• 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 😑

If anyone doesn’t get the reference:

I forgot how old this gag was until realizing it’s in 4:3 aspect ratio.

Hopefully this doesn’t impact my ability to buy them DRM-free. Ugh.

At least with S&S, they would release them without DRM after 5 years. That’s 5 years too long, but better than nothing I suppose.

Yeah, you’d have thought. I can’t remember the last time I bought a non-rechargable battery except for 9V for my smoke detectors, and none of them were Duracell or Energizer.

If you reverse the polarity of lots of things, you get a fire starter.

I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.

You mean the one from the obvious troll account that was obvious?

I would really love to meet this data protocol that can modulate 100 Mbit traffic to fit inside a 13.2 kbps voice codec. I totally will not be patenting it and getting rich from it.

I don’t really consider blahaj as an “identity politics” instance, but I think I know which users you’re referring to (or at least their style). I’ve probably had those blocked for a while now.

Edit: A few of those have older hexbear alts which kind-of explains things.

Don’t want to start any drama by listing specifics, but basically any instance that advertises itself as “a space for {insert flavor of identity politics here}”.

Excellent catch!

“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are” 😢

Don’t feel bad. I was able to distinguish by ear between a T.38 fax handshake and a V.34+ modem handshake which definitely reveals my oldness 😆

So many things wrong with that though:

1. That’s a fax machine handshake not a data modem.
2. That’s a LOT of data to be hissing over dial-up in a highly compressed GSM voice channel
3. She didn’t dial anywhere near enough numbers
4. The background noise would have had that handshake repeating over and over

The most nostalgic chiptune generator you’ll ever hear.

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

Definitely one of the “throw it on the pile” projects for me, too, but I’m for sure throwing it on the top of the pile. Have had quite a few severe storm warnings this year already and this could be pretty useful. I was originally just looking for a way to forward NWS/EAS alerts to Meshtastic from the internet, but getting them direct over-the-air is even better.

Only complicating factor is I have to fashion or buy an antenna for ~150 Mhz since I don’t have any adapters that will fit the RTL-SDR (I’ve just used the little stock UHF TV antenna that came with it for ADS-B and other playing around).

I don’t want to repeat what others have already said as that’s all pretty accurate. As a rule of thumb, just look at the site sidebar for various instances and just avoid any that base themselves around any form of identity politics. Sadly, that’s a lot of them, but life is better without those kinds of attitudes in your face all the time.