Category Archives: News

Article note: That's a nasty bug, NGINX+PHP-FPM is a common (and likable) configuration, and the patch isn't in most distro repos yet. At least it requires an option not in the default configuration (except for if you're using Owncloud/Nextcloud's recommended configs).

Article note: Not the fault of the scooter, but the issue of obvious and/or intoxicated drivers vs. everyone else remains.

Article note: Seriously. Useful scrollbars (consistent, native, proportional ones), useful menus (with fitts' law and words, not "we hid everything behind a hamburger that eats your main view when you start digging through its inscrutable icons"). It's like everyone saw fondleslabs and forgot everything we know about UI.

Article note: Neat. The idea of "fully open" is moderately compelling; the performance of that hardware is unlikely to be.

Article note: The Internet turned into something assholes could rent-seek on, and that's when it went to shit. The "Digital Colonialism" model isn't terrible. The interplay of that model and the "Eternal September" model have some ...unpleasant to contemplate... implications, especially about sustainable community size and composition.

Article note: I'm very curious about the potential of LoRa both for single user applications (area-wide pagers, connected devices of the reasonable basestation design rather than the "every goddamn lightbulb connects directly to the Internet" IoT bullshit), and for making decentralized WANs. The stuff I've seen is always not-quite-there, and this kind of continues the trend, but it does appear to be steadily polishing.

Enlarge / Lostik is plugged in to the left USB port of this Samsung Chromebook running GalliumOS Linux. It's currently transmitting packets, using the sample sender.py utility, from a basement about 15 feet underground. (credit: Jim Salter)

A lot of readers commented on our earlier report on Sure-Fi long-range, low-bandwidth RF chirp communicators that we should test generic Lora gear. Lora is the open standard that Sure-Fi began with and built on top of, and it's available in a variety of inexpensive kits. Most of those kits are aimed at low-level maker-style integration with Internet-of-Things gear like Arduino, but I found a couple of preassembled kits with generic USB interfaces suitable for use with regular x86 computers. One of those, Lostik, had consistently better user reviews and glowingly boasted of its "extensive documentation," so we picked a pair up for $46 apiece and got to testing.

We should be clear about one thing up front—nobody should claim that any Lora device has "extensive documentation" with a straight face. Lostik seems to have more documentation than any of its competitors, but figuring out exactly what it would do felt like learning to play pirated video games in the 1980s. What we eventually discovered was that Lora devices are sort of like dial-up modems all connected to a single party line—they run on serial interfaces over which they can be issued commands and can send or receive data.

It's possible to use a generic terminal emulator (at 57,600bps, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, and no parity) to communicate directly with Lostik, but you'll need to understand its commands—analogous to the Hayes AT modem commands of yore—if you do. That was a bridge too far for us, so we said "the heck with it" and just lightly modified the ./sender.py and ./receiver.py sample scripts from Lostik's Github repository and used them for some simple range testing. These scripts don't require (or offer) any kind of authentication or pairing; any Lora device running receiver.py will successfully receive data from any Lora device running sender.py within its effective range.

Article note: Neat! Old FPGA-Based thin clients seem like a great target for emulated computers, all the IO of a computer pre-tied to a decent-size FPGA. Shame the available boards are Spartans on ISE, because ISE is a ghastly, accreted disaster of a development environment that even Xilinx has abandoned.

Article note: Google's Cheif of devices, when asked about obtaining consent of people visiting spaces with always-on listening devices: "Gosh, I haven't thought about this before in quite this way," Osterloh said. "It's quite important for all these technologies to think about all users... we have to consider all stakeholders that might be in proximity." - That's a solid "We don't even consider privacy when churning these things out."

Article note: Oooh. That has the potential to be amazing, Bone was brilliant, and in a way that would adapt well to TV.

Article note: There are several niche communities who jealously guarded silos of hard-won information in their yahoo groups. All the ones I know of have transitioned to more modern, more open platforms, but actually valuable information could disappear into this step of Yahoo's ongoing collapse.