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California's breakdown has a lot more renewables than US as a whole (shocking!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

Having kids has made random conversations somewhat frequent for me.

Something that I found super interesting learning about amateur (ham) radio was that antennas don't always work "backwards" as you'd expect. From Maxwell's equations they obey reciprocity, so it stands to reason (or so I thought) that an antenna that's good at receiving is also good at transmitting.

But it's not true! It turns out that the noise floor of the environment

in part due to atmospheric stuff like lightning

is so much higher than the sensitivity of radios (well above thermal/Johnson noise) that an inefficient antenna can be a really good antenna for receiving, in certain circumstances. Namely, if a receive antenna is inefficient but has good directionality, it can be useful...but probably no good for transmission!

It's not super profound or anything, but I found it pretty interesting.

Remember that RAID and redundancy is not backup.

Try to 3-2-1, or something similar/better, if you can.

I am fairly sloppy here, and I am also very cheap. I have multiple copies in my home for important stuff (mainly Immich), the in use copy being on SSD and a few backups on spinning rust. I have a raspberry pi with an external HDD at family's place, with a daily rsync+snapshot, for off site backups.

Of course, I've never had a catastrophic failure, so who knows how smooth that would be...

I switched to Technitium and I've been pretty happy. Seems very robust, and as a bonus was easy to use it to stop DNS leaks (each upstream has a static route through a different Mullvad VPN, and since they're queried in parallel, a VPN connection can go down without losing any DNS...maybe this is how pihole would have handled it too though).

And of course, wildcards supported no problem.

Maybe take a look at Outline. (Not affiliated, but I host it for myself.)

I also host KitchenOwl, but mostly just as a grocery list.

Nice Dali-esque chair!

Oh thank God it's tobacco, I read it as Tabasco and was very worried.

"While I'm up here I want to shout out all of our friends and neighbors who couldn't be here tonight. Our international friends and neighbors who cannot safely travel to this country. Our immigrant friends and neighbors who cannot safely travel inside this country. Our trans friends and neighbors who cannot safely travel after having their driver's licenses revoked overnight without warning by a cruel and unnecessary legislative act.

"Our friends and neighbors in places like Iran, Venezuela, or Gaza who fear for their lives on a daily basis because of cruel and unnecessary violence. I don't have any plans to stand on this stage again anytime soon, but if I ever were to do so again I would want it to be amongst all of my friends and neighbors, safe and thriving."

I would love to see some enterprising politicians try to pass massive funding for solar/renewable and just call it some stupid nationalistic thing to make it popular with the grey matter-challenged demographic.

Go renewable to save the planet? Fuck off hippie! Go renewable because then we can bomb with impunity? I'm listening...

Never done meshtastic, but I do a little amateur radio. For a high gain antenna, do you just experiment with where it's pointing, or do you point towards something in particular?

The dot-com bubble burst, but...well, it got better.

Of course there were some casualties (famously pets.com), but Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Amazon...yeah they got their clock cleaned at the time, but long term they were pretty successful.