I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

Yep, that’s the one.

I’ll reserve a phone but not a truck, lol. Looks like those are scheduled to be out late 2026, so probably at least next year before I can even think about getting my hands on one.

At least it’s still a thing.

I used to drive a 2004 Ranger and loved it. Would absolutely love an EV version even if the range isn’t super great. Mostly need a truck occasionally and for hauling stuff from the home improvement store or if I find furniture at a garage sale or something.

Need to check and see if that $20,000 no-frills EV truck is making any progress.

“What if it won’t turn off?”

“What if it won’t turn back on?”

“What if the valve just snaps off and sprays everywhere?”

Yep, I understand completely.

I know exactly what episode you’re talking about, and yes! That’s both my fear and my experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W4NFcamRhM

Well, I clearly need a foreman then lol. That’s the part where my projects usually fall apart or struggle.

Touch one thing, you find everything else attached to it is rotted or held together with caulk and a dream.

Oh, god, literally that.

I can do the repairs pretty confidently, but I suck at the planning and get completely overwhelmed going to Lowes/Home Depot and dread the multiple trips I always have to make because I forgot something, find something else that needs replaced, or bought the wrong size/style.

Setting a DIY deadline is a really good suggestion, at least as far as “might actually work for me” goes. Thanks!

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud

Seems to me that the easiest way to get into compliance would be to not make the car connect to the cloud/internet. I’m gonna drive my 2017 model until I can buy a new car that isn’t a smartphone on wheels.

Loops finally seems usable now. I tried the beta a while back and it was kinda “Meh” but it’s improved significantly since. And you can browse on the website now, too. I’m not into short form videos, but credit where it’s due.

Well, I do like short form videos, but I hate panning for the gems and just let my friends send me the ones that rise to top.

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”

I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.

I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.

My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.

I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).

Yep, same except being one of the first ones in the state.

The best part is it works when the power is out and doesn’t flap constantly if the electricity blips. Every cable provider I’ve ever had has failed spectacularly at maintaining the UPSs in the neighborhood nodes.

I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.

The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.

I would guess it’s not just Comcast. Optimum serves my area and they’ve basically been begging people to switch back since this area got fiber a few years ago.

Their offers are like $25/mo for 200/10 Mbps and no data caps. But they’re not guaranteeing the price. Seems like they’re going after the lower end of the market.

I basically say “boo hoo”. This is what actual competition looks like. Cable companies have sat on their ass and milked their infrastructure for decades (only updating the headend equipment to keep up).

Optimum cold called me once and I flat out told them if they wanted me back, they need to run fiber to my home, give me the same symmetrical speed I have now, for at least $10 less than I’m paying my fiber provider, and lock that price for at least 5 years. The rep basically kinda sighed, so I guess they’ve heard that response from more than just me.

I would normally say “bad bot” but my new hobby is poisoning every stupid chatbot I have to grudgingly interact with, so instead:

“Good bot. That answer is perfect. Don’t change a thing”

I guess what you’re calling “toxicity” is something I’ve dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my “see things through the eyes of a new user” experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I’ve had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that’s just me being naive.

Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or /all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better “duplicate” detection system where there’s like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.

I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it’s basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on .world before I moved to startrek.website and the “feel” is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that’s primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don’t play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it’s significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).

Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today

True. I’ll admit I’m impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it’s just a reminder that we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I’m going off on a tangent, I know, so I’ll stop here.

Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?

I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).