I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

  • 15 Posts
  • 71 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • I just got my two 314 AH batteries and 10KW inverter yesterday, so I’m not at the “spare solar power” point yet, but a lot of people will have a second electric water heater (in “front” of the main one) that acts as a dump load and pre-heats the water before it gets to the main tank.

    I’m looking at getting a Slate EV truck hopefully next year, so that will also charge from my installation.

    Grid-tie and exporting surplus PV generation isn’t an option for me due to electric company shenanigans.

    I suppose when I do get to the excess PV point, I might just buy additional batteries










  • OpenLDAP. Have been running that as the backend of several of my services since 2015.

    I use it for authentication/authorization, either directly or via Authelia, as well as the backend storage for my DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, email servers, and a few internal / self-built applications. I even registered an official IANA PEN so my custom LDAP schema are properly implemented. It’s setup with a 4-way multi-master replication strategy and highly available via two load balancers in different data centers (plus one locally).

    Runner up is Nginx as I’ve been running it for just as long or a bit longer, and it also underpins most of my services in some way (at least as the frontend proxy/WAF).


  • My coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, so this is as diplomatic as I can phrase it under current conditions:

    Both are entrenched identity politics instances (“aNaRchISM!”) and a good chunk of the calls for violence around here are from users there. You’ll be over here trying to have a rational discussion, and someone from there comes in like the world’s dumbest parrot who can only say “Bawk! Guillotines! Bawk! Luigi”.

    dbzer0 was aight when it was just the piracy instance, but they’ve shifted more to far left politics and re-federated with Hexbear, so they’re basically Hexbear-lite these days. Quokk turns a complete blind eye (or tacitly endorses) several power users who do nothing but call for violence, doxx, and/or do nothing but spread anarchist propaganda.


    • Shun the toxic people. Block them and don’t look back.
    • Seriously, block them. They’re still gonna toxic whether you’re there to observe it or not.
    • Find a well moderated instance that isn’t afraid to show toxic people the door
    • Block .ml, grad, hexbear, dbzer0, and quokk.au
    • Block any other instance or person that centers itself around identity politics
    • Block all the news/politics communities. Just get your news from actual news services. The comment section for most news/politics posts here is worse than an entire garbage dump on fire.

    And you’ll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now 😑






  • I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

    Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

    Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.



  • I don’t use MQTT currently, but there’s several things you can do with it:

    • Pass some messages as plaintext for use in, say, HomeAssistant
    • Bridge meshes over the internet
    • Send/receive ProtoBuf messages from an MQTT client to the Meshtastic node and the mesh
    • Plugging in some of the mesh mapping programs to visualize the mesh

    I tried setting up MQTT with HomeAssistant but couldn’t get messages to come in correctly. Most likely my own fault but I just never got back to it as I didn’t have a specific need in mind when I was setting it up.


  • Most of what I’ve dealt with were ESP32-based devices like the Heltec V3 (now V4) that have integrated LoRa radios. It should be possible to add on a SX1262 LoRa radio via SPI and flash Meshtastic firmware, but most people just start with a pre-built kit since they’re pretty inexpensive and have battery charging circuitry and everything already onboard (which you’d otherwise have to handle yourself with a vanilla ESP32).

    I started with the Heltec V3, and the V4 improves several gripes I had with it. They’re easy to get started with, lots of case designs available, and generally good entry points.

    SeeedStudio has a lot of pre-built options as well. My new daily driver is the SenseCap T1000e which is about the size of a few credit cards stacked together. Posted about it here: https://startrek.website/post/34105873

    There’s two main flavors of Meshtastic devices: ESP32-based and nRF-based. The former are generally a little less expensive and have WiFi but are a lot more power hungry.

    The nRF-based ones are more power efficient and can run longer from smaller batteries. The tradeoff is those only have Bluetooth and lack WiFi. I don’t really use WiFi with these, but it can be useful if you want to connect a node to MQTT.

    Check out Seeed to see some of their pre-made options: https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-and-Meshtastic-and-4G-c-2423.html