um… did my bio get deleted?

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

    It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

    Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.







  • Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a hardware SIP phone like the Grandstream WP826. I spent years struggling with software phones, most of them suck ass and the good ones aren’t very good.

    quick unboxing video

    Then make sure to enable voice transport encryption and set SIP transport to TLS (not UDP) and set keepalive timers to something below 3 minutes or so. The encryption settings are not just for security, using TLS for SIP transport has way fewer problems with incoming calls than UDP in 2025 network environments.

    There are some firmware issues with the Grandstream WP826 but they are steadily releasing new firmware updates every month or two. If you need absolute bulletproof reliability go for something more expensive, otherwise the WP826 or similar model will likely be good enough (I say that as someone who is easily vexed by shitty software/electronics)



  • I only would agree with defederating if it’s proven that they are blocking anti-genocide content on other servers from being visible to their users.

    In general I believe that maintaining lines of communication with those who otherwise believe in reprehensible ideologies is best, both in order to better understand such backwards ideologies, and also to provide a lifeline back to consensus reality for people who’ve been swept up by them.

    I also believe that in the majority of cases, users should wield the power to instance-block for themselves. Or at least, servers where this is the case are the ones I prefer to participate on.

    However, if it becomes clear that feddit.org admins are censoring content external to their instance due to their support of Zionism, then my first objection becomes irrelevant, and the second would be questionable, given the efforts of admins to put external fedi content thru a pro-genocide filter. At that point, defederation would be both warranted and wise.


  • Currently in a holding pattern because, while I got RAM & SSD for a new-to-me “1-liter” server before tariffs hit, I don’t have the server itself nor any money to buy one, despite looking for 9th or 10th gen Intel which will cost me only $120 to $150 barebones.

    Money to buy one is not coming in because the place where I live has nonstop noise & activity and I don’t have a separate room or any door I can close, which severely limits my ability to work as I have auditory hypersensitivity and an absolute need for solitude in order to recharge enough to think. 🤷🏻



  • One thing I really like about the author’s fedi coverage, he doesn’t kowtow to rank stupidity and avoid mentioning alternatives because of hivemind disapproval.

    From a publisher (user) perspective, Nostr’s censorship resistance by design blows the doors off of what ActivityPub can claim in that regard. And I say that as someone who’s been pretty much all-in on ActivityPub fedi since its inception (almost a decade, wow)