I’m a fake white supremacist on Facebook and have befriended thousands of Nazis. I report all their shitty racist posts and get their accounts banned, again and again and again.
When you remain as the last Nazi on Facebook, you can finally report yourself and then it will be all over.
That would be such a fitting ending but alas there are really a lot of them.
This is a 21st century superhero story.
IDK how you can do it though… When I encounter shit like that it makes me like physically ill.
I think I’m so amused by the fact that I’ve totally fooled them and how fucking dumb they are that I get over the nausea. But not even kidding, one of the women told me her daughter killed her baby by putting meth in her bottle and I was able to correlate that, and I couldn’t read FB for days after.
Wtf……why?? Just .w.hat??
It was hideous. Apparently the parents and five young kids were all living in one room and somehow sleeping in one bunk bed, and they gave the baby meth in the bottle to stop her from crying. I’ll see if i can find the article.
You’re the hero we need. Thank you for your service.
PS: how much trouble are we in, out here in the non-nazi segment of the population?
Less trouble than you’d think. I wouldn’t call them a particularly organized group of people. Also I have convinced many of the American ones that voting for Biden will kick off race war and they’re super into that stupid idea.
4-D chess player here.
Oh my god, is that how you find all the sov-cit stuff?
Yes!
Couldn’t you AI that? A chatbot, Fakebook-API…
Why? I’m really good at it.
But only 1 person with limited time and energy.
Great idea, btw.
Personality wise I am the kid who tried to dig to China with a teaspoon in everything I do, including being a fake Nazi. I’m pretty great at this.
In theory, he doesn’t know whether he’s the only one. They could all be fake Nazis and no one knows.
deleted by creator
Actually my self esteem increased this past few years but I won’t pass up an ADHD infodump opportunity. DDR is, IMO, the most efficient path for videogamer enthusiasts to transition to healthy exercise.
DanceDanceRevolution (DDR) is an arcade rhythm game that is certainly not dead, much to your surprise perhaps. The Japanese arcade scene is a whole, far more in depth iceberg to chip at, but trust me when I say Konami focusing on machines did not (only) mean pachinko machines, it also meant their multiple arcade rhythm games under the Bemani brand.
I am not kidding when I say there was a DDR setup in my middle school in southern USA. I started a bit there, but I never got real dedicated gameplay until there was a new DDR cabinet installed at both Dave and Busters and a local arcade joint. Having access to a machine can be substituted by a home pad. Please, buy the L-TEK pad without the bar. Cheapest exercise equipment out there at 250 + shipping from Poland.
You start off just browsing the songs in the roster until you find ones you like. There’s some token English licensed songs, but the bulk come from Konami original songs and a selection from the massive library that is the Rhythm Game Song Genre™. Most weebs get their beginnings from anime OPs and TouHou and Vocaloid, so if you have early YouTube nostalgia jump right into Bad Apple and Night of Nights. Later on you get addicted to the super high BPM (400+) techno mixes of the “Boss” songs (more on that later).
So how is gameplay? Visually, four lanes of arrows travel from the bottom to the top, indicating when you have to step and in what direction on the four directional pads at your feet. You should learn quickly that keeping your feet on the arrows and never stepping in the center is the key to actual gameplay. The song’s patterns are designed to lead one into another. It’s far from dancing, but you transition from paying attention to each arrow to just stepping to the beat. You internalize patterns and you get better, right?
But then, there’s a hurdle. Some songs demand you turn your hips and move your right foot on the left pad and vice versa. Difficulty is based on number 1 to 19, so you keep track that you can pass 11s, but not 12s. Each new song introduces new patterns in ordering and timing. Your old highest level becomes your warmups as you get better and better. You start to take a liking to faster, more complex rhythms like triplets, syncopated notes, and more sounds that a drummer doing prog rock would grok. One particular song has you galloping like a horse to Japanese festival music. If you know, you know.
But there’s a catch, a limitation: your own body. Nearing difficulty 12 and 13, you’re doing the equivalent of a decent jog for around two minutes, right? You might start needing some time between songs to take a break and drink some water. At 14 and 15, you’re going for something called High Intensity Interval Training. That is, you go at your MAXIMUM SPEED for as long as the song demands you go. You don’t give up because that means losing and you paid for this arcade game, right? You push and push and sometimes fall over, but eventually you’re running ragged at 600 steps per minute begging that your life bar doesn’t sink anymore. You need more training. The next song is 440 BPM with 880 steps per minute.
You want it. You want to play the harder songs in the difficulty ranking. You start to jog outside of the game on treadmills and otherwise. You put on the same heartrending songs and you find yourself sprinting desperately for 2 minute bursts because it’s impossible to stop while the song is playing. I’m running for almost an hour straight, and I get a head start at running progress because of my DDR experience! It pays off and you can play up to 15s, but there’s still 4 more levels until you get to 19. Over 4 years (at college, see?) I bike to the arcade, I play my heart out, I bike back. My blood pressure decreases, I breathe slower and deeper, and my snacking habits are at least counteracted. Best videogame of my life.
Only downside? I can’t convince anyone outside of the rhythm gamers at the arcade that the music is good. The rhythms of those “Boss” songs are etched into your soul by the end. I can namedrop MAX 300 and everyone in the scene can practically play the song out in their heads. It’s literally a lifestyle hobby, and a rather healthy one at that.
You got me in the first half, not gonna lie.
I first thought you were going to talk about DDR in terms of RAM.
I used to play ddr when I was younger. Now I play MoonRider in VR(you may have heard of beat saber). I think it’s even more fun and harder exercise if that’s what you want. It’s also cheaper, you can get a quest 2 for $150 which can also do everything a stand-alone VR headset can do. There are actually a ton of exercise apps/games, though I’ve never tried any.
Is this an oculus exclusive? I can’t find it on Steam. Other than some 2d motorbike game.
Go to Moonrider.xyz in a internet browser.
I can actually attest to this and chime in with my own experience! When I was a senior in high school I was morbidly obese and had zero physical activity. My days consisted of binging junk food, getting high, and gaming. Buddy that I gamed with always played rhythm games with me, but on the controller. One day he got a dance pad. I enjoyed it so much I ended up losing 30lbs without even trying before I graduated. Just 30 minutes to an hour of DDR everyday. Started feeling good about myself again and went to the gym. Long story short here we are almost 20 years later and I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been and an active athlete in Strongman, Powerlifting, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So yeah DDR kinda saved my life lol
Once upon a time I used DDR to lose 30-40 pounds. I really enjoyed playing the game—even if I was never really great at it—and the side benefit is that I got into better shape.
But, that was a long time ago, in the PS1 era. Now—other than your L-TEK recommendation, which looks doable—I’m not even sure how I’d get back into it. Maybe worth my digging into again, seeing as how age has been putting on the pounds…
If you want any encouragement, one of the DDR regulars at the arcade was a totally non-college age woman who needed a hand brace due to some age-typical RSI, I presume. That is, I could only assume because she played up at the 13s (well near 9 footers and above) with dogged passion. I don’t even know how old she was because she had that cardio build, the kind you might find a Zumba enthusiast with. I’m not being ageist here: I’m more terrified of the 30, 35 year olds on the machines because I know their passion dictates their body and not the other way around. If you can’t take the high impacts on your joints for higher speeds, it’s always just fun to play the medium level charts and maybe even go for high scores. She didn’t need to go high and that was fine.
If you wanna get back into the grove, YouTube has all of the charts of the better songs available. Just… load up Captain Jack (Grandale Mix), AFRONOVA, Dynamite Rave. Get back in the groove without a pad and just feel it come back! Unfortunately official cabinets have lost the rights to many of the older classic songs, but StepMania doesn’t care :). And if you do pick it back up and wanna chase the new stuff, well, you’re gonna have to dance for that privilege.
I bought a used PS2, a new dance pad (the thick “cloth” one, not the nice metal one), two PS2 versions of DDR (DDR Max and Max 2 I think), and a memory card. It wasn’t cheap, but it got me back into it. When I was in highschool 20+ years ago I had the nice metal pad for PS2 and I loved it.
Etienne please come back
I use lemmy
That’s too niche and weird, keep that to yourself
Yeah, who the hell does that? Such a fucking nerd…
Meshtastic long range radio systems. Off grid, user created, low bit rate but stupid long range.
Sweet I’m pretty inexperienced with radio stuff but I’ve been meaning to look into that for a while. Time to hop down the rabbit hole!
It’s just the right amount of DIY to be engaging and so cheap to get into. Plus the discord community is really active.
Plus the discord community is really active.
<triggered>
This is the first time I’ve heard about this; seems so cool! Any ideas which radios I should be looking at?
Get on the notification list for a RAK starter kit. I have heltec and RAK, and the NRF chip outperforms the ESP32 based ones by leaps. Barely uses any battery. Just check which frequency you need for your country. I’m in NA so we use 915 MHz
You a ham? Or is this LoRa? APRS?
This is LoRa but there’s heavy crossover with the HAM community.
Cool. I got licensed just before the pandemic, I’ve played with APRS a bit but never LoRa
IIRC, some hardware can be switched into a HAM mode, letting it transmit at higher wattage, at the cost of zero encryption for legal compliance.
i like those
I placed my order for some radios to play with 3 days ago. Im unreasonably excited for them to arrive.
I’m in thr US and had to order mine from Aliexpress. Those were some long weeks of waiting.
It doesn’t help that i orderd it on the 2nd day of Chinese new year, so i wont see any action for at least a week.
That’s fascinating. I just picked up my first 10M radio, can you elaborate a bit?
I’m not much of an expert but it’s basically low power UHF radios that use a particular waveform and FFT process to decode signals that are well below background noise. My radio regularly picks up messages with an SNR -10. I like it to the GPS system’s algorithms.
The main drawback is that, because they’re low power, you have to have LOS between antennas.
How did you learn to not fuck up? I heard if you interfere with important radio frequencies (airplanes I think) you’ll get punished by the law.
Edit: I looked into transceivers at one point and saw that mentioned.
They operate in bands intended for stuff like LoRa and IoT. So there’s no danger of messing with other systems.
Lmaoooo, was going to say the same thing. Fantastic project that has me hooked.
Like ham radio bounce off the ionosphere over the horizon long range?
Not that far. Most LoRa systems use UHF bands so you need LoS to get these super low powered radios to work.
Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.
There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.
And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.
I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha
I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the superbowl@lemmy.world community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @anon6789@lemmy.world makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.
I’m glad I’m still considered educational and not just a weirdo! 😜
Owls have been around for millions of years and are very adaptable, so there are many cool variations and unique behaviors and more. There are over 250 species of owls alive today, and since they are reclusive and nocturnal, they’ve historically been hard to study, so we’re still learning new things about them all the time.
I’m still thinking about that BirdPi that data maps the bird calls automatically. I wonder if it can pinpoint habits of my rare visitors like the Northern Flicker to increase my chances of seeing it.
Oh interesting! I had never heard of BirdNet or Bird Pi. It looks like Cornell Lab integrated that machine learning project into the Merlin app:
Merlin also sound identifies a Northern Flicker in the woods behind my house that I’ve yet to see.
And yes educational! It was your long form posts from a couple months ago that really drew me into the community. I was just really impressed with the level of detail and really appreciated it. I like learning new things that I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to seek out myself. I was reading those even though I didn’t comment much at the time.
Found the post. It looks like it’s onigiri@lemm.ee that has it. Here’s one of the regular commenters, and he gives a link in his comment here:
I’ve only seen the Flicker twice in about 15 years of living here so I get very excited when I catch him.
That’s why I tell people to comment even if it’s just like “oh that’s really cool. I learned something.” The talon post was huge and took a week to write and was huge, so I wrote one or 2 more and people were all quiet, so all I’m left with to think is I guess nobody was interested or it was too long, etc. If I can do a funny pic with a 2 sentence caption that gets the same or better reaction than me writing a paper after spending a day reading a research paper and collecting citations, guess which posts you’re gonna get! 😆
I’m reading the stuff regardless, but I don’t wanna be the person all day talking to themselves! I want to interact with the people of the group. We got almost 3k subs now, but there’s maybe a dozen of you that talk to me, which I appreciate! But I wish it was a bigger chunk of the people.
Like I said in my SuperbOwl wrap up, I may be the one posting every day, but you guys are equally important to the community because you guys interacting is what keeps me motivated to make the posts. Even my quickest posts probably take 15-30 minutes of scrolling to find a story, writing a summary, and uploading pics. The benefit to me is zero, cuz I’ve already seen it. I do it to get you guys excited, and I want to see that excitement or I don’t know it’s there.
Ok, rambling on now so I’m donnnnnne.
I got a fun Barred Owl pic, a fun Hawk Owl pic, and some new quick owl research in my drafts folder. Which one do you want to see tomorrow?
Yeah my life doesn’t leave me a lot of room for creating posts. I know how much work that takes.
But I’m good at running my mouth, so I try to comment these days because I know that engagement drives engagement. (I have no idea what drives post visibility on Lemmy though. Is there an algorithm here?)
I’m not working tomorrow, so I’ll have time to read some research! But I’ll never argue with funny adorable owl pics of any sort either haha
For real, I never gave much thought to the time content creation takes before I feel into this. My work has good chunks of downtime while I’m waiting for equipment to be ready or me being on standby so it works out. I probably spend as much time on this as actual work most days.
Lemmy 0.19 or whatever it is sorta does an algorithm where there is a weighted active sort or something along those lines. I’m guessing like a post on a comm with 5000 subs with 50 comments is ranked about the same as a post in a comm with 50 subs and 5 comments. So I hear anyway, World hasn’t rolled it out yet due to smaller instances having issues when it first came out and they didn’t wanna trash the biggest instance for not super significant upgrades until more bugs were worked out.
I couldn’t tell you exactly how the regular active sort works, I just default to New on all comms and occasionally glance at Top 6 Hours on All.
This research is more just an observation, it’s like 3 paragraphs. I’ll post the one pic in the morning and the research one at lunch. The other pic I think is a little better so I’ll hold onto that a bit. I got a quick Owl-natomy in reserve too for a day where I can’t find anything to post. Switching to an app with drafts has been such a huge help so I can prepare things in advance.
I moved a little over a year ago and have faced the transition from crows, bluejays, doves, and a charming married cardinal couple to lots of stray cats and zero birds.
I did not expect how much of a bummer this would be.
Living city center I used to be very pleased seeing anything else then a pigeon from my window once in a while, even if it was just a common blackbird or a great tit. Then I moved to the edge of the city, these are so super common they’ve become boring to observe haha, I need birds of pray to trigger that now. People need greens and birds around them.
Thanks for the app, I didn’t know it existed
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !superbowl@lemmy.world
Rabbits. Rabbits are fuckin’ awesome. Did you know they don’t have paw pads like cats and dogs? There’s just fur there, which means they have less traction on slick surfaces. They can be taught to use a litterbox, too !
They also have such different personalities from cats and dogs. Netherland dwarf bunnies are twenty pounds of bunny in a 2 pound body. They’re crazy energetic and need plenty of space even though they’re tiny. The bigger a bunny gets the more chill they generally are, but the bigger the bun the more likely there will be issues with their back or other joints as they get older.
I am getting a bun soon myself! Do you have one at the moment?
I don’t, mostly because my apartment doesn’t allow animals. I very much want one though! What kind of bun are you getting?
I haven’t really decided yet, but I think Harlequins are super cute and are said to have great personalities.
They are gorgeous! I hope you find a perfect bun (or two, they are usually happier in pairs and two buns is about the same amount of work as one)!
Great point about getting a pair!
Do rabbits need a companion, especially if their owners can’t match their energy level? Also, is keeping an indoor rabbit with cats a bad idea?
It’s better to have a pair, because rabbits are very very social animals. A lone bunny can get bored, anxious, and very very destructive. The trade off is that the pair may not be as cuddly and attentive to their owner as a lone bunny, but they will be immeasurably happier.
Cats are predators, and rabbits are prey animals. You can have cats and rabbits together but it’s not recommended - it takes less than a second for Kitty to go from “this is a friend” to “this is dinner”, or for BunBun to literally kick the guts out of its former pal. Same thing with dogs; bunnies can and will end up on the wrong end of the prey instinct and can either get destroyed or end up dead of shock/fright. And people are not fast enough to keep these things from happening in 99% of cases.
Side note: some people keep rabbits and guinea pigs together. This is a terrible idea because even though their diets and habits are similar, guinea pigs carry bacteria in their guts that can absolutely fuck up a bunny.
I work in Tech but I dislike most tech products. They are not repairable, are spyware, abandonware, shiteware and overall not a win-win situation that it is supposed to be. To be away from screens, I got into woodworking. To make things to old-fashioned way. To be repairable, to be sustainable and mostly to be imperfect. And yes, the imperfections are not on-purpose. I am doing my best to buy the old ‘Quality’ stuff that wont break and restore them to working order.
With shoes I buy second-hand Leather, Goodyear welted shoes and I splurged on Darntough socks. My feet are so happy. Currently I am seeking the best jeans, and almost all cotton seems to the trick.
So not the most niche per se, but I like it.
Theres a mysterious stone wall that I found in the middle of nowhere in the forest with no road access that I’ve been investigating for years and nobody else cares!
There are other weird characteristics nearby that are visible on Google maps
Why? Who made you?
Edit: Here is a link to a gallery of photos I’ve taken of some segments of the wall:
https://postimg.cc/gallery/KkPj5H1
Here is an annotated map of the area with unusual features, some of which may be natural:
Here is the location in google maps. The sat imagery has recently been updated: https://www.google.com/maps/@-32.2335528,116.1823985,644m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
I’ve been out to this location 10 or so times, and in all my digging, I haven’t found a single railroad spike or tie, so I really don’t think it’s railroad-related. The bush is extremely dense, especially near the creek, and often impossible to walk through, hence the photos are from a distance.
The stone wall is not mortared, and I really dont think it would bear the weight of a train even in its brand new condition.
Its very old and someone put a lot of work into it, near as I can tell its at least 50m long, maybe much longer
I did find one very large iron nail, about 1m in length, and took it home with me, but I don’t have it any more.
On the raised band of black stone, the stones are about melon or basketball sized, much larger than railway ballast which us usually not larger than a fist. It could be a natural formation.
If I knew you, even casually, I would demand you take me to this mystery wall in the woods and completely disregard the risk of following relative strangers to an isolated secondary location.
I’ve updated my OP with more details
I wouldnt murderer you, but I cannot promise you will survive. Its very hostile terrain in Australia, after all.
I would brave the drop bears and an instilled false sense of safety to see this wall in the bush.
Sounds interesting you should make a post somewhere with pictures of it included (a must).
I’ve updated my OP with more details
Is it possible that someone tried to clear the area from rocks to grow crops? I’ve seen stone walls being built around old fields
Check historical maps, surveying maps, things like that. I found a massive concrete foundation once in a weird spot and it turned out over 100 years ago a railroad ran through there!
Bro, show us your mystery wall
I’ve updated my OP with more details
The forest definitely looks cleared, it is abnormally sparse in that 2sqkm vicinity compared to the surrounding area. The straight treeline adds to the artificiality.
That 1m “nail” may be a drill bit, the old type where you hold with one hand and rotate it while you hammer the end. Does the “head” of the nail have cracks at the edges? That would date it to mid 1900s or earlier.
I suspect it is a prospecting camp and that wall is a retaining wall for the camp perimeter. The wall looks like a common rubble wall that would be common in the early 1900s or earlier. That area is around a geologic boundary of productive granitic formations, so there are a variety of valuable natural resources that they may have been looking for.
All I can say for certain is that I have one thing to check out if I ever find myself in Perth for some god-forsaken reason.
The nail did have a cracked, hammered head, and it had a round shift (unlike old forged nails which traditionally had a square or rectangular cross section I think. It had a 5 degree bend in it so thats probably why it was discarded. It didn’t have a twist or spiral, but maybe it was used as a ground probe to determine soil depth down to bedrock.
Ive suspected that maybe the wall was part of a sluice or race used for washing materials.
Ive fossicked in the dry creek bed for crystals, gemstones and gold. There is hardly any gold, but heaps of crystal.
I reckon you’re probably right about it being a prospectors camp.
Id love to take a metal detector out there one day to look for more iron, but alas I’m a broke boy.
They used to have those around parts of the trail of tears for markers if you happen to be in the southeastern parts of the U.S.
How does it line up with the railway map here?
The site in question lies right in the middle of the big void area between Armadale and Brookton.
Its not impossible that there was a temporary timber-getting railway there, but the hills are very challenging terrain, and Im just not sure a train would go there.
Interesting! I hope you get to find out more about it.
Mapping on open street map, with camouflage as a close second.
So…you’re the camo mapper?
Now that you mention it kinda. I map a lot of land use (forest, fields, swamps etc)
I just know an unusual amount about camo. Metal Gear Solid 3 like, changed me man
Maps > “Directions” > turn-by-turn instructions
I really like how far third party nerf blasters have come (worker, monkey mods XYL etc.) and really want to get into it, but I’m too old to play with kids and there’s no adult community here that would pick it up (as opposed to airsoft or paintball).
So I’m left with a nice ass blaster I spent $130 assembling, and can only plink around a small apartment with it
I hope you meant nice-ass blaster rather than nice ass-blaster
With the heavy plunger spring I suppose it really could be both
Why not both?
One shoots things and the other is from Tremors
I tried to inspire some fun at my last job but we were all too serious. When I left that job, somehow I came away with more nerf guns than I brought …. Then I discovered my teens are also too serious
I printed some Captain Slug hyprs for my kids (and myself ofcourse) Super easy prints and lots of fun. Ive been eyeballing some of his bigger blasters for a while now too.
Gestures broadly to about half of Lemmy
There’s this really small niche game called Warhammer 40k that I’m in to… but no one else had heard of it… :(
Also, small objects that are over-designed that have purpose or function that go largely unnoticed. Japanese style toothpicks immediately spring to mind.
Japanese gum wrappers, too. You can buy a pack of Trident-style gum where the wrappers are perforated and glued in so by pulling the gum out, the end rips off and stays in the package so you can just bite the gum and pull it out of the wrapper with your teeth. It’s beautiful.
Your area doesn’t have a 40k community? That IS surprising and sucks to hear. Here’s hoping one springs up at a game store and you can warrggggh to your hearts content.
Someday i hope the internet learns about it so it can find its audience
Hey the Warhammer video games have been good lately. Vermintide 2 was amazing and Darktide… had a rough start but the developers keep improving it.
What’s the deal with Japanese toothpicks?
The end is designed to be cleanly broken off to be used as a restI reject your reality in favor of my romantic notion…Good Day Sir!
My reality is slightly disappointed by your rejection, but will continue to persevere purely out of spite.
Hey I’m sorry about that asshole, I’m with you
I’m a massive networking nerd. I have literal stacks of old networking hardware, probably enough to connect a small town. It’s almost all used and some is damaged and I love the shit out of every scrap circuit board with those glorious ports.
I usually end up ranting about home networking on Lemmy, and the networking subreddits are generally the only reason I go back to that site every now and again.
I’ve become a wireless expert, and I regularly flex that knowledge at work. It always amazes me how bad some people’s wifi is and they just accept it, like, it do be like that sometimes… But it doesn’t have to be like that.
Because of this I often find myself ranting about what to do, or not do, when it comes to home networking projects. I always feel like this falls on deaf ears because I end up repeating the same or similar rants regularly.
You ever seen a Unify AP just chilling on the floor under a desk in a commercial setting while people complain the WiFi is always slow?
Pain.
Or when they put it inside or behind a metal file cabinet and wonder why the wifi doesn’t work unless you’re right next to the file cabinet
My favorite so far was a factory that put a giant metal shipping container in the middle of the shop between the AP and where they were using the wifi and complained that they couldn’t understand why that part of the shop got no signal.
That’s a pretty good interest to have. Do you happen to have a write up of good networking solutions to use for homes? Most people probably just grab a router on sale or use the one provided by their Internet provider and use the default settings.
I’m sure that everyone has bottlenecks that they could fix, but most people just don’t have the knowledge base to figure it out.
It really really really depends on the situation. How big is the home, how fast is the internet, future plans, coverage needs, etc. And budget.
IMO, most people don’t spend an appropriate amount on their internet network. They’ll spend hundreds per month for internet service from an ISP, but refuse to spend more than $60 on a router to get it from the ISP modem to their $1000 phone. It doesn’t make sense, especially when you consider that it’s a one-time cost that will serve you for many years; the per month cost of owning it is less than a cup of coffee a month, even if you buy something that’s 10x more expensive. People are so resistant to it that is crazy.
Even at $100, you’re going to get what you pay for, better than the $60 router, but it’s going to fall short of anything that’s worth keeping for extended periods of time.
Right now my blind go to, when I don’t know anything about someone’s situation, is the ubiquiti UDR. It’s an all in one device, around $200, with a WiFi 6 access point built in, and four ethernet ports, all 1Gb and two of them have PoE. The limitation is the 1Gbps internet link so anyone with an ISP connection faster than 1Gbps should go with something else. Most don’t, so this is my recommendation.
The reason I recommend it is that you can add additional access points to it as needed with basically no additional spend (beyond the ap itself). With two PoE ports, you can add two aps without worrying about whether or not you have power injectors or anything. Adding a small network switch is easy on any of the other two ports if four isn’t enough for you, and ubiquiti has some pretty cheap, small switches for that.
The UDR comes with a built in network management device (otherwise known as a “cloud key” in unifi) which puts everything into a single interface. So the access points (both internal and add on), switches, etc are all managed from a single system that’s local, and has local sign in, and has a convenient cloud interface which is free to use, and has all the same functionality.
As a starting point, this is excellent. Because having just the UDR you can service a small apartment without any add-ons. If your needs grow, you can build out as needed. If your needs grow beyond the UDR, you can upgrade to the UDM/UDM pro (or similar) and keep using all the add-ons you’ve purchased. There’s room for growth, and ubiquiti has proven themselves to be rather adequate at providing networking for the home. Unless you get into some very advanced features, it should serve whatever needs you have both now and in the future.
My recommendations obviously change depending on the situation. One person I worked with recently, I recommended the UDM pro and a pair of access points, because his ISP connection was in his furnace room. The UDM doesn’t have any WiFi built in, and the furnace room is usually a nightmare to get wireless into or out of. The connection will suck. So being able to move his access points (of which he got a couple), out of that area and into more open spaces, was critical. In that case I gifted him a Dell power connect switch and used PoE injectors to power the access points. I was able to provide a very good, very reliable network for him without ongoing difficulty or issues (which was his primary concern). Before this he struggled with the wireless from his ISP modem, and it disconnected and had very poor signal throughout his home.
Since the initial set up, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. He’s very happy with the system. His situation had some unique challenges, and we even ran ethernet vertically up to his second floor office through what used to be a chimney stack and that had been used to install a forced air duct for the second floor. So the space was only that forced air duct from the furnace. The cable(s) share that space with the air handling duct (but are run outside of the duct for safety), and he has gigabit ethernet jacks in his office to get a reliable connection for his professional systems in the office. He probably doesn’t need the Dell switch in the mix, but it gave him extra ports for use for later.
I’ve done dozens of custom recommendations for people. At this point I’m thinking of making a website to point people to that has all the information about home networking you could need, generalized enough to always be correct. I want to include sections on different manufacturers and why wifi kind of sucks, explanations of different technologies, their benefits, pros and cons, that kind of thing. Etc… All in one place so I can link people to it and they can learn as much or as little as they want; with pages like recommendations, all time stamped so you know what’s current or recent, and deep explainer pages of different technologies and how they work and what benefits and stuff that they have if you want to know more.
It’s a huge plan, and it will take me weeks or months to write it all out. I will need to find cheap web hosting for it and get some kind of UI/UX design going for it, and build the whole thing so I can update it without having to work too hard to start the new page entry. Maybe a wiki style? Idk. I’m thinking of calling it something along the lines of “WiFi sucks” or something related… Like wifisucks (dot) com or whatever. I’m sure I’ll need help with it, mainly in the UI/UX, but it’s something I’ve been considering doing for a while, just to handle these kinds of questions continually.
I have a blog about it, called untangle the tubes, IIRC, and I go on long, in-depth rants about stuff. But it’s highly disorganized and random.
Thanks for an absolute bang of a write up. Absolutely fantastic! I’ll have to research some of what you wrote because I don’t know what PoE injectors are or some of the other things. I certainly think you should create a wiki/blog related to this. It’s fantastic and unfortunately is way beyond the knowledge of most people. As you stated, most people are underutilizing their bandwidth because of bottlenecks and don’t even know it.
Thanks again for such an excellent write-up and I look forward to reading more from you in the future.
There’s a blog. Nobody reads it, but it exists. I want to translate everything into a wiki. But before I go to build the site, I want to hash out some of the write ups first so that I have a starting point.
Mainly just taking my blog posts and cleaning them up, adding some useful images and such… Links, etc. You know.
It’s one of far too many planned things I want to do.
Nice. I too have my share of older networking equipment. Mainly 3Com. I’ve grown fond of that brand and the quality of their devices (though not the quality of the supplied wall adapters).
I am by no means a wireless expert but would like to know how to expand my current wifi network into the garden.
You know HAM radio? It’s kinda interesting, because people can use it to talk to each other and it technically doesn’t require any infrastructure. But there are also repeaters in cities that can increase the range.
I’ve been wondering why people don’t try to do something similar with WiFi? Some kind of city-wide WiFi network with repeaters. It’s probably difficult and I’m not sure if it would have any practical use. But the advantage over HAM radio is that it’s encrypted and doesn’t require a license. I imagine that people could use it to chat with each other and share stuff without having to rely on social media or the internet.
I’m a qualified amateur operator. I can operate on any ham bands up to 190W EIRP if I recall my countries regulations correctly.
The issue with doing something like wifi on ham bands technical issues finding radio chips capable of signalling at such a high rate of speed, on bands that are able to be used by hams. There’s also the requirement for hams to identify themselves on air, and the general use of AM/FM and derivative technology on ham bands and general resistance to the OFDM used as the main signal encoding for WiFi. So finding an OFDM capable radio transmitter/receiver for use in… say, the 2m band (144Mhz … ish) is basically impossible, and there’s no way to identify. You would have to build a new protocol and standard from the ground up and use very modified or rare/expensive radio chips, and likely build the drivers/firmware for it entirely yourself. People with the required hardware, software, baseband, radio, and firmware experience that are hams who want a product like WiFi for ham radio channels is extraordinarily rare.
As for city-wide WiFi/mesh networks: it has been attempted, and has seen some limited success, but doesn’t scale well with the usual protocols. Routing protocols like BGP, OSPF and IS-IS are meant for much larger IP blocks being routed between interfaces. A wireless mesh system would use a single interface (one radio) for both send and receive, which most protocols don’t support, and each “hop” or station on the mesh would only be advertising a single IP (or an extremely small set of IPs) per participating node.
Most routing protocols assume that every node on an interface can talk to every other node on the same interface and thus there’s no need to repeat or relay messages from an interface to the same interface.
There’s also no standards that allow wifi to use multiple channels/frequencies for tx/rx, eg, send on 5.45 GHz, and receive on 5.65Ghz. it simply isn’t something that any WiFi chip is capable of. So full duplex isn’t possible right now.
The common wifi frequencies are also extremely power limited and on bands that are prone to interruption. In the wild, there’s plenty of things that can disrupt 2.4Ghz and 5/6Ghz transmissions. With the power limits, to go any significant distance, you need directional antennas that limit free space path loss so the signal travels further. In the case of wireless internet service providers (WISP, not to be confused with the mobile carriers), they generally use panel or dish antennas to extend the range. For power output, at the high end, some bands allow for upwards of 5W of directional power, or 1W of omnidirectional power (in EIRP). On the low end, handheld ham radio units start at 5W of power, and can usually attenuate their transmitter to 1W or lower as an option. Household WiFi is usually around 0.1W of power per radio. Even cranking that up to the maximum legally allowed wattage won’t result in covering more than a few blocks of a city with a fairly poor signal overall; that signal is going to be fairly easily blocked, absorbed, reflected, or otherwise attenuated by just about everything, including, but not limited to the structure of your house.
Meanwhile, standing in my home with a 5W handheld transceiver operating on 70cm (440Mhz), I can hit a repeater that’s something like 10 miles away with a nearly perfect signal over FM, without assistance. OFDM signals would likely be scrambled beyond recognition at 2.4 or 5 GHz across that much of a gap, or even one that’s 1/10th as far, with only 1W of legal power, without using some kind of directional antenna or antenna array.
Don’t get me wrong, well configured wireless can go so far that you have to account for the curvature of the earth, but they’re always very very directional, using dish antennas or similar.
Don’t get me wrong, the ideas are great, but the challenges faced are enormous. It can quickly turn into a lifelong project to get something functional, and even then, there’s no guarantee that it will ever catch on as a product. The limitation for ham operators regarding encryption is problematic when it comes to data communication as well, since just about everything that’s data-driven on the internet implements SSL. Computers and systems expect encryption all over the place and bluntly, those messages cannot be sent over ham bands. There’s nuance to that regulation, at least in my country, but I won’t get into the fine print here.
Even so, there are some crude digital modes used by ham operators which are normally voice encoding or plain text encoding. Uses are limited on purpose. If you’re interested in longer distance emergency communications you could look into LoRA, which is relatively new.
There’s a lot more to say on this, but bluntly, I’ve said enough. It’s all interconnected, and I love it, but I’m just ranting now.
Thanks for a very detailed explanation! So it seems that this is almost impossible. Except for maybe a small part of a city.
The lack of encryption, privacy and anonymity in HAM radio would be an issue for me. Just like in mobile phones. But since you can use end-to-end encryption over WiFi (and some weaker, less useful encryption is used in mobile phones), maybe there are exceptions. I’ve heard of LoRA, but I wouldn’t want to use it, unless I’m allowed to encrypt the messages. It also seems that the message length is very limited, so using something like PGP might not always be possible.
Well, for basic WiFi to dramatically extend coverage, you would need to take a page from the WISP/mobile carrier playbook and set it up with semi directional panels, in a configuration that covers 365 degrees. Placing the units high up on a tower, angled down slightly, with their power levels as high as they can go.
Primarily using 2.4Ghz would provide better penetration of signals in the area, but there would also be more conflicts.
Still, as I’ve said, even in this configuration, you may get a few blocks of coverage at best… At least to a regular device with an Omni antenna, like a phone or laptop. The only way to extend any further would be to use directional antennas on both sides, which is what WISP companies do. In that case, you can generally transmit to anywhere in line of sight of the base antenna system. Being very high up vertically becomes a more significant factor since there’s plenty of buildings, trees, and other obstacles that are going to block the communication. As I mentioned, at extreme range, you’re going to contend with the curvature of the earth itself, so that’s something to bear in mind when going very very far with it.
Regulations allow for the public to use 2.4/5 GHz as well as 900mhz and, I believe, 430? MHz? There’s higher frequencies like 60Ghz, but at that wavelength, you start to see scattering and attenuation from atmospheric events like rain and fog. Those things still affect 2.4 & 5Ghz, but usually not significantly enough to cause a failure in the link. The ISM 5.8ghz band may be a good place to go for high speed data, but for simple (slow) data, 2.4 GHz will be more reliable.
The regulatory bodies that govern frequency use are fairly strict when it comes to what can be done without a license. The only way to guarantee that you can do pretty much whatever you want would be to request a frequency for your own uses from your local regulatory authority (in the US, it’s the FCC, in Canada it’s IC or industry Canada, other countries will have similar government organizations to manage the EM/RF airspace). With a license you may have power restrictions based on the area you intend to serve (they don’t want you blasting the signal so strongly that you encroach on other licensed people legally using their system in their area), but you should be free to use any mode (analog, digital, data, etc), with any level of encryption you want, and grant permission to anyone else to use the frequency in your designated area. This is how mobile providers operate, but usually they’re buying large bands of frequency ranges for use across the entirely of a state/province/country, so their pricing is well into six figures. It’s not cheap to get such licensing, likely well into the thousands per year, even for a modest area with a small frequency range. Additionally, your name goes on the license, and that’s usually made available to the public, though few ever actually look at that data, it is available nonetheless. You can otherwise anonymize the transmissions and encrypt the messages to your heart’s content. The challenge there is that everything that can transmit on those licensed bands is extremely expensive; since usually only businesses with direct need for such systems ever apply for a license like that. The only places I’ve known to use a licensed RF system have been physically large places, like airports (security, airlines etc.), large campus style institutions like universities and colleges, and parks services (even as small as water parks) many smaller businesses are illegally using FRS and GMRS for in-store communication; places like your local hardware store may do this. Larger franchise places are a mix of purpose built communication systems, like with the headsets commonly used by fast food restaurants, which are very short range and that is counterbalanced by the illegal use of residential systems like FRS for the same purpose.
Unlicensed residential communications like FRS are usually very short range and very power restricted, and the legislation (at least here) usually stipulates that they are only to be used for personal communication, not professional/business communication; so the use of such services in a commercial environment is illegal. However, enforcement is usually not very strict, and businesses do it anyways, and likely don’t get punished for such abuse of those systems because nobody is enforcing the rules against it. Businesses know that enforcement is poor and often disregard the potential risks of using those services illegally.
I know ham operators are generally very adamant about people following the rules and I’ve heard many stories of individuals thinking they can just use ham bands without proper identification or qualifications without consequence, much the same way as businesses do with FRS, but licensed operators have and do, track down such use and report it, and that’s about the only time I’ve heard that people get punished for their illegal use of frequencies and bands… when it is reported directly to the FCC/IC/whomever is in charge of the allocations. The only instances of reports that I’ve heard are from ham operators and city services like fire departments when you illegally broadcast on their channels.
Most of the unlicensed frequencies are generally the wild west of radio, and all manner of strange and unusual happenings occur on those bands. It’s usually few and far between that you’ll experience it, but it happens and often, nobody has the skill or care, to bother reporting it. Nonetheless it is illegal to broadcast over the frequency power limits and the penalties for being caught are steep, up to and including jail time; so it’s not something I would ever endorse. Regardless, you have been warned. Check your local laws from your regulatory authority and ensure you are complying with laws before turning on any transmitter (listening to any/every frequency is generally not restricted, though, understanding the transmissions is usually an issue, especially with digital/encrypted communications on licensed frequencies). YMMV on this.
Regardless of all of that, if you wish to pursue an emergency or wide spread communications system for data, including encrypted data, I wish you the best of luck. I’m happy to lend a hand and experiment along with you if you desire it. I’ve always felt that exclusively relying on primary communication systems, like mobile phone systems and public switched telephone networks (things that otherwise rely on infrastructure) is an inherent weakness. I’m an IT person by day, with specialty in wireless and networking technologies, so you’ve struck a chord here. I’m very interested in any data communication that can be used during a primary infrastructure failure. Personally I experienced the full force of such a failure a few years back when one of the major telecommunications providers in my country had a significant/system wide communications break down for more than 24 hours. I was a mobile subscriber to their service, and for that day, I was unable to use any data services on my cellphone, nor make our receive any calls. It was a wake up call that if there’s a large scale failure of the system I relied on, then I would be dead in the water in terms of being able to get help in an emergency. At the time I didn’t have my ham license, and I was unable to even check and make sure my loved ones were okay while I was away from a working WiFi connection. At the time I was traveling to work, and while on the road I was entirely communications blind. Something I haven’t experienced for nearly 20 years. Unfortunately, I’m the only person in my family to have achieved my amateur qualification, but I can at least request that someone with a working connection call and talk to someone (over the radio), if such an event reoccurs. Having a method to communicate with them in the event of another such failure without requiring them to go through the amateur qualification would be something very desirable to me.
I was thinking about this WiFi idea, because I think it could be useful in case of an emergency. I think there should be services hosted inside of cities. I mean in their local networks. It could be local government websites and maybe things like a Lemmy instance where people could talk. Even stuff like Open Street Map could maybe be useful. So if the city was for some reason cut off from the internet and the mobile network, most people would still be able to communicate and have access to information. It would be like having a tiny backup of the internet (at least whatever is possible to self host). I think it’s a big oversight to only rely on the internet.
Something like this could maybe be also useful in countries with authoritative governments, which sometimes cut off internet access in the entire country. In the long term the government would probably find out and try to stop it, though.
But as you’ve explained, making something like this would require many people working together and ideally should probably be handled by a local government instead. It’s not something I plan on doing, it just seemed like a cool idea to think about.
I might try playing with LoRA for some other project some day, if I can legally use it without a license. But if I can’t encrypt the messages, then I would probably prefer to use WiFi (for short distances) instead.
In your case, to have emergency communications with your family, maybe CB radio or satellite phones would be a solution?
Much of the internet is both centralized and not. It was designed with redundancies in mind, so it can route around disconnections. The centralization part of it is that services like your ISP generally are very centralized to datacenters, so something “in city” may not be able to be accessed without the closest datacenter or internet exchange being online, each of which has multiple redundancies.
The only good way to do it would be over a city-wide public wifi that has all of the self-hosted information on the locally connected network. Only on that wifi network could you get access, since that system would be linked back to the internet/ISPs via the internet exchange or datacenter.
It would be an ambitious project. The AMPRnet is one such emergency wifi network. It requires a ham license but it’s all wifi based long distance communications. The ham license is for authorization to operate on the network, not a legal/technical requirement. They just won’t let non-hams connect.
People host all kinds of things on there, so it’s fairly robust overall.
As for emergency communications, in an actual emergency (risk to life and limb kind of deal) any person, whether qualified or not, has legal permission to use any radio they find. My family knows this. My concern is that they won’t know how to switch to a useful channel when such an emergency happens. I have several handheld radios, so there are a few around that they can grab. If I’m heading out of town with them, I try to bring a few, so if an emergency happens while we’re away, I can program and hand off a radio, and we can stay in contact if we need to split up at all during the emergency.
For everyday communications in a primary communications outage, we have some FRS radios which don’t require a license. They’re much shorter range, but would be useful to have in a pinch.
There’s a lot of decent options.
I’m actually looking into setting up a LoRA node, or something similar because there’s a spec that I came across for a mail detector IoT thing. It’s low power and uses LoRA. It should last several months on a fairly modest battery. It should be able to relay to us when mail is detected so we can go get it from the community mailbox thing when it is delivered. I should be able to tie it into our home automation stuff and just send out notifications when we need to go get it, or change the color of lights or something.
It will be my first step into this kind of thing, so I’ll see how it goes.
I’m sure I’ll post about it at some point.
I haven’t heard of AMPRnet before. Sounds interesting.
As for emergency communications, in an actual emergency (risk to life and limb kind of deal) any person, whether qualified or not, has legal permission to use any radio they find.
I wasn’t sure about that, so that’s good to know!
Mail detector sounds like a perfect use for LoRA. But I suspect that there is no security by default and anyone would be able to send you such a message if they were mean :).
I have a bunch of networking gear to sell, it’s semi recent stuff, all Cisco. How would I go about selling it? Are those websites that buy old network gear in bulk any good? I really don’t want to sell them individually on eBay
I intern at a scuba shop for free classes but the shop is incredibly poorly managed so I’m in a race to get all the certs before the business folds.
I have like 6 pages of stats for space ships, stations, weapons, factions and races for a game I play in my head while at work. It’s like X4 but with Elite Dangerous’ scale and ship customization.
I have another 15 pages of lore information for a world inhabited by furries that goes into the cultures of each race, (Melkin, Avastin, Scala, Exiranni and Drai,) how they interact with one another, interracial tensions, a timeline of major events, the story of one of my main characters during the Electromedeival period and the otherworldly horrors that they face. It also has a more futuristic-modern era, with futuristic cyberware mixed with 2000s architecture, where a group of investigators part of the government organization Advanced Research and Investigation Agency (ARIA) search and dispose of anomolous entities and secure anomolous areas. I’ve been working on it for years tbh, and idk why lol.
You should flesh it out a bit. Sounds like you may have something
That’s cool. With that amount of information you could make a whole fictional encyclopedia for your furry sci-fi SCP world.
Good point
Sounds like that would be of great use for people wanting to turn it into boardgames or computergames.
My skill are lacking at the moment but I must say I am impressed.
