We don’t have “flying cars” because “flying cars” is what we call aircraft whose use case isn’t practical or safe.

You can go spend $100 grand on a light sport airplane and get a pilot’s license in a couple months right now. You’ll almost certainly never use it for actual practical travel.

The most crashed make and model of airplane in history is the Cessna 172.

The most popular make and model of airplane in history is the Cessna 172, in production since the 1950’s and some guy in Kansas is slapping one together as I speak.

Meanwhile I have a pair of Kenmore 80 series washer and dryer. They’re more reliable than my own heart and lungs, and I can get parts for them when a knob or a lid switch goes bad once every decade or two.

Removed by mod

My dearest Tokenring,

There are attempts to make state-wide meshes, there’s one in North Carolina. Most of the traffic on this mesh? “Morning mesh!” --no answer-- Most of the conversations you see between members? On Discord. Probably because Discord actually works.

I dig the idea of a communication network in which individuals can own the infrastructure. This doesn’t seem to be it, though.

I live in an East coast pine forest where the average urethra has longer range than sub-watt UHF. What range testing I’ve done with the two nodes I own shows I can get about 3 blocks with one of my nodes on my roof. Around here, you’d need adoption at a truly impossible scale to get any use out of LoRa as an infrastructure protocol.

I know of three projects that use LoRa as the carrier technology: Meshtastic, Meshcore and even Reticulum (which isn’t strictly LoRa but I’ve seen it extended across LoRa). Meshtastic is probably the worst, and most popular, of the lot.

Having played with it a bit, I have very low hopes for Meshtastic.

Being UHF it’s very line of sight, and things like trees absorb the signal significantly. They like to talk about long range, but it really isn’t.

Meshtastic doesn’t really do intelligent routing, so it’s not great as a single large public net.

Meshtastic has a lot of little features like telemetry and such which are half-baked and broadcast on the Primary “channel.” Settings to send automatic or telemetry data over secondary channels is absent in the very half-baked software are of course missing.

It’s less secure than shouting in the street. Looking at the design of the thing, it looks like it’s a man-in-the-middle attack that’s had a chat app built around it.

And you’re not going to get normies to adopt it. It’s a garbagefuck user unfriendly chat app that you need to spend $50 on a little radio to even use, to talk to…nobody. I’ve seen the idea of “Let’s use it to communicate during our hike!” I can think of fewer practical ways to do that, because now you have to have the Meshtastic node and a phone with you, if one or the other battery dies you’re fucked, and it’s possible you’d be out of radio range of your partners before you’re out of shouting range. Somebody’s gonna walk out into the woods with a meshtastic node, fall into a hole and their body will never be found.

I pronounce it pwood.

MATE is the first of four “Screw that we’re forking GNOME” distros.

When my laptop was pretty new, I would have to update Linux Mint’s kernel for the trackpad to work. The older kernel it defaulted to didn’t support it but the update manager could get a newer one that worked. The Wi-Fi driver actually worked better in Linux than in Windows.

I think the biggest surprise for me is that there’s still anywhere in the country with genuine actual POTS lines. I thought the Plain Old Telephone Service was dead and that those places that still had phone numbers were six feet of phone line to a VoIP converter box to an internet connection.

Just before my mother retired as a school secretary, she was telling me all the hell they had to go through to keep a fax machine running in the age of IP telephony.

It wasn’t me that said that, I just explained the saying.

So, tier lists.

There’s been something of a fad in the last few years of organizing things into tier lists. As far as I can tell it comes from the gaming community, ranking player characters or items or weapons or whatever. The tiers follow the letter grading scale I think most of the English speaking world will have some understanding of; A through F without E with F being a failing grade. Apparently because Japan, an S tier for Superior is added above A.

A fun implementation of this is TierZoo. One of those Youtubers who is also on Nebula, his whole gimmick is he does educational videos (and lifeforms in general) in a very video game discussion style. As if he’s a veteran player of an MMORPG called “Outside” in which every organism is a player character. If you want to get a good grip on the tier list phenomenon he provides many examples.

I saw a short of the guy doing that, the AI voice started to respond and then it cut off and a human said “What can I get for you?”

“Distraction free.” I’ve seen people buy these typewriter/word processor clusterfucks because they cannot bring themselves to write their book/screenplay/whatever on a device that is capable of accessing Twitter. I wonder about these people sometimes.

A phone though? A “phone” is a multitool. I want to be able to look stuff up wherever I am, I want my music collection with me, I want a capable GPS app.

Why bother with this when dumb phones already exist and are for sale at every grocery store?

I’ve got a Lenovo tablet with an Intel Pentium processor that runs Fedora okay. Everything works, but especially remembering/detecting orientation with the keyboard attached is about as polished as stucco.

Apparently the hardware defaults to a portrait layout; it’s a 1080x1920 monitor, not a common 1920x1080, and by god and all his rapey little clergy if it CAN wake up in portrait mode, it will. Waking the thing up means turning it on, ripping it in half, waiting 3 seconds for the monitor to rotate back to the way it was when you put it to sleep, and then clicking the keyboard back on.

I cannot report anything of the sort out of a GTX-1080. Using Linux Mint, X11 and the proprietary drivers handled by Mint’s driver manager, I got reliable service in video editing, CAD and gaming. I will note, my main computer is now a Radeon system running Wayland.

It is fairly easy to upgrade between minor and even major versions of Linux Mint. I did it continuously from 17 to 20.3 on my Dell laptop.

Also, the changes especially between minor versions tend to be fairly minor. Mint follows Ubuntu’s LTS strategy, they’ll support a version with security updates for 5 years. Don’t succumb to FOMO.

I gamed on Linux with a 1080 for a few years there and it was alright, I have gone AMD though just so I don’t have to bother.