waffles
breakfast food
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User ID: 3250
waffles
breakfast food
1yr ago
I've made it a habit to put everything worth memorizing into an Anki card on my phone. Names of acquaintances I have met, dates of historical events I am interested in, vocabulary, formulas and constants that I use in my line of work or hobbies, phone numbers, just to name a few common ones. Spaced repetition is the only method that has worked for me. Memorizing the major system also helps for memorizing numbers. I review the cards once a day on my phone, it takes me less than 5 minutes.
waffles
breakfast food
1yr ago
It's not difficult at all to get a board connected to your phone (via bluetooth) or home wifi network. About an hour or two of tinkering should get you up and running. If your home is located at a good vantage point and in a populated area, you should be able to connect to other folks quite easily, otherwise you might have to try going up a hill, or mounting the device outside. I use a portable USB battery pack to power it up on the go.
This was a month or two already, but when I was searching around online it seemed like the Heltec v3 was the cheapest and most popular product available that came with a case and antenna, so I figured to jump on the bandwagon. Worst case you'd be $20 in the hole. Make sure you get the one with the correct frequency for your country.
Not sure how many guerilla Meshtastic installations there are out there! If you ever run into any issues you might have to take it down so it needs to be at least somewhat accessible.
waffles
breakfast food
1yr ago
I recently bought a Meshtastic board, a Heltec v3. For those who aren't familiar, this is a license-free low-bandwidth LoRA (long range-radio) device that can reach out very long distances on minimal power. The Meshtastic platform is a peer-to-peer network that supports text and data communication, the most notable part being that each device on the network is a node that receives and re-transmits messages to other nodes around them. In areas with good coverage, it means that you can potentially send messages to someone several hundred miles away from a board the size of a pack of gum.
I'm in a metropolitan area but at the base of a hill and don't have a very good connection to the rest of the nodes in my area. If I had the space, I would make a solar node (enclosure, solar panel, charge controller, battery, Meshtastic board, and antenna) and mount it on the roof, but unfortunately I live in an apartment and can't quite do that. However, if I find a good spot in the future, I might perform a guerilla installation somewhere nearby. Ideally it would be somewhere I frequent, since I would need Wifi or Bluetooth to connect to the node with my phone.
You can find a Meshtastic kit on Aliexpress for maybe $35 shipped, I would highly encourage anyone with even a passing interest in radio to pick one up and play around with it for a weekend.
waffles
breakfast food
1yr ago
I also got into bicycling around 3 years ago, it was the middle of Covid and I was looking for a versatile outdoor hobby and bicycling fit the bill very well. I was occasionally riding an old steel-frame road bike I had since college, but the bicycles you can get these days with some disposable income blew it completely out of the water. I ended up getting a gravel bike (aluminum frame, carbon fork) and it feels like going from your parents' old hatchback to a sports car. It makes a lot of sense for those of us who only have the space for one or two bikes and aren't that interested in going on rougher terrain. I carry around a compact hand pump, so I can ride on pavement to the trailhead, drop the pressure, ride on the trails, and pump back up when I want to ride home. I also have a set of Crankbrothers doubleshot pedals, which has clips on one side and flat on the other, so I can wear whichever pair of shoes makes sense for where I'm going.
At some point, I would like to own and use a proper mountain bike with suspension, but that will have to be a future endeavor.
waffles
breakfast food
1yr ago
I'm about halfway through "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours". I don't remember where I came across this book, but I put it on my to-read list a year or two ago and recently picked it up. I don't know too much about the author, but it seems like he became interested in this topic and went through a bunch of secondary-source material and compiled this book with his findings. The author put the book on his website: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm
Most chapters are self-contained. Some particularly interesting ones that stuck with me were "Prisoners' Law" which puts prison gangs in a new perspective (might it actually be in prisoners' best interests to have an informal law-and-order system within the prison?) and "Pirate Law" which shows how a bunch of outlaws paradoxically create a new set of laws.
I saw some of your posts from the past week or two, that you're doing a lot of this from scratch. I'm interested in what you're doing on the utilities side (heat exchanger, PLCs, power). I have about a decade of experience as an engineer in the heavy industrial space, mostly on power distribution (which I can speak to quite well), but I have some basic experience with industrial controls as well (which I have enough knowledge to be dangerous). My day job is a very scaled-up version of what you intend to do, but the principles are the same.
If you're running into technical challenges, I'd be glad to bounce some ideas back and forth.
An unsolicited open-source reference that you might find useful, mostly applicable to North American practices, but might be a good jumping-off point: https://ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/socratic/sinst/doc/liii.html (Lessons in Industrial Instrumentation)
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