Could be any or all of that, yeah. You can also set the level of precision for your reported location, but I don’t think even the lowest precision settings would put it 1,000 miles away.

I live near-ish to an airport, and I’ll occasionally see nodes that are 1 or 2 hops and 100-200+ miles away. Best I can tell, the airborne node is legit relaying those which I think is pretty cool. Not really useful, but cool.

LoRa is a proprietary radio interface, so I don’t how how FOSS you can go with it, but the Meshtastic firmware itself is FOSS.

What are your use-cases? Are you looking for something to use as an everyday carry? An outdoor solar node to relay messages in your area? A node to use as a base station? All of the above?

For everyday carry, I semi-recently bought the SenseCap T1000e and I love it. I did a post about it here: https://startrek.website/post/34105873

Seeed (the company that makes the T1000e) also makes a nice outdoor, solar powered node: https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Solar-Node-P1-Pro-for-Meshtastic-LoRa-p-6412.html

They’ve also got a lot of options for various other configurations as well: https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-and-Meshtastic-and-4G-c-2423.html

Those are all “turnkey” devices, but I’ve heard good things about the Heltec V4 if you want to go a more DIY route and make your own case and add your own accessories (GPS, accelerometer, etc).

Pluribus does that, but also bounces around, so not sure if it fits.

I don’t think it ever fully went away, though. I’ve seen it as recently as 2018.

Personally, I love that layout.

I’m always at a loss for what to put up as wall decorations, and I hate rats nests of cables. Win-win!

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud

Seems to me that the easiest way to get into compliance would be to not make the car connect to the cloud/internet. I’m gonna drive my 2017 model until I can buy a new car that isn’t a smartphone on wheels.

I get mine from ebooks.com

Not all are DRM free, though, but there’s a good selection available. It’s up to the author/publisher whether to release them DRM-free, though, so it’s not their choice.

For the DRM-free ones, you can just straight-up download the epub for them which is fantastic.

They’re separate queens and separate collectives/cooperatives.

The Jurati Cooperative is, as of the end of Season 2, guarding the spatial anomaly that formed in the beginning of S2. They’re completely absent from the third season. Which I can understand since S3 was a fan-service reunion (which I loved) and there just wasn’t room in the 10 episodes for them.

The queen from S3 is the same one from VOY: Endgame and First Contact and part of the same collective since they were first introduced in TNG.

The new one affected the other one?

AFIAK, no, they had no effect on each other. The alternate timeline queen (that turned into Queen Jurati) was not the same queen seen in S3 or elsewhere. That queen was from a 2401 that no longer exists. She and her cooperative only exist because they went back in time and took the long way back to 2401.

That’s what that song was! I recognize this from an episode of The 100 but could never figure out what it was. Now I know.

Loops finally seems usable now. I tried the beta a while back and it was kinda “Meh” but it’s improved significantly since. And you can browse on the website now, too. I’m not into short form videos, but credit where it’s due.

Well, I do like short form videos, but I hate panning for the gems and just let my friends send me the ones that rise to top.

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”

I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.

Trash? None.

Clutter / work-in-progress: No comment.

I asked similar a few weeks ago: https://startrek.website/post/33957879

The answers were all pretty much what you’ve already listed: FreeCAD/OpenSCAD for parametric parts and Blender for sculpted shapes.

The only one not covered in that post was OnShape because I was specifically asking for ones that weren’t SaaS/cloud based.

Lol, touche. Also:

In order and in character:

1. [Chidi]: No, that would be highly unethical
2. [Eleanor] Of course. How else would you do it?
3. [Eleanor] Obviously they had it coming so no harm no foul.
4. [Jason] Nah, Pill-Boi said it was fine.
5. [Tahani] My heavens, no. I would never want to upset my friend Ray. Charles. Ray Charles was my friend.
6. [Jason] In Jacksonville we’re legally required to.
7. [Chidi] Given the ethical implications of restraining user freedom but also providing safety for the majority of people, we have to take into account several factors [ pulls out a blackboard, stomach ache intensifies ]…

I mean, it might if you did all 4 of those with the same post. lol. The Judge would invent “The Super Bad Place” for that.

Just seeing that is giving me a horrible flashback to Reddit and not being able to block “Superstonks”. By the time they eventually rolled out the ability to mute subs, I’d already learned there was a 1,000 user limit on the number of people you could block b/c I started blocking anyone who posted there lol.

I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.

My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.

I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).

Yep, same except being one of the first ones in the state.

The best part is it works when the power is out and doesn’t flap constantly if the electricity blips. Every cable provider I’ve ever had has failed spectacularly at maintaining the UPSs in the neighborhood nodes.

I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.

The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.

I would guess it’s not just Comcast. Optimum serves my area and they’ve basically been begging people to switch back since this area got fiber a few years ago.

Their offers are like $25/mo for 200/10 Mbps and no data caps. But they’re not guaranteeing the price. Seems like they’re going after the lower end of the market.

I basically say “boo hoo”. This is what actual competition looks like. Cable companies have sat on their ass and milked their infrastructure for decades (only updating the headend equipment to keep up).

Optimum cold called me once and I flat out told them if they wanted me back, they need to run fiber to my home, give me the same symmetrical speed I have now, for at least $10 less than I’m paying my fiber provider, and lock that price for at least 5 years. The rep basically kinda sighed, so I guess they’ve heard that response from more than just me.