Original question by: @SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
The pencil and the sheet of paper.
Zero surveillance. Zero AI.
I am excited about Fediverse and how the open nature of it gave birth to thousand of open source projects.
I hope e-ink displays get way cheaper. I’d love something like a Raspberry Pi 500 and a portable e-ink display for writing.
I love e-ink for informational displays around the house. If they were cheaper, there’d be one in every room driven by an ESP32.
I have begun using Meshtastic mesh radio and it seems promising. It doesn’t do anything that you can’t already do with a cell phone, but it can provide personal, group, and community communication without any infrastructure requirements. You also get end-to-end encryption without depending on any kind of central hub.
I got interested in this from thinking about the political situation in the US. Having an independent and secure means of communicating locally could become important if the government continues along its current path. It has already been useful, on a small scale, at protests.
More generally, Meshtastic can provide communication during blackouts, emergencies, and natural disasters where the cell network may be down or saturated beyond capacity. And everyone with a radio automatically extends the mesh further. Just having a radio turned on becomes a minor, but real, form of community service.
The radios are very small, low-powered devices that almost all run on batteries. They are available fully assembled for around $60, but you can also buy kits (that do not require soldering) for under $30. It’s easy and relatively cheap to get started.
There are also pre-built and kit-based dedicated repeaters that are designed to extend the mesh to a wider area. We bought a completely self-sufficient repeater that powers itself with two solar cells. The whole thing, including the solar cells, is smaller than a shoebox and cost just over $100. It is now on top of the highest ridge in our area and has extended reliable coverage out to our section of town, despite our hilly terrain.
Meshtastic is easy to set up, inexpensive, and potentially very useful.
How did you go about setting it up on the highest ridge in your area? I’ve got a lot of hills/mountains in mine but most of it is owned by someone or public land like parks. I would love to do something like that, though.
I cheated. :-) After spending a lot of time trying to think about where I could mount it on my house I realized that my friend, who lives a block away, is at the very top of the highest ridge in the area. So we mounted in on her house instead. We immediately went from seeing the three radios we own to seeing more than twenty, most of the time. And we started seeing people one or two hops away.
Then someone a few miles away put up a repeater of their own. It’s well within range of ours, so now everyone who can get to either can communicate with everyone in the other area. There are other parts of town that have their own growing meshes. We hope those gaps can be closed to interconnect everything here.
I do still intend to talk with some of the local radio and tv stations. There are three huge broadcast antennas near us (because we’re near the top of a ridge). I’m hoping one of them might be willing to host a repeater, as a public service. Even if they don’t want it on their big masts, putting it on a small tower or on the roof of one of their buildings would get us above almost everything. I know that one of them is already hosting an Amateur Radio repeater.
It blows my mind how easy it is to build a completely self-sufficient repeater node. The one we have now can get a day’s worth of charge from just a few hours of daylight. And it’s under a fairly solid tree canopy. It can also operate for around a month without any additional charging, so even a week of terrible weather isn’t a problem.
It is also easy to configure a node to allow remote access directly through the radio mesh. So I don’t have to get within Bluetooth range if I need to change something in the configuration.
Have any links on getting one set up (the node with solar)? I have a use case for a mountain top with poor cellular signal but excellent line of sight to a very large area.
There is a section on the Meshtastic site about solar powered nodes, but it doesn’t really talk about anything beyond power consumption issues: https://meshtastic.org/docs/solar-powered/
The unit I bought was the Ultimate Meshtastic Solar Radio Node from PeakMesh on Etsy. I couldn’t be happier with it.
If you plan on buying a pre-built unit there is almost nothing you have to do beyond naming and installing it. Despite there being a Role called Repeater, the common wisdom is that you should leave the role as Client. The only trick is to set up your regular radio so it can act as a remote admin for the repeater. Go into Radio Configuration -> Security and look for the “Add” button under Admin Key. Put the public key of your regular radio in there and save it. That will give you access to the repeater without needing to be within Bluetooth range.
If you’re going to built your own node, you’re already beyond me. :-) The one I got uses a WisBlock chipset for maximum power efficiency. It has two 21700 batteries and two 1-Watt solar cells. I think the WisBlock already know how to handle the solar and batteries. If not, you could look at the Heltec T114, which I know can do that and has separate power inputs for each.
I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Just be aware that I’m pretty new to this too.
I’ve been meaning to get started on this, hoping for BBS 2.0 to spark LMAO
As someone who ran a BBS v1.0 back in the dark ages, I think that’s not a bad idea either.
Yes I have seen this pop up on my timelines a couple of times. Very cool.
New technology kind of stopped being exciting for me. Too much abuse, and even stuff that’s hard to abuse (like new medical treatments) typically takes several decades before it’s available for end users and even then is usually out of reach financially for most people.
To quote one of my favorite authors:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
That’s definitely part of it, but I think the main issue is that a lot of the new tech in the last 20 years was used to further the far right (e.g. Facebook, Google) and erode civil rights in general (e.g. privacy, right to repair), on top of constant enshittification and ever-shrinking longevity of devices.
Nuclear thermal rockets, at least twice as efficient as the best chemical ones, and are absolutely going to be used for space travel to the moon and Mars in the future. NASA was working on them in the 60s and early 70s but when the space race started to cool down they stopped. There’s been more money put into that stuff recently though
AI is pretty fascinating even though it has created a lot of controversy
I wanted to say, I’m excited about the possibility of machine learning use in medical screening. If we are able to get people to be checked more often and any abnormalities to be found earlier, it could save a lot of lives - and it’s starting to look promising already
Analytical vs LLM crap, I agree there’s a lot of potential there. We’re burning the environment for people to generate fake images and cheat at school when we should be doing medicine instead.
The stuff they are cooking up at ITER in france.
Small modular molten salt reactors. Probably won’t solve the energy crisis in their current form, but could be insanely useful for specific applications once reactor production is mature.
Whatever replaces OLED monitors. People are quick to defend OLED, citing the fabulous picture quality, but I’m not about to spend that kind of money on a display with a built in expiration date. They only last until the burn-in becomes too pronounced to continue enjoying it. This issue is especially troublesome for people who play certain games with persistent UI elements.
Current OLED tech has reduced burn-in to almost zero. I can’t remember what major tech site did extensive burn testing but they found almost all current gen models had almost zero issues. The ones with any noticeable retention went through the pixel cleaning and was almost good as new.
I don’t understand how OLED could be viable for me. I have desktop layout with various windows vast majority of my PC time and only like maybe 10% goes to gaming when screen refreshes more often. I don’t want to slowly burn my window decorations and panel into panel itself. No matter how far in the future it is, well, unless it’s something unreasonably high like 50 years when the rest of the electronics won’t exist anymore anyway…
MicroLED are currently being developed, so we’ll see what those are like. Imagining the world in 50 years is a scary exercise. There probably won’t be any wildlife left.
New medicine down the road of ozempic and other hormone mimics/manipulators. I think we’re going to see a step change increase in how much control people can exert over their bodies when genetics and environment are a challenge.
