in the US at least its about broadcast power level. HAMs can broadcast louder but cant enable encryption. default firmware shipped to the US limits your power level so you remain legal.
*i should add that is MY understanding of the situation and i’m no lawyer.
oh this is a dilemma. does the desire to torment an autistic sub outweigh my own need for symmetry? i don’t like this question.
this is never going to be and was not designed to be a secret spy movie text network anymore than it is an instant messager replacement. the encryption has a ways to go yes but its also come a long way. the benefit of the platform is zero licensing entry with cheap gear. that communities can stand up together and use. or organizers can flash devices between uses and swarm a mesh if needed.
its fun building meshes that can cover a hundred miles but, to function like that you have to drastically shorten the messages. and repeat messages to deal with drops. the encryption overall is fine for what the mesh can do and what the appropriate use cases could be. not great but it’ll do.
for the handheld portables like a tdeck stick to flexible whips. it’s lesson you want to learn before breaking your first tdeck.
generally though these pocket devices are not stand alone solutions. they become useful in an established mesh network. If your area doesn’t have an existing community for this stuff, you dont travel to places with established meshes or you’re just getting started. plan on picking up at least one other small device. a heltec or rak with decent antenna would let you place it at a high point and experiment with what kind of range the tdeck gets.
i’d say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.
if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don’t need to open up.
if your username can also share your gender and pronoun prefs it save a ton of time.
maybe the denver school shooting can be the last one this bobblehead pushes out of a news cycle.
if you’ve already got something at home to run it on and want it easy to set up/maintain. take a look at mkdocs.
that place looks beautiful and it’s a very long hike back. maybe suggest to your partner that you just live there now.
Think I’ve now recovered from doing a human thing Friday. Friend i only see every few years was in town for a night, so it was a social human thing i actually really enjoyed and made recovery easier. Unfortunately a mutual friend is determined this out of state friend and i get together, and keeps trying to get us to hookup at the bar. While knowing i don’t enjoy drunken hookups AND have stopped drinking entirely since the last time she tried this scheme. So now i get to have the “life isn’t a 90s rom-com” discussion and it’s gonna feel a little like telling a 6yr old santa isn’t real.
the community has learned through multiple rounds of astroturfing attacks to be cautious. this post is formatted like something that gets passed around “autism mom” facebook groups. that shit gets exhausting to filter out.
i’ve settled on the wisblock starter if im putting something together for a beginner. theres some nice already assembled kits available as well. as has been mentioned already here the antenna is where you find success. and the RAK4631 on the starter makes is easy to add a better external antenna for both lora and bluetooth. which means it can be placed at a high point and potentially still connected to throughout a house or appartment. its also a really nice platform to build off of if you get into it.
so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn’t enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
the new firmware does a better job of generating keys, and now waits until after the radio region is set by a user. wiping and reflashing recreates the keys it got when a vender bulk flashed devices.
update the firmware to 2.6.11 by doing a wipe/update.
it’s awful, everything feels wrong. some weeks i shower like 4 times a day just to reset how my skin feels. worst part for me is, gardening has been one of the few activities that keeps my depression in check.
if you want easy java minecraft i might try something like https://github.com/itzg/docker-minecraft-server though i’ve not tested that one beyond ‘it did install’.
for bedrock this walkthough does a good job of covering the steps. https://harrk.dev/dedicated-bedrock-minecraft-server-ubuntu-setup/
microsoft has a habit of changing the download url regularly so automating it gets annoying. my kid has moved onto java so i’ve just left the bedrock server shutdown.
if you really want to run a java server outside docker and you’re comfortable with bash scripts, i can post mine here. but one of the docker builds is going to be the simplest way to get started with it.
symfonium has been mentioned in this post before specifically for android auto. i had the same hang up with apple car play. i didn’t use most of the plexamp fancy features. i just wanted it to play music and be easy to use when driving. manet finally came along for ios. though i’m still hoping one of the open source apps adds the functionality later.
meahtastic has a local groups section. your area may have one thats not in that list, most of the big US meshes arent. if you’re in the US chicago, austin, msp and san fran all seem to have active communities of varying sizes. those websites and discord/signals/whatever will have great resources for meshing in your area. a node for someplace like austin isnt going to have the same design concerns as say minneapolis or toronto.