Arkhive (they/she)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’ve “started” but only so far as working on my home lab/server and home network. In theory if I get everything setup in advance, it’s as simple as getting some high gain WiFi antennas and getting other people to put their routers in bridge mode and configuring them to extend my network.

    That being said, I am building out my home server with this goal in mind. An effective mesh network will have multiple devices hosting redundant instances of all the services, and the more devices doing that the more resilient the network is. To that end I’ve taken to learning NixOS for the reproducibility. Because your system is declared in a single file, and hardware specific config is separated from that, I can turn any device into a node in the mesh simply by installing NixOS and pulling the config of an existing node.

    Eventually I’d love to basically build my own routers from single board computers and high gain antennas that I can just give to people. Basically a plug and play, preconfigured device that will pickup the existing mesh, or create a new origin node if not in range.

    The super long term dream or goal of this would be to include a very long range, slower connection between origins to trickle feed content changes. Depending on the dystopia we end up in, this could be done with crazy strong WiFi signals, radio, LoRa, or even (inspired by factorial logistics robots) gliders or drones that are themselves carrying mesh network nodes and fly over bubbles of mesh networks.

    It’s all kind of a pipe dream, but I’m at least educating myself for a time where more people begin to realize the World Wide Web as we know it is crumbling.







  • It really just comes down to what you know. Moving from MacOS (from OS9 through like 10.12 or something) to Windows made me feel like Windows was the bent spoon. So many small things that to this day infuriate me. Just a couple that really stuck with me even after ditching both for Linux.

    • if you have highlighted text to select it, and hit the right arrow, where should your cursor end up? MacOS decided the cursor will be after the last character within the highlight. Windows places the cursor after the first character outside of the highlight. Why does this matter? The reason I noticed it was trying to edit file names quickly. I would like to right click, select rename from the context menu, which selects the text in the editing field, tap the right arrow once to move my cursor to the end of the string, and begin deleting whatever amount of text I need. If I try to do this on windows I end up deleting part of the file extension unless I tap an additional time. Not a huge deal but it legitimately messed with my muscle memory in just basic typing on windows.
    • the other aspect of MacOS that really is far and above anything windows has is ‘Preview’. Not QuickLook, which is a detail view of a file triggered by tapping space with it selected. I mean ‘Preview’ the graphics viewer utility. It’s one of those pieces of software that “just works”. It can import from pretty much any scanner, print to any printer, do basic image editing, open and edit PDFs. It’s really a phenomenal piece of software that feels like such a basic set of features that should exist in a default install of a flagship OS. Even the best free option of anything similar on windows doesn’t hold a candle to it.

    These are two VERY cherry picked examples, but I also feel they exemplify the “what you already know is more comfortable” dichotomy. Like having to find a functional PDF tool is kind of just “normal” for windows. Few windows only users I know actively miss the inclusion of that by default, and a whole industry has formed around the need for PDF editing, and yet humble Preview still puts Adobe Acrobat to absolute shame.