One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.

Used to own an orange pop-top VW Camper bus. Have been drooling after the VW ID.Buzz since the announcement. Would make an amazing roving office.

This Kia ups the stakes. One configuration is as a camper. Waiting to see it in action.

So... if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn't have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That's how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you've installed. It does a match against the phrase 'slots' and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it's all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don't be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don't like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you'll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it's shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There's no free lunch.

Thanks for the tip, will also look into ARES.

I've only taken one of the CERT classes. Will have another next week and am signed up for three more. My understanding is that CERT is targeted at civilians who form a neighborhood first response team in case official services are inaccessible or stretched thin.

The material leans heavily toward self-help (medical triage, food/water/medicine caches, etc) until help arrives. My thinking was the official channels already have access to UHF/VHF for their own comms. But CERT trainers kept repeating that if a big disaster hits, neighborhood groups should plan to make do for 10 days (and maybe up to 30) before outside help can come in.

Assuming 10 days without power, gas, or water and maybe closed roads, seemed like Meshtastic might be a good way to coordinate inside these neighborhood groups and across them.

The LilyGo T-Deck (https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck?variant=44907372413109) with a 3D printed or IP-66/67 enclosure seems like an inexpensive civilian-friendly device to offer CERT groups without requiring a radio license. But the repeater network needs to be there and configured for redundancy. TBH, I don't know if it's a good solution, but I'm going to ask the instructors this week if there are any alternatives already in place. Meanwhile, I'm trying to learn as much as I can (hence the post).

The entire cast of Princess Bride.

We're in earthquake terrain (a fault line runs through the middle of town). My concern would be what happens in case of a Loma Prieta scale quake. Going to do some research on fault tolerance, redundancy, and avoiding single points of failure.

Have a buddy who works at a FAANG and has been doing a lot of work on DR. He showed me a picture of his stash of prototypes. Turned out all were built on top of Meshtastic. Going to hit him up for tips next week.

That's actually a great clip to show the CERT training folks here. Will share it with them this coming week at the class. Thanks!

Awesome tips, thank you!

The highest peak around here has a communication tower on it. Pretty sure some of it is for municipal services. Will do research on what it will take to stick a router up there, if there isn't one already.

This shows how one company (li-cycle) that claims they recycle 95% of the lithium does it: https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ

99.99% doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Not a formal audit, but a more recent review of the protocol: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/

They can take Fort Ross, but they can't pry Clam Beach from our cold, dead hands.

My wife and I used to tag-team. Only one person got to lose it at a time. As soon as one person got that distant, exasperated look, Parent 2 jumped in and Parent 1 could go cool down, watch a show, have a drink, or take a bath. If solo, we'd use distraction and humor. If too much, you stick them in a playpen with toys and let them self-sooth.

If it's any consolation, they won't remember diddly-squat of anything that happened before ages 5-6.

That last one was just people shooting at magic suits.

My first tech job out of college, I was told to go talk to "Dave," the guru old-timey programmer and learn the lay of the land. He turned out to be this crotchety old guy, with low tolerance for idiots, but a soft spot for someone who actually paid attention.

A few months in, I was told to go fix a feature in the company's main product which was sold to power utilities. This was a MASSIVE code base, with a mix of C, C++, assembler, and a bit of Fortran thrown in. I spent a week poring through all the code trying to figure things out. Then I hit a mystery workflow that didn't make sense.

I walk over to Dave's office and ask a specific question. Now, mind you, he had worked on this years ago, and had long moved on to new products. He leans back in his chair, stares at the ceiling, then without looking at the screen once tells me to go look at such and such file for such and such variable, and a list of functions that were related. I go back to my desk and damn if it wasn't EXACTLY as he described.

Now, I'm probably as old as he was then. I don't remember what I wrote an hour ago. No matter what I build, I'll always be in awe of Dave and what he could keep in his head.

Getting less programmer_humor and more "I didn't get the promo" angry vibe from this.

If you right-click and View Source, it all fits on one screen.

I use the same tool. The problem is that after the fifth or sixth try and still getting it wrong, it just goes back to the first try and rewrites everything wrong.

Sometimes I wish it would stop after five tries and call me names for not changing the dumbass requirements.

Most IoT devices that died did so because the vendor went out of business and had to shut off the servers. Most lived in hope that a last minute investment would keep them afloat. In a few other cases, it was the middleware software provider (like Google IoT) that shut down and bricked a device.

This legislation might apply to a big company that decides to discontinue a product line and could then send notices out, but most startups won't know (or admit defeat) till the last possible moment. By then it's too late.

Uh-oh. They've pissed-off Gruber.