category: Technology

Many months ago I started hearing a good bit about a technology referred to as “MeshTastic”. MeshTastic is a decentralized mesh communications network that uses LoRa radios to provide communications, particularly in situations where other technologies such as cell service are not available. The first question, of course, is “what the heck is a LoRa radio?” I’m going to avoid getting into the weeds here, but LoRa is a portmanteau of ‘LOng RAnge’ and refers to a technique to communicate over long distances. That technique involves “Chirp Spread Spectrum” to encode information in “chirps” or short pulses of data. Because much of the data transmitted by IoT devices is just a few bytes, LoRa is an ideal technology for IoT and, in fact, is often used for exactly that purpose. A LoRa device, for example, could be used to communicate with an remotely controlled gate, issuing commands to open or close the gate, or to check its status. ...

After years of having only a single option for internet service in our area, two – count them: TWO – new providers have moved into our neighborhood in the past few months. Both of those providers boast that they provide fiber internet and in their marketing push the idea that fiber automatically means faster internet. I call BS. In all honesty, I truly considered switching to one of the fiber providers early on, but then really began to think about what I would be getting for my money. I realized that it was just hype and that the whole “speed” thing is essentially marketing: all aroma and no substance. ...

Way back in 2017 I obtained my Ham Radio License. I spent a bunch of money on all the ’toys’ that go along with that hobby and actually spent a good bit of time working some of the digital modes over the HF frequencies. I routinely hit South Africa as well as a bunch of places in Europe. Then we moved. After we moved I had so many irons in the fire that I didn’t set up my ham gear again. In fact, I actually sold my HF rig because, to be honest, I didn’t feel like I was getting enough out of the hobby to continue it. Not to mention that it is expensive. ...

Over the last few days I’ve been playing with a number of new options for the internet. I’ve written about micro.blog and an increasing interest in the “indieweb” and I am continuing to explore the opportunities available there. The one thing that has surprised me is that I’ve become interested in the Fediverse. If you’re not familiar with that term, well, which rock have you been under? Seriously, the “Fediverse” is decentralized network of individual servers that interconnect so that you can experience the whole network even though you’re only signed into the one server. With a few exceptions each server is designed around specific community interests, whether that’s technical interests, social interests, and so on. There is likely a Fediverse community for pretty much any interest you may have. And, unlike X or Facebook and other corporate entities, the Fediverse is distributed: No one owns it, no one entity controls it, and no one entity can shut it down. Oh, and it’s free to join and use. ...

Okay, so in my last post I stated that I didn’t do a lot of distro hopping. And, for the most part that is true. That said, though, I do run a homelab and the whole purpose of that lab is to trial different operating systems, software, etc. In the process of exploring Omarchy and its related technologies (Wayland, Hyprland, etc) I ran across several other intriguing things that I wanted to try out. I’ve played with both Arch Linux (on which Omarchy is based) and NixOS in the past but never really gave either of them a fair shake. So, over the last couple of days I’ve been playing with both. Today I want to talk a little bit about NixOS. ...

Toggling the Touchpad in OpenBSD on Lenovo X250 to Address Palm Rejection Issues. So, one of the challenges I encountered with OpenBSD is that the touchpad does a really bad job of rejecting motion from my palm. While writing in Emacs I’d often find my mouse jumping around and my writing not where I expected it to be. After some digging around I found a solution: How to setup OpenBSD in i3 to toggle touchpad Create a file in ~/home/bin/ called “toggle-touchpad.sh” ...

I have watched Youtube videos for many, many years. Not only that, I actually created a Youtube channel and created videos for a while. Recently, though, I’ve begun to reassess my relationship with Youtube. Youtube can be a great source for learning. Just about anything you want to learn you can learn on Youtube. There are, in fact, entire courses available to teach you anything from philosophy, to math, languages, and, of course, a metric ton (or two) of courses on technology. I love that I can learn what I need to learn using Youtube. ...

Revisiting WordStar A day or so ago I ran across an article where science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer had released his version of WordStar 7.0 for DOS, noting that it is now abandonware and, thus, he felt comfortable releasing it into the wild. What was interesting was that, as he noted, not only he, but several other quite successful writers had developed quite an affinity for the ancient software that ran on a long outdated operating system. ...

PlainText Preferences Over the last ten years there have been a couple of preferences that have driven many of my technology decisions. One is a preference for using plain text rather than proprietary software. The other is a preference for flat files over databases. Let’s Talk about Plain Text My move toward plain text came about for several reasons. First, I just wanted to take notes that I could quickly create and reference as needed. ...

My Technology A common discussion in any of the technology forums is which platform is better. Some argue that Windows is best, others that Mac is and others, still, argue that Linux beats them all. What is my take? Well… it depends. ###I am Operating System Agnostic Truly, I am. I have all three operating systems in use in my home as I write this. I started my technology back in 1984 or 1985 with a Commodore 128. It didn’t take long at all to capture my imagination and soon I was doing some Basic programming, playing games, writing papers, etc all on that little computer. I’m not sure my wife was all that impressed. But, boy, I sure was! ...