I've been playing with Meshtastic a lot, since learning about it at Open Sauce last year. I'm up to 5 little LoRa radios now, and I'm working on a couple nicer antenna placements, so I can hopefully help shore up some of the north-south connections on the MeshSTL map .

To better understand the protocol, I wanted to visualize Meshtastic communications using SDR (Software Defined Radio). I can do it on a Mac or PC, just setting GQRX , SDR++ ,

Growing up, I remember recording CRTs with any camera was an exercise in frustration. You would either get a black bar that goes across everything, a slowly moving 'shutter' of darkness over the screen, black frame flickering, or even a variety of bright artifacts, especially when moving the camera around.

Just setting your camera's shutter speed to match the refresh rate somewhat closely is usually enough to make it at least bearable (I start at 1/60th and see what looks least annoying).

This is the second year I brought my Dad (a now-retired radio engineer and co-host of Geerling Engineering ) to Open Sauce , a Bay Area maker faire-like event, dreamed up by William Osman and featuring hundreds of exhibits ranging from mad science, to vintage electronics, to games, to world-record-breaking Rubik's Cube solvers :

Meshtastic is still a bit touch-and-go sometimes, but the St. Louis area Mesh has grown quite a bit, to the point I can regularly mesh with 10-30 other nodes. So far we can't quite get the entire metro covered wirelessly, but there are a few gaps MQTT is connecting currently.

One thing I hadn't really thought about—but can be useful, especially for visualizing the mesh —is GPS positioning on the mesh node itself.

A few months ago, I upgraded my M4 Mac mini from 1 to 2 TB of internal storage , using a then-$269 DIY upgrade kit from ExpandMacMini.

At the time, there was no option for upgrading the M4 Pro Mac mini, despite it also using a user-replaceable , socketed storage drive.

But the folks at M4-SSD reached out and asked if I'd be willing to test out one of their new M4 Pro upgrades, in this case, upgrading

I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack .

One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically ) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80 TB usable) I currently have.

It turns out, when you stop running an entire YouTube channel in your

tl;dr : If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here . Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition .

A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down . YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected.

Luckily , I have enough reach I was able to get a second chance . Most content creators aren't so lucky, and content about tools like

I've had a Pi and SDR earmarked for 'getting weather data from my weather station' for a long time now. I don't know why I waited so long, because it was shockingly easy.

I have a Acurite 5-in-1 weather station (with separate lightning detector) mounted about 15' in the air in my back yard. It comes with a fancy little LCD display to show all the stats it transmits over the 433 MHz wireless frequency.

But I want to

I've enjoyed using Ubuntu Server's GitHub SSH pubkey importer for a long time, it's a quick and easy way when doing an interactive server installation to get the built-in OpenSSH server configured for remote SSH access.

However, many computers I work on have Ubuntu Desktop installed instead, and it doesn't even include OpenSSH Server in the default packages!

So I thought I'd write up a quick guide for how to set up SSH on Ubuntu Desktop pulling in my GitHub SSH public keys