Global namespace extremist. Defragment your communities!

  • 8 Posts
  • 938 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • A bit of unrequested advice… Help expand, or start a mesh network in your area. The SX1260 lora chips are a modern miracle. Plus, It’s basically hiking and socializing activity masked as a tech hobby. There’s also a chance of learning a little bit of physics, or community organizing as a bonus.

    With the new people you meet, there’s also a chance of finding a new hobby. I’ve met an unexpected number of paraglidists through my various tech interests. People from all kinds of backgrounds are really into flying. Who knew?


  • On the other hand, it’s one of the least intrusive proposals I’ve heard in this round of debate. The parent flags the account as a child, the browser sends one (or more, in this case) extra bit indicating if it should receive the adult content (whatever it might be) or not.

    No ID verification, no face scanning, no credit card checks, no companies building profiles of everybody on earth and sharing them with shady institutions. Plus, it pushes the responsibility back to the parents, who (hopefully) know the child the best, and can adjust the restrictions either way if needed.

    Now I can finally accept that the age verification issue is merely “controversial”, instead of absolutely evil global conspiracy.




  • the only way you can feel halfway safe and secure is by spending more money

    That’s not something the Graphene devs could change. The firmware on the existing truckload of old hardware is simply outdated and insecure. To fix that would require somebody to write completely new firmware for those devices. You’re free to take the job. Help the community, and the environment, by reviving all those old devices. Free of charge, or course ;)




  • Your bank does not need to use the app trackers to spy on you. They already know everything important there is about you.

    What the banks are worried about is fraud. Fraud costs them money. But the thing is, the app development cycles are long and complicated, and instead of a pragmatic approach, they just bolt on more and more obscure non deterministic authentication schemes and heuristic checks. That’s why the app wants to know things like your location and access to the list of other installed apps, and simple username and password are not enough to let you through anymore.

    The device attestation for them is probably just another checkbox to tick on the list of “at least we tried”. Regardles of whether it’s actually relevant for security. As long as it saves them more money that it costs them, there’s no reason to not enable it.





  • The most important thing is the location. LoRa works best with direct line of sight. The higher you can place it, the better.

    Of course, a higher gain antenna will provide an advantage. It will narrow the radiation beam, so it shines more to the sides instead of wasting power by covering the areas above and below.

    In an area without any obstacles it will extend your range. In an urban area it can overcome some obstacles by better reflecting the signal off of certain surfaces. Or so I’ve been told, I’m not a physicist :)

    In our mesh, the most popular antenna for stationary repeaters is Mikrotik Omni, 6.5 dBi. You can use any reputable vendor in your area, but avoid the cheap stuff from aliexpress. They often lie about the gain, and can be a hit or miss.

    Be careful about the antenna connectors, though! Most of the ready made repeaters come with RP-SMA connectors. The normal SMA, or even the N-type connectors are certainly more popular with the traditional radio crowd. There are adapters, or ready made cables with appropriate ends available.

    Then there’s the interference. You can have the best location and high gain antenna, but if there’s a mobile cell tower broadcasting on a close enough frequency, you’re going to have a bad time. This might be highly dependent on the region and the chosen lora band. (433, 868 or 915 Mhz). If you suspect this might be a problem, the RF filter can be screwed in, in front of the antenna.

    Hope I didn’t scare you. Best of luck!