anarcat

Debian developer, sysadmin, ex-entrepreneur, anarchist, photographer, musician, writer.

🏠: https://anarc.at
©: CC BY-NC-SA
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⚥: he/him

Last Notes

2026-10-06 13:01:33 UTC

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yes, it's the thing that allows cars to show which track is playing on FM radio stations here in canada

2026-10-06 12:57:24 UTC

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i know about the RAK flash extensions! but those change the power usage profile tremendously, from "i can just put a solar relay on my roof" to something closer to "how the heck do i make a solar setup big enough to power a raspi"... it won't work with the stock solar panel on a rak solar mini, for example, as far as i understand it (and also consider we have "special" constraints here in montreal where we might reach -30C at night :)

2026-10-06 12:55:32 UTC

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and for the record i've experimented with #meshtastic, #meshcore, *and* #reticulum extensively. there *was* a #meshtastic mesh in Montreal, but it was mostly carrying telemetry, text messages were unreliable. now we have a fairly good meshcore network, but we're reaching what feels like a saturation point so we are trying to tune things to reduce telemetry, i think it can scale to about 1000-2000 repeaters, perhaps 1000-10000 clients, which is about a one percent ratio of the population, in orders of magnitudes... i also have a reticulum repeater, but it only sees one lora neighbour, so we don't have critical mass there. i have also experimented with running a nomadnet node, running reticulum over meshcore, and much more, so i would say i have pretty good experience in all three networks. :)

2026-10-06 00:44:37 UTC

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it's mostly a hunch. meshcore repeaters don't keep a routing table, they mostly just flood or relay the packets they're told to, it's source routed and the (heavier) clients have the routing tables. reticulum, from what i understand, has each "router" keep a full routing table of all the announcements in the mesh, mapped to their neighbors. that would be too heavy to carry for a city on a small embedded device like a RAK4631 for example, at least that's my hunch.

2026-10-03 01:19:44 UTC

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also, don't get me wrong: I *love* reticulum, but damn it's all over the place right now. just get me a set of repeaters that can replace our #meshcore mesh and i'll just switch, but we're missing so many things right now (OTA upgrades, remote admin, group chat) that i'm just waiting for now...

2026-10-03 01:15:59 UTC

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i am really on the fence on this: on the one hand, yes, it's awesome that #reticulum can Just Work over TCP out of the box but i'll be damned if i'll allow onboarding to be "super easy"... meshchat? *nomadnet*? much of it is just hostile UX, and sometimes it feels deliberate (come on, control-d to send a message??)... and also, that means we rely on the internet to route messages, and it's unclear what will keep working after we're censored or everything collapses.. on the other hand, meshcore networks are have a strong "lora-only" approach that really forces to work out the radio problems directly (and those are *hard), i'm not sure reticulum would actually scale *there*, at the size of a city

2026-10-02 03:03:40 UTC

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perso je suis allé avec #matrix parce que je veux pas vraiment avoir un groupe qui me sonne dans les poches à toutes les 5 minutes, signal c'est pour les trucs perso, privés, pas pour les projets libres et communautaires publics

2026-06-19 01:47:27 UTC

🚨 Bill C-22 would force every Canadian internet provider, messaging app, and cloud service to build surveillance backdoors & store a year of your private data. Foreign state hackers exploited similar legislation in the US — compromising up to a million people. Tell your MP: https://openmedia.org/StopC22-mast #BillC22 #cdnpoli @OpenMediaOrg

2025-03-30 02:25:54 UTC

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In a fascist society it is not enough to be non-fascist, we must be antifascist. #antifa

2025-03-30 02:25:34 UTC

In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist. -- Angela Davis

2025-03-22 04:25:20 UTC

Losing the war for the free internet https://anarc.at/blog/2025-03-21-losing-war-internet #debian-planet #python-planet #hacking #network #neutrality #sysadmin #radio

2025-01-29 20:51:16 UTC

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1. that's rust 2. i don't know how to do that 3. that doesn't generate email and 4. are you serious right now? stdlib's email is the best we've got?

2024-12-10 14:27:50 UTC

does anyone have contacts at proofpoint? they're blocking our (torproject.org) mail servers which affects delivery to icloud, and they're not answering the normal channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41900