litchralee

1

Firstly, I wish you the best of luck in your community's journey away from Discord. This may be a good time to assess what your community needs from a new platform, since Discord targeted various use-cases that no single replacement platform can hope to replace in full. Instead, by identifying exactly what your group needs and doesn't need, that will steer you in the right direction.

As for Element, bear in mind that their community and paid versions do not exactly target a hobbyist self-hosting clientele. Instead, Element is apparently geared more for enterprise on-premises deployment (like Slack, Atlassian JIRA, Asterisk PBX) and that's probably why the community version is also based on Kubernetes. This doesn't mean you can't use it, but their assumptions about deployments are that you have an on-premises cloud.

Fortunately, there are other Matrix homeservers available, including one written in Rust that has both bare metal and Docker deployment instructions. Note that I'm not endorsing this implementation, but only know of it through this FOSDEM talk describing how they dealt with malicious actors.

As an aside, I have briefly considered Matrix before as a group communications platform, but was put off by their poor E2EE decisions, for both the main client implementation and in the protocol itself. Odd as it sounds, poor encryption is worse than no encryption, because of the false assurance it gives. If I did use Matrix, I would not enable E2EE because it doesn't offer me many privacy guarantees, compared to say, Signal.

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 1w ago

Stroads are best understood as a product of emergent evolution. That is to say, no thinking went into their development, except as incremental, thoughtless upgrades from what was probably once a rural country road.

The only good thing about stroads is that when they're demolished and rebuilt properly, there's usually enough room to build an express two-lane road, or two-way busway, or dual-track light rail line, plus room for adjacent frontage/access roads for local traffic.

The land and technology exists to build things properly, but often not the political and community will.

2

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 1w ago

These remind me of a time when French shepherds walked on stilts to overcome swampy landscape.

The modern equivalent would be stilts to "walk over" lanes of stroads, since the stilts could land on the lane dividers and thus provide uninhibited, elevated urban travel. Just don't fall.

I jest, but that would be a solving a real issue, where crosswalks at stroads take forever and a half.

2

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

My Ecobee thermostat -- which is reasonably usable without an Internet connection -- has one horrific flaw: the built in clock seems to drift by a minute per month, leading to my programmed schedules shifting ever so slightly.

I could have it connected to a dedicated IoT SSID and live in a VLAN jail so that it only has access to my NTP server.... or I just change the time manually every six months as part of DST.

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

I don't currently have any sort of notebook. Instead, for general notes, I prefer A3-sized loose sheets of paper, since I don't really want to use double the table surface to have both verso and recto in front of me, I don't like writing on spiral or perfect bound notebooks, and I already catalog my papers into 3-ring binders.

if I'm debugging something, and I'm putting silly print statements to quickly troubleshoot, should I document that?

My read of the linked post is that each discrete action need not be recorded, but rather the thought process that leads to a series of action. Rather than "added a printf() in constructor", the overall thrust of that line of investigation might be "checking the constructor for signs of malformed input parameters".

I don't disagree with the practice of "printf debugging", but unless you're adding a printf between every single operative line in a library, there's always going to be some internal thought that goes into where a print statement is placed, based on certain assumptions and along a specific line of inquiry. Having a record of your thoughts is, I think, the point that the author is making.

That said, in lieu of a formal notebook, I do make frequent Git commits and fill in the commit message with my thoughts, at every important juncture (eg before compiling, right before logging off or going to lunch).

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Musical chairs would indeed be a "fast paced and exciting" environment, but in the least desirable way.

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Obligatory mention: !keming@lemmy.world

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

"young people irking the community" is a complaint as old as written history lol

1

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Approximately 90% of people are right-handed. In European writing systems that use quills and pens, reading and writing left-to-right makes more sense so that you can hold the pen in your right hand and drag it rightward, not into the ink you just laid down.

In East Asia, before writing on paper was a thing, they wrote using inscribed bone, but then eventually moved to vertical wood boards, bound together by string. Each character on the board would be ready from top-to-bottom, and then move to the next board. The most logical choice for a right handed person is to stack the wood pile on their left, and use their right hand to draw the next board to meet their gaze, then set it down on their right. Later, this bundle of wood boards would become paper scrolls, but would still be pulled from left-to-right by a right-handed scholar.

For this reason, the historical writing system common to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for centuries was read right-to-left (because instead of scrolls, we have pages, which can be moved easily). But the native Korean script is left-to-right, as is the modern Vietnamese script. And Chinese and Japanese in the 20th Century switched to left-to-right. And yet, Japanese books are still ordered "backwards" so that the title page is what Westerners would say is the back of the book, and manga panels are read from the right side toward the left.

So far as I'm aware, this means some Japanese signs can be rendered left-to-right (modern), right-to-left (historical standard), and top-to-bottom (traditional). The only orientation that's disallowed is bottom-to-top (although vertical news tickers will do this, so that readers see the text from top-to-bottom).

It all boils down to right handedness, but it depends on whether your hand is moving, or the text is moving.

1

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Are ham radio operators in the EU able to use LoRa radios and be exempt from duty cycle limitations?

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Admittedly, I haven't finished reflashing my formerly-Meshtastic LoRA radios with MeshCore yet, so I haven't been able to play around with it yet. Although both mesh technologies are decent sized near me, I was swayed to MeshCore because I started looking into how the mesh algorithm works for both. No extra license, since MeshCore supports roughly the same hardware as Meshtastic.

And what I learned -- esp from following the #meshtastic and #meshcore hashtags on Mastodon -- is that Meshtastic has some awful flooding behavior to send messages. Having worked in computer networks, this is a recipe for limiting the max size and performance of the mesh. Whereas MeshCore has a more sensible routing protocol for passing messages along.

My opinion is that mesh networking's most important use-case should be reliability, since when everything else (eg fibre, cellular, landlines) stops working, people should be able to self organize and build a working communications system. This includes scenarios where people are sparsely spaced (eg hurricane disaster with people on rooftops awaiting rescue) but also extremely dense scenarios (eg a protest where the authorities intentionally shut off phone towers, or a Taylor Swift concert where data networks are completely congested). Meshtastic's flooding would struggle in the latter scenario, to send a distress message away from the immediate vicinity. Whereas MeshCore would at least try to intelligently route through nodes that didn't already receive the initial message.

1

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

I personally started learning microcontrollers using an Arduino dev kit, and then progressed towards compiling the code myself using GCC and loading it directly to the Atmel 328p (the microcontroller from the original Arduino dev kits).

But nowadays, I would recommend the MSP430 dev kit (which has excellent documentation for its peripherals) or the STM32 dev kit (because it uses the ARM32 architecture, which is very popular in the embedded hardware industry, so would look good on your resume).

Regarding userspace drivers, because these are outside of the kernel, such drivers are not kept in the repositories for the kernel. You won't find any userspace drivers in the Linux or FreeBSD repos. Instead, such drivers are kept in their own repos, maintained separately, and often does unusual things that the kernel folks don't want to maintain, until there is enough interest. For example, if you've developed an unproven VPN tunnel similar to Wireguard, you might face resistance to getting that into the Linux kernel. But you could write a userspace driver that implements your VPN tunnel, and others can use that driver without changing their kernel. If it gets popular enough, other developers might put the effort into getting it reimplemented as a mainline kernel driver.

For userspace driver development, a VM running the specific OS is fine. For kernel driver development, I prefer to run the OS within QEMU, since that allows me to attach a debugger to the VM's "hardware", letting me do things like adding breakpoints wirhin my kernel driver.

6

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Very interesting! Im no longer pursuing Meshtastic -- I'm changing over my hardware to run MeshCore now -- but this is quite a neat thing you've done here.

As an aside, if you later want to have full networking connectivity (Layer 2) using the same style of encoding the data as messages, PPP is what could do that. If transported over Meshtastic, PPP could give you a standard IP network, and on top of that, you could use SSH to securely access your remote machine.

It would probably be very slow, but PPP was also used for dial-up so it's very accommodating. The limiting factor would be whether the Meshtastic local mesh would be jammed up from so many messages.

3

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

This answer is going to go in multiple directions.

If you're looking for practice on using C to implement ways to talk to devices and peripherals, the other commenter's suggested to start with an SBC (eg Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi) or with a microcontroller dev kit (eg Arduino, MSP430, STM32) is spot-on. That gives you a bunch of attached peripherals, the datasheet that documents the register behavior, and so you can then write your own C functions that fill in and read those registers. In actual projects, you would probably use the provided libraries that already do this, but there is educational value in trying it yourself.

However, just because you write a C function named "put_char_uart0()", that isn't enough to prepare for writing full-fledged drivers, such as those in the Linux and FreeBSD kernel. This next step is more about software design, where you structure your C code so that rather than being very hardware-specific (eg for the exact UART peripheral in your microcontroller) you have code which works for a more generic UART (which abstracts general details) but is common-code to all the UARTs made by the same manufacturer. This is about creating reusable code, about creating abstraction layers, and about writing extensible code. Not all code can be reusable, not every abstraction layer is desirable, and you don't necessarily want to make your code super extensive if it starts to impact your core requirements. Good driver design means you don't ever paint yourself into a corner, and the best way to learn how to avoid this is through sheer experience.

For when you do want to write a full-and-proper driver for any particular peripheral -- maybe one day you'll create one such device, such as by using an FPGA attached via PCIe to a desktop computer -- then you'll need to work within an existing driver framework. Linux and FreeBSD drivers use a framework so that all drivers have access to what they need (system memory, I/O, helper functions, threads, etc), and then it's up to the driver author to implement the specific behavior (known in software engineering as "business logic"). It is a learned skill -- also through experience -- to work within the Linux or FreeBSD kernels. So much so that both kernels have gone through great lengths to enable userspace drivers, meaning the business logic runs as a normal program on the computer, saving the developer from having to learn the strange ways of kernel development.

And it's not like user space drivers are "cheating" in any way: they're simply another framework to write a device driver, and it's incumbent on the software engineer to learn when a kernel or user space driver is more appropriate for a given situation. I have seen kernel drivers used for sheer computational performance, but have also seen userspace drivers that were developed because nobody on that team was comfortable with kernel debugging. Those are entirely valid reasons, and software engineering is very much about selecting the right tool from a large toolbox.

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

Ok, y'all know that I often critique the editors of publications for writing some abysmal headlines. But like, what is this? Pabst Blue Ribbon versus craft IPA beer?

Nevermind a headline that is misleading, this headline has so many words but tells me so little. And the only reason is because one of the manufacturers mentioned was founded by a craft brewery owner.

It's not even a click bait headline, because I couldn't even parse what it was trying to say. At least the article does describe a pair of bikes and their specifications.

2

litchralee @sh.itjust.works 2w ago

I've only heard bits and pieces of this from friends and strangers through some specific events so far

Can you tell us what bits you've heard, so that we don't have to give redundant answers?