dries off, I'm going to swap out the antenna and do some re-testing to see if I can determine where the problem lies.
I added mounting tabs and tabs to bolt the lid closed for the #meshtastic #solar box.
#3dprinting #cad #mesh #network
RIP 🪦 BitRefill's pre-paid MasterCards. #BitRefill no longer has any digital credit cards that can be used to pay in person. The only option is to have a physical card mailed to you, which is better than nothing, but far inferior to what they used to have.
"According to the WEEE Directive, the EU member states are obliged to collect data on waste electrical and electronic equipment and to transmit this data to the European Commission."
WTF, Europe? Why would you require this extra effort just to invade people's #privacy?
Source:
@Daniel Batten Have you seen the paper in Nature that quantified the PM2.5 pollution attributable to Bitcoin mining in the U.S.? Any comments?
One thing that stuck out was "Fossil fuel power plants generated 85% of the increased electricity demand from Bitcoin mines, including 138 coal-fired and 497 natural gas-fired plants."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58287-3#auth-Gianluca-Guidi-Aff1-Aff2-Aff3
Remember back when people used passwords? Yeah that was tedious!
Reminder: The Dead Milkmen
I will not be taking any questions at this time.
In 2022, the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis started tracking the cost of eggs in bitcoin and USD.
At the time, it showed 18 months of data and illustrated that bitcoin is much more volatile than the USD. Now we have 4 years worth of data.
USD: 1.466 ➡️ 5.897 (+302%)
sats: 4217 ➡️ 6223(+48%)
In just 4 years, using only data from the federal reserve, we see that:
1.) the value of eggs is volatile, and
2.) #bitcoin has lost far less value than the #USD, at least measured in eggs
And even though it has a URL in it, you should never take a screenshot like this at face value! Check to make sure I'm not pulling a hoax on you. I'll even save you from having to type in the URL.
Buying eggs with bitcoins | FRED Blog
#ProofOfWork. Mixing in rice hulls. Probably have about 4 more houts of work left 'til it's done.
#gardening #permies #permiculture #homestead #homesteading #garden
This project is hardcore! #OpenSource, #hardware, #firmware and #software. You can buy pre-flashed hardware.
The catch? It's not clear what components to buy or why, and the setup process is so difficult, it's effectively your new hobby.
I expect it'll get better as out gets more popular and more people contribute to the documentation.
#electronics #diy #OpenHardware #FOSS
GM. Time to set aside the cross #compiler for a while and switch to #house and #garden projects.
I should be working on mixing rice hulls into the soil of our raised garden beds, but I worked on the open source energy monitoring project. Made progress, but it's not tracking our usage yet.
Tomorrow I hope I can get some rice hulls in between working for the #Artisans #cooperative, meeting with my local elected representative, and helping cook meals for this week. Because it's calling for rain the day after tomorrow.
I managed to get botan (the cryptography toolkit) cross compiled for Win x86-64 (from Linux x86-64). It took all day, but I got it, including even running the test suite under wine to verify it's all correct.
Patch submitted to libbotan to make it easier for others in the future.
Now I'm trying to figure out why the cmake files in keepassxc aren't able to find my newly created botan-2.pc file that defines how to link to the library, what library and header paths should be included
