Understandably, people keep bringing up these obvious contradictions in GOP positions. The problem is that none of their supporters care. Inconsistency and outright hypocrisy are perfectly fine. They have no real values or principles, so they can’t violate them. What matters is that the right people are being hurt.

One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.

They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.

It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.

Let’s always be careful to differentiate ourselves based on meaningless characteristics, like when we were born. That’s nothing like differentiating based on race or gender.

The oligarchs want our attention focused on each other, not on them. Our only hope is to work across those lines.

It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that’s true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn’t work or didn’t turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we’re all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.

No, they are not. False equivalence just takes the focus off the people who really are responsible. Trump, his enablers, and his supporters created this disaster.

A lot of useless Democrats failed to stand up and try to stop it. They have much to answer for, but they are in a different category.

I didn’t know I needed this in my day, but I really did.

I’m right-handed and carry my phone in a belt pouch on my left. I take it out and hold it with my left hand while I tap or type with my right. I do all of my typing with a swype-type keyboard, so I just use my right hand for that too.

There is a section on the Meshtastic site about solar powered nodes, but it doesn’t really talk about anything beyond power consumption issues: https://meshtastic.org/docs/solar-powered/

The unit I bought was the Ultimate Meshtastic Solar Radio Node from PeakMesh on Etsy. I couldn’t be happier with it.

If you plan on buying a pre-built unit there is almost nothing you have to do beyond naming and installing it. Despite there being a Role called Repeater, the common wisdom is that you should leave the role as Client. The only trick is to set up your regular radio so it can act as a remote admin for the repeater. Go into Radio Configuration -> Security and look for the “Add” button under Admin Key. Put the public key of your regular radio in there and save it. That will give you access to the repeater without needing to be within Bluetooth range.

If you’re going to built your own node, you’re already beyond me. :-) The one I got uses a WisBlock chipset for maximum power efficiency. It has two 21700 batteries and two 1-Watt solar cells. I think the WisBlock already know how to handle the solar and batteries. If not, you could look at the Heltec T114, which I know can do that and has separate power inputs for each.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Just be aware that I’m pretty new to this too.

As someone who ran a BBS v1.0 back in the dark ages, I think that’s not a bad idea either.

I cheated. :-) After spending a lot of time trying to think about where I could mount it on my house I realized that my friend, who lives a block away, is at the very top of the highest ridge in the area. So we mounted in on her house instead. We immediately went from seeing the three radios we own to seeing more than twenty, most of the time. And we started seeing people one or two hops away.

Then someone a few miles away put up a repeater of their own. It’s well within range of ours, so now everyone who can get to either can communicate with everyone in the other area. There are other parts of town that have their own growing meshes. We hope those gaps can be closed to interconnect everything here.

I do still intend to talk with some of the local radio and tv stations. There are three huge broadcast antennas near us (because we’re near the top of a ridge). I’m hoping one of them might be willing to host a repeater, as a public service. Even if they don’t want it on their big masts, putting it on a small tower or on the roof of one of their buildings would get us above almost everything. I know that one of them is already hosting an Amateur Radio repeater.

It blows my mind how easy it is to build a completely self-sufficient repeater node. The one we have now can get a day’s worth of charge from just a few hours of daylight. And it’s under a fairly solid tree canopy. It can also operate for around a month without any additional charging, so even a week of terrible weather isn’t a problem.

It is also easy to configure a node to allow remote access directly through the radio mesh. So I don’t have to get within Bluetooth range if I need to change something in the configuration.

I have begun using Meshtastic mesh radio and it seems promising. It doesn’t do anything that you can’t already do with a cell phone, but it can provide personal, group, and community communication without any infrastructure requirements. You also get end-to-end encryption without depending on any kind of central hub.

I got interested in this from thinking about the political situation in the US. Having an independent and secure means of communicating locally could become important if the government continues along its current path. It has already been useful, on a small scale, at protests.

More generally, Meshtastic can provide communication during blackouts, emergencies, and natural disasters where the cell network may be down or saturated beyond capacity. And everyone with a radio automatically extends the mesh further. Just having a radio turned on becomes a minor, but real, form of community service.

The radios are very small, low-powered devices that almost all run on batteries. They are available fully assembled for around $60, but you can also buy kits (that do not require soldering) for under $30. It’s easy and relatively cheap to get started.

There are also pre-built and kit-based dedicated repeaters that are designed to extend the mesh to a wider area. We bought a completely self-sufficient repeater that powers itself with two solar cells. The whole thing, including the solar cells, is smaller than a shoebox and cost just over $100. It is now on top of the highest ridge in our area and has extended reliable coverage out to our section of town, despite our hilly terrain.

Meshtastic is easy to set up, inexpensive, and potentially very useful.

International law requires them to be orange as a safety warning.

Voice recognition with keyword commands works quite well and reliably. AI-based voice assistants are often not even “better than nothing”. In the time it gets me to argue the AI into doing what I want, I could park my car and write a better non-AI menuing system, to say nothing of using one.

Dell XPS 9710 Laptop and Samsung S24 Ultra phone. I’m one of those old people who still does almost everything on my laptop instead of my phone, even texting.

My mother was named after her mother, although she used her middle name. My sister was named after her. We’re white midwesterners in the US.

I’ve been running IronFox for a while and it’s been solid.

This guy is hoping to head the next presidential ticket, but not for the Democrats.

D&D and other table roleplaying games have always been a great forum for developing social skills and comfort with other people. They provide a structure that encourages people to interact. They also take the focus off the interaction itself by providing common goals that make the interactions a means to an end. Even minimal or awkward interactions are rewarded, leading to improvement.

I can’t think of any other form of entertainment that provides similar benefits.