Sal

3.19K Comments!! You are a super contributor!! You are doing a fantastic job in helping keep lemmy engaging! Certainly not lazy by any metric 😁

I'm not an expert by any means, but from what I have learned so far I can see that there is some logic to how the nodes process and route the messages to avoid congestion, and there are some options that one can make (like selecting specific frequency sub-bands) to make a more private mesh run smoothly.

I suspect that a lot of the issues that you read about are related to mis-configuration.

Examples:

• You are setting up your first meshtastic device and you want to find other people quickly, and so you of course set up your device to downlink messages from the most popular MQTT server and make use of the default settings - like hundreds of other people around the world. This overloads your device because it is downlinking MQTT messages faster than it can process them, and it can become non-responsive.

• You purchase a node and want to contribute to your local mesh, and you are lucky enough to live in an area that already has a dense mesh network. Since you want to contribute, you set up your node and make it a "router", and use a common configuration. But your node is not actually very well positioned, and the "router" type has preference over other nodes. Your node can stop nearby stronger nodes from broadcasting. To make it worse, at some point there were problems because there was a Router Client setting (see: [Feature Request]: Admit Router Client was a mistake) many users did not understand the behavior of the router node and this lead to some meshes running into trouble. So, as the mesh grows, it becomes more likely that you will introduce nodes with sub-optimal configuration into the mesh.

There is possibly some threshold at which a mesh really does grow so large that even if properly configured it may be problematic, but, honestly, I don't know if this has happened. In my area we are certainly not close enough to having a functional mesh, so I have not experienced these limits.

I had not heard of Reticulum but I am certainly interested! Seeing as it can run on the same hardware, perhaps I will be able to justify buying all of those boards and antennas after all 😜

Ah, it's very cool that you are making your own music for the videos and sharing them under creative commons!

You are a bit further than me then! So far I just have a few ideas floating through my brain from time to time. Mostly sensor-related stuff. I should start making notes 😄

One idea: I would like to combine the Open Gamma Spectrometer with a Meshtastic device so that one can transmit remotely a gamma spectrum every ~10 minutes.

Even though:

These data are associative and do not establish a causal role for such particles affecting health

I still don't feel so nonchalant about the idea of microplastics lodging on my brain. While the effect on human brains is very difficult to directly measure, we do have a lot of data on mice that suggest that having plastic in the brain is bad for the brain.

When quickly looking into EU food regulations it seems like microplastic content is not regulated in food, and the logic appears to be along the lines that not enough data is available to assess the actual risk. This makes some sense in that measurement, control, and enforcing limits is likely to be difficult, expensive, and might create some economic challenges, and so regulators might not want to go this route unless proven absolutely necessary.

At the same time, data does exist showing that the plastic levels are increasing in our brains, and we have very good reasons to believe that this is not a good thing. It is not that we are completely in the dark - I am sure some smart people would be able to come up with reasonable limits and methods of control by now.

My not-very-informed suspicion is that there is pressure from wealthy and powerful lobbyists that would significantly suffer from microplastics regulations, because 'plastic in the brain' has seemed like an obvious thing to address for some years now.

I have never been educated about how to avoid ingesting / breathing microplastics. Do any of you know some habits or diets that reduce or increase exposure to microplastics?

Nice video and music choice! Do you know what those medium-sized almost spherical creatures that are moving around might be?

Nettle mentioned that you are looking for recommendations on what to put on your descriptions. My recommendation is to add the name and author of the music and the technical specifications of the microscope, lenses, and the equipment used to record. The technical details are useful to others to get an idea of the amount of zoom and also to learn the kind of images that a specific set of tools can produce. If you have some thoughts on what the different microbes observable in the sample might be, it is also nice to include that. No need to worry about getting the identification wrong, just mention what you suspect them to be, and this invites others to help you identify what you are looking at. Or, if you have no guess, you can also ask others to help you identify.

Haha, woah, their call really does sound like a banjo!

Is this your photo? If so, nice find!

That's very cool! What has been your most successful implementation so far?

In the radio settings page of the Meshtastic docs they describe the maximum speed of transfer for different setting combinations that have been tested. The fastest setting is the Short Range / Turbo, which can achieve up to 21.88 kbps: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/

The more common "LongFast" setting achieves 1.07 kbps. I just saved a few simple text-only HTML sites and they weight about ~2 - 5 kb, so it would certainly be possible to transmit them in a few seconds. There is some additional overhead with every packet, and in the EU at least we have a 10% duty cycle rule a 868 MHz, so only 6 seconds of every minute should be used for transmitting. Navigating through the page would be a bit cumbersome.

Since the html page will exceed the character limit from the Meshtastic app chat, it would probably make sense to make use of a dedicated app to send these kind of packets using LoRa instead of Meshtastic itself.

There are other methods of sending IP/TCP packets over packet radio. I am just now learning about this, and found this video yesterday: https://youtu.be/V0FAzMIsxMg?t=1413

With this technique you can use a radio to transmit packets to a Linux PC that behave just like an 'Ethernet' TCP packet. The video covers a related open source implementation called 'New Packet Radio' with which you can transfer 50 kbps - 500 kbps using radio packets in the 430 MHz band. These protocols work with frequencies and powers generally reserved for those with a HAM radio license: https://hackaday.io/project/164092-npr-new-packet-radio

I think that panspermia is the most likely hypothesis to be eventually proven correct.

According to this hypothesis, very simple "living" structures can be found throughout space, scattered around planets, meteorites, and perhaps even in space dust. This dust can be thought of as fungal spores. When they land in a planet with suitable conditions, these systems can evolve into more complex life forms.

The alternatives to panspermia generally imply that Earth is a super special planet in which certain special conditions conspired at a point in time to allow an extremely unlikely event to happen. Panspermia suggests that, instead of a being a statistical anomaly, life is probably rather common throughout the universe.