How to go a whole article without once mentioning AirTags.

Also, whatever happened to Bluetooth AoA/AoD for precise location-finding 🤔

It’s going to be brutal, you’re going to have a lot of work but once the dust settles - you will have higher returns than everyone around you.

Don’t mind the overhead camera pointed at your desk.

Nothingburger. For the vast majority of users the audio was already getting sent to the cloud for realtime processing. Nothing here changes that.

For a few devices, some amount of processing was getting done on-device. Now, with the fancy LLMs, it has to revert to sending it all to the cloud.

Just turn on the feature to delete the recording after each processing. Best you can get if you want to keep using these devices and not run an NVidia processing cluster in your kitchen.

Excellent insights. You’ve given me a lot more new things I’ve never heard of to look up and investigate (ARES, ARK, POD).

There’s a registered Meshtastic node near me that places it on the side of a mountain in an open space. Going to get in touch with them. It has line of sight to half the city from that high up.

I’m going to use all this info to find out what the local municipality has already set up for DR at the next CERT class. Also what gaps need to be filled. Lots more to learn.

Much appreciate all the info. Anyone reading this, please keep it coming.

I believe that over the past several years, A.I. systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains — math, coding, and medical diagnosis, just to name a few — and that they’re getting better every day.

This is why I stopped reading the columns and unsubscribed from the podcast.

Big fan of the TEV channel. Really appreciate their unspooling of day-to-day use, instead of just running down the tech specs.

One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.

Used to own an orange pop-top VW Camper bus. Have been drooling after the VW ID.Buzz since the announcement. Would make an amazing roving office.

This Kia ups the stakes. One configuration is as a camper. Waiting to see it in action.

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So… if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That’s how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you’ve installed. It does a match against the phrase ‘slots’ and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it’s all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don’t be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don’t like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you’ll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it’s shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There’s no free lunch.

Thanks for the tip, will also look into ARES.

I’ve only taken one of the CERT classes. Will have another next week and am signed up for three more. My understanding is that CERT is targeted at civilians who form a neighborhood first response team in case official services are inaccessible or stretched thin.

The material leans heavily toward self-help (medical triage, food/water/medicine caches, etc) until help arrives. My thinking was the official channels already have access to UHF/VHF for their own comms. But CERT trainers kept repeating that if a big disaster hits, neighborhood groups should plan to make do for 10 days (and maybe up to 30) before outside help can come in.

Assuming 10 days without power, gas, or water and maybe closed roads, seemed like Meshtastic might be a good way to coordinate inside these neighborhood groups and across them.

The LilyGo T-Deck (https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck?variant=44907372413109) with a 3D printed or IP-66/67 enclosure seems like an inexpensive civilian-friendly device to offer CERT groups without requiring a radio license. But the repeater network needs to be there and configured for redundancy. TBH, I don’t know if it’s a good solution, but I’m going to ask the instructors this week if there are any alternatives already in place. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn as much as I can (hence the post).

The entire cast of Princess Bride.

We’re in earthquake terrain (a fault line runs through the middle of town). My concern would be what happens in case of a Loma Prieta scale quake. Going to do some research on fault tolerance, redundancy, and avoiding single points of failure.

Have a buddy who works at a FAANG and has been doing a lot of work on DR. He showed me a picture of his stash of prototypes. Turned out all were built on top of Meshtastic. Going to hit him up for tips next week.

That’s actually a great clip to show the CERT training folks here. Will share it with them this coming week at the class. Thanks!

Awesome tips, thank you!

The highest peak around here has a communication tower on it. Pretty sure some of it is for municipal services. Will do research on what it will take to stick a router up there, if there isn’t one already.

This shows how one company (li-cycle) that claims they recycle 95% of the lithium does it: https://youtu.be/s2xrarUWVRQ

99.99% doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Not a formal audit, but a more recent review of the protocol: https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/

Coming soon: American Airlines “express exit from wing” as a paid add-on to each flight.

They can take Fort Ross, but they can’t pry Clam Beach from our cold, dead hands.

That last one was just people shooting at magic suits.