Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I live in an East coast pine forest where the average urethra has longer range than sub-watt UHF. What range testing I’ve done with the two nodes I own shows I can get about 3 blocks with one of my nodes on my roof. Around here, you’d need adoption at a truly impossible scale to get any use out of LoRa as an infrastructure protocol.

    I know of three projects that use LoRa as the carrier technology: Meshtastic, Meshcore and even Reticulum (which isn’t strictly LoRa but I’ve seen it extended across LoRa). Meshtastic is probably the worst, and most popular, of the lot.


  • Having played with it a bit, I have very low hopes for Meshtastic.

    Being UHF it’s very line of sight, and things like trees absorb the signal significantly. They like to talk about long range, but it really isn’t.

    Meshtastic doesn’t really do intelligent routing, so it’s not great as a single large public net.

    Meshtastic has a lot of little features like telemetry and such which are half-baked and broadcast on the Primary “channel.” Settings to send automatic or telemetry data over secondary channels is absent in the very half-baked software are of course missing.

    It’s less secure than shouting in the street. Looking at the design of the thing, it looks like it’s a man-in-the-middle attack that’s had a chat app built around it.

    And you’re not going to get normies to adopt it. It’s a garbagefuck user unfriendly chat app that you need to spend $50 on a little radio to even use, to talk to…nobody. I’ve seen the idea of “Let’s use it to communicate during our hike!” I can think of fewer practical ways to do that, because now you have to have the Meshtastic node and a phone with you, if one or the other battery dies you’re fucked, and it’s possible you’d be out of radio range of your partners before you’re out of shouting range. Somebody’s gonna walk out into the woods with a meshtastic node, fall into a hole and their body will never be found.






  • Self-inflicted wound.

    She plays Candy Crush and feels that calling herself a “gamer” for it amounts to stolen valor.

    Maybe she’s right, maybe she isn’t. I’m a woodworker, and I’d built several bookshelves, tables, shop fixtures and cutting boards before I felt comfortable wearing the rank. I would insist I was an amateur or a beginner. It was my little porch table that is made with genuine mortise and tenons that I felt I’d earned it.

    And that’s without the gender politics of it. Here I’m a man doing traditionally masculine things. I’m not a man taking up knitting or a woman taking up gaming.




  • So, tier lists.

    There’s been something of a fad in the last few years of organizing things into tier lists. As far as I can tell it comes from the gaming community, ranking player characters or items or weapons or whatever. The tiers follow the letter grading scale I think most of the English speaking world will have some understanding of; A through F without E with F being a failing grade. Apparently because Japan, an S tier for Superior is added above A.

    A fun implementation of this is TierZoo. One of those Youtubers who is also on Nebula, his whole gimmick is he does educational videos (and lifeforms in general) in a very video game discussion style. As if he’s a veteran player of an MMORPG called “Outside” in which every organism is a player character. If you want to get a good grip on the tier list phenomenon he provides many examples.



  • I’ve got a Lenovo tablet with an Intel Pentium processor that runs Fedora okay. Everything works, but especially remembering/detecting orientation with the keyboard attached is about as polished as stucco.

    Apparently the hardware defaults to a portrait layout; it’s a 1080x1920 monitor, not a common 1920x1080, and by god and all his rapey little clergy if it CAN wake up in portrait mode, it will. Waking the thing up means turning it on, ripping it in half, waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to rotate back to the way it was when you put it to sleep, and then clicking the keyboard back on.