Been busy lately. Not much time to kick back and chillax with #nostr. I don't expect it'll slow down for at least a month.
Then there should be a nice little break before the gardening madness ramps up. Then it'll be washing, prepping, cooking, and preserving fod for months on end. Won't have time for #OpenSourve projects like #signet, social media or building #meshtastic #radio gear until winter sets in
Merge request submitted upstream. Hopefully it's pretty close to being up to their standards.
If all goes well, there will soon be an MXE package for libbotan2.
I already have another contribution in the pipeline (libargon2), but I'm going to wait for feedback on libboton2 before I submit a MR. That way the reviewer won't have to give me the same feedback twice. I can just submit libargon2 correctly the first time, hopefully. 🤞
Small #meshtastic #solar node update:
Range is about 1.3 miles in the direction of town and at leat 1.6 miles in the direction of cornfields.
I do not have line of sight. My antenna is about 20 ft off the ground and surrounded by trees and houses.
The trees are easily 50 ft tall, so it's challenging to get above them. Obviously I am scoping out tall buildings and towers as I cruise around town doing my range testing.
Nobody: what'd you do on your day off Dr Hax?
Me: I compiled gcc SO many times. It was a blast! 🤓😆
OK, now I understand why hackers in the movies have tons of consoles open.
I have 7 terminal windows open, almost all of which have multiple tabs. 😅
I may have just pulled an all nighter to get a cryptographic toolkit integrated with a cross compiler.
Hope to get libbotan2 added to the list of MXE packages soon. I need to do more testing before I'm confident enough to submit a merge request, vut so far so good.
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 $70,968.26 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $41,909,806,349.80 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
