ultracrepidarian: a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise.
This is from my all-time favorite book of poetry, ‘Reservations’ by James Richardson. I’ll share two stanzas from ‘The Tracks’ that have always left me breathless with sheer awe at how well he writes.
And it is hard even to imagine
the neighbors in a bath of light
playing small cards
their windows in precipitous lines
downhill to where the silence leans
like blocks of onyx quarried
from the white moon,
tomorrow already in ruins.
I had lunch with an old friend recently and quoted Richardson to him, which reminded me of my neglected post series. Here’s one from Vectors 3.0:
“143.
The audience is faceless, back rows disappearing into dimness, and it doesn’t talk back. Find your audience and you will blather. Write, instead, to the listener at your table for two, the one in your head whose faint blush, half-smile, glazed eyes make you correct course in midsentence, back off, explain, stop to listen.
”
Excerpt From
By the Numbers
James Richardson
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/by-the-numbers-by-james-richardson/
Good blogging advice also!
Cute, no?
That’s the repeater. More about it later.
I have a complicated history with ham radio. Years ago, a friend/co-worker and I got our one-day ‘Technician’ licenses, and for years after that I tried to make first contact. Like, talk to anybody. I learned about bands and power and radios and repeaters and programming software and hackable firmware and only managed walkie-talkie on FRS and GMRS. Suuuper frustrating.
I was recently emailing a former co-worker (Hi, Jon!) who’s taken up ham radio as hobby and somewhere in there we started talking about Meshtastic. Then in December it made front page on either Tildes or Lobsters and I was intrigued. Especially this story about using it on sailboats. And this followup post. I also sometimes watch his videos, so this Jeff Geerling post was also valuable.
Key bits:
Based on some research, I ordered
Note that I’m simplifying here a bit – the repeater came later, and the antenna was a recommendation from the ‘San Diego Mesh’ Discord.
The Meshtastic site planner predicted that the repeater + antenna would provide incredible coverage. Remember that this is based on a tenth of a watt! Like, less than a single display LED:
Cue detours in aforementioned Discord group, learning about device roles and the tyranny of Long-Fast, and I was back to not being able to talk to anyone.
In searching for help, I found that many folks had gotten frustrated with the design tradeoffs of Meshtastic and had started a newer project called Meshcore to address them:
More about Meshcore:
So I spent half a day building and installing the repeater in the back yard only to a) not see traffic or get more than a single response and b) the estimated coverage was really shit:
One of the folks on the Discord sent me the key information: as seen on the West Coast Mesh page, local radios do not use the USA presets for frequency, bandwidth, spread factor and coding rate. I had been talking to no one! Here are the correct settings:1
That made the difference! Now I can see and talk to people. Here’s a chat from me, using the iOS app to a T1000-E card to the repeater, going 10 hops to get north of Los Angeles:
That trace is from the very useful tool here, by the way. Just click on a message to see its trace.
Hardware I’d recommend to try it out based on a week or so:
If you want to spend the least in order to see if anyone’s using it locally, I’d suggest checking the maps above first and then trying the WisMesh Tag or T-1000E cards.
I’m having a lot of fun. You might too.
A week or so ago, I read in the Scope of Work newsletter about a Colorado brand of hoodie called Melanzana:
- Here’s a workshop and showroom tour of the Melanzana cut-and-sew shop in Leadville, Colorado. Here’s an interview with Melanzana’s founder, Fritz Howard. Melanzana produces all of their clothing in Leadville, a town of about 2600 people which, at over ten thousand feet above sea level, is the highest incorporated city in the US. This makes it challenging for them to expand production, and ultimately constrains their growth as a company. They handle this partly by selling the vast majority of their product in-person at their showroom, which actually requires appointments for most purchases and has a per-customer, per-visit limit on the quantity of clothing one can purchase.
I find Melanzana’s business strategy counterintuitive and unexpected, and I suppose it helps to explain the fact that I was totally unaware of Melanzana until a couple of months ago, when I was given one of their hoodies more or less by accident. What has remained a mystery, though, is the honestly shocking amount of attention this hoodie has received since then; it’s easily the most commented-upon garment I’ve ever owned, with both friends and strangers calling the brand out by name and complimenting the sweatshirt’s frumpy yet somehow athletic drape. I guess this is all to say that Melanzana seems to have forged their own idiosyncratic moral framework, and has somehow managed to convince a large number of New Yorkers that that framework is worthy of their attention.
I did a bit of looking and the video by MyLifeOutdoors was convincing – I managed to time a release on the site and bought the micro grid hoodie. It’s gonna get a lot of wear, and I figured it for something worth sharing. Melanzana reminds me of the Patagonia ethos – made for use, treats the employees well, does repairs and isn’t trying to grow endlessly. Good stuff.
Added to the YouShouldBuy tag, my highest praise.
(Oh yeah, Scope of Work is also a recommend.)
I was using the SX-6 coaster and realized how many I have that are mementos of things past.
Leaded plastic from my time in the X-ray lab. LabView, ditto. NSA back from when Chris interviewed there. Not sure where I got the SX-6 and National Data coasters.
Proust had madeleines, I guess, and I have … these. What do you have?
As I have written about before, taking your phone to a protest is 100% going to get you written into various government data stores. This story today confirms that ICE is using Stingrays.
So. As explained in Domestic surveillance and police riots, you can get a cheap Android device to communicate and photograph; since then there’s a new EFF project called Rayhunter that I’d also highly recommend. It’s inexpensive and quite simple:
A picture, just to show what it looks like. There are other supported devices and many places to buy them; this was easiest at the time.
P.S. – on Mac, you may need to run this to remove the app-signing error:
xattr -c installerAs Reddit on iOS minus ads explained, Reddit still has a lot of value and today I read this post about a new watch search engine. To quote his post:
Sorry for the image link, WordPress mangled the quote. The link is https://chronoscout.co/en/watches/
Give it a try!
Oh yeah, Margaret and I have some ideas, for now there’s just a single sad index.html at https://dialedin.watch/ but stay tuned!
Backstory – for a few years I had a Confluence-based site at WatchOtaku.com where I wrote and reviewed watches. I shut it down in 2019 and since then the files have been available at http://www.phfactor.net/swr
However, that URL is gross, the files were raw HTML and thus hard to read, so this morning I moved them to a new hostname and added the lovely 4KB water.css, so now the URL is semi-clean and the pages are readable, light/dark compatible and responsive for mobile. Still 100% free, no JS, no tracking. Enjoy!
Some links for a burgeoning student I know:
James Stacey’s tutorial – part 1 and part 2.
SteveG, the OG god of macro, documented his setup here, in case money is no object.
Anyone have an iPhone app that they like that automates macro focus stacking?
Here’s a SteveG, from his Credor writeup:
More recently, on the TGN podcast, James recommended the free Adobe app ‘Project Indigo’ for wrist shots. It doesn’t do focus stacking but I’m gonna try it out. Their writeup says that they plan to add stacking as a feature and show this example of manually stacking 41 images:
I went looking today for mounting options for my new! signed! Effin’ Birds poster and my first thought was how much I like the aluminum dibond on my UNIX Magic poster:
then I realized that I had never blogged it! So back in 2021, I read this story via Hacker News about a legendary 1970s conference poster full of inside Unix jokes and references, was instantly smitten and ordered one:
Anyway, the Unix poster is all that and continues to occupy a place of honor, right in the corner of my eye, because frankly my entire career has been Unix in various forms: Linux, NetBSD and OpenBSD, Irix, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and others that I can’t recall any more. I’m counting MacOS since yeah, it’s Unix with a professional makeup, and so are Android and IOS.
(The time spent on OS/2, BeOS, Windows flavors, Desqview, GeoWorks, DOS… well, ahh well)
Now its time to add my signed EB poster – my better half bought this for me at ComiCon 2025:
but you can’t buy the dibond sans a print, so I’ll probably cheap out and get this locally from Blicks.
So this is a mixed post – yeah, you should totally get a unix poster, you can DIY it for much less than the fancy print. Secondly, Effin Birds is awesome, I also have his wall calendar and some conference tchotchkes.
ultracrepidarian 