I’m right-handed and carry my phone in a belt pouch on my left. I take it out and hold it with my left hand while I tap or type with my right. I do all of my typing with a swype-type keyboard, so I just use my right hand for that too.

There is a section on the Meshtastic site about solar powered nodes, but it doesn’t really talk about anything beyond power consumption issues: https://meshtastic.org/docs/solar-powered/

The unit I bought was the Ultimate Meshtastic Solar Radio Node from PeakMesh on Etsy. I couldn’t be happier with it.

If you plan on buying a pre-built unit there is almost nothing you have to do beyond naming and installing it. Despite there being a Role called Repeater, the common wisdom is that you should leave the role as Client. The only trick is to set up your regular radio so it can act as a remote admin for the repeater. Go into Radio Configuration -> Security and look for the “Add” button under Admin Key. Put the public key of your regular radio in there and save it. That will give you access to the repeater without needing to be within Bluetooth range.

If you’re going to built your own node, you’re already beyond me. :-) The one I got uses a WisBlock chipset for maximum power efficiency. It has two 21700 batteries and two 1-Watt solar cells. I think the WisBlock already know how to handle the solar and batteries. If not, you could look at the Heltec T114, which I know can do that and has separate power inputs for each.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Just be aware that I’m pretty new to this too.

As someone who ran a BBS v1.0 back in the dark ages, I think that’s not a bad idea either.

I cheated. :-) After spending a lot of time trying to think about where I could mount it on my house I realized that my friend, who lives a block away, is at the very top of the highest ridge in the area. So we mounted in on her house instead. We immediately went from seeing the three radios we own to seeing more than twenty, most of the time. And we started seeing people one or two hops away.

Then someone a few miles away put up a repeater of their own. It’s well within range of ours, so now everyone who can get to either can communicate with everyone in the other area. There are other parts of town that have their own growing meshes. We hope those gaps can be closed to interconnect everything here.

I do still intend to talk with some of the local radio and tv stations. There are three huge broadcast antennas near us (because we’re near the top of a ridge). I’m hoping one of them might be willing to host a repeater, as a public service. Even if they don’t want it on their big masts, putting it on a small tower or on the roof of one of their buildings would get us above almost everything. I know that one of them is already hosting an Amateur Radio repeater.

It blows my mind how easy it is to build a completely self-sufficient repeater node. The one we have now can get a day’s worth of charge from just a few hours of daylight. And it’s under a fairly solid tree canopy. It can also operate for around a month without any additional charging, so even a week of terrible weather isn’t a problem.

It is also easy to configure a node to allow remote access directly through the radio mesh. So I don’t have to get within Bluetooth range if I need to change something in the configuration.

I have begun using Meshtastic mesh radio and it seems promising. It doesn’t do anything that you can’t already do with a cell phone, but it can provide personal, group, and community communication without any infrastructure requirements. You also get end-to-end encryption without depending on any kind of central hub.

I got interested in this from thinking about the political situation in the US. Having an independent and secure means of communicating locally could become important if the government continues along its current path. It has already been useful, on a small scale, at protests.

More generally, Meshtastic can provide communication during blackouts, emergencies, and natural disasters where the cell network may be down or saturated beyond capacity. And everyone with a radio automatically extends the mesh further. Just having a radio turned on becomes a minor, but real, form of community service.

The radios are very small, low-powered devices that almost all run on batteries. They are available fully assembled for around $60, but you can also buy kits (that do not require soldering) for under $30. It’s easy and relatively cheap to get started.

There are also pre-built and kit-based dedicated repeaters that are designed to extend the mesh to a wider area. We bought a completely self-sufficient repeater that powers itself with two solar cells. The whole thing, including the solar cells, is smaller than a shoebox and cost just over $100. It is now on top of the highest ridge in our area and has extended reliable coverage out to our section of town, despite our hilly terrain.

Meshtastic is easy to set up, inexpensive, and potentially very useful.

Dell XPS 9710 Laptop and Samsung S24 Ultra phone. I’m one of those old people who still does almost everything on my laptop instead of my phone, even texting.

My mother was named after her mother, although she used her middle name. My sister was named after her. We’re white midwesterners in the US.

I’ve been running IronFox for a while and it’s been solid.

Try to make life better for yourself and for everyone else. Try to have compassion for everyone. You don’t have to agree with them or support what they do, but treat them as having worth.

And a great many tools have a brief period of excitement before people realize they aren’t actually all that useful. (“The Segway will change the way everyone travels!”) There are aspects of limited AI that are quite useful. There are other aspects that are counter-productive at the current level of capability. Marketing hype is pushing anything with AI in the name, but it will all settle out eventually. When it does, a lot of people will have wasted a lot of time, and caused some real damage, by relying on the parts that are not yet practical.

I don’t play computer games and I rarely buy commercial software of any other kind. The majority of my computer time is spent using FOSS applications. I try to give at least a few dollars every month toward each tool that I use on a regular basis. Among other things, I contribute to Lemmy, Voyager, and the Lemmy.Ca site. Overall it amounts to supporting more than a dozen projects for a total of around $50 per month.

I wish I could afford to do more, but I try to do what I can. Some projects are part-time and some make up the primary income for the developers. All of them are contributing their time without demanding payment to make our lives better. They deserve our support, in whatever form we can give it.

Various factions would like us to feel isolated and helpless so we can be manipulated more easily. All of the things you mentioned still exist and have meaning, but there are alternative meanings being pushed at us. And we not everyone has a community or family in the traditional senses anymore.

If you want to be a member of a community, you can. There are many available in most places, and there are more on the internet that are not limited by location. Find a group of people with common values, common interests, or anything else that ties you together and participate in it. Humans evolved to be social animals.

Human interconnections are a threat to the power that be. Individuals are easy to deal with via manipulation, intimidation, or incarceration. All of that becomes harder with groups, and the larger the group, the harder it is. That is also why we see so many efforts to subdivide us by race, culture, nationality, generation, education, income, religion, gender, gender preference, sexual preference. The less unified we feel, and the more we view the people around us as “other” instead of part of our community, the less able to we are to band together to form an effective threat to the ruling class.

I think your assumption that personal gain being the main driving force behind everyone’s behavior is flawed. That may be true of humanity in general, but it is not true of a great many individual humans. Mental health is a multi-axis spectrum and very few of us are right in the center. There are many factors that can push people to do things against their best interests.

That’s a very good list. I just threw out the first couple that came to mind, but it is worth calling out the organizations that are still trying to do real journalism.

I give small sustaining donations to NPR, ProPublica, and The Guardian. I hope to add a few more when I can.

NPR and the BBC still aren’t doing that.

That was the first movie I ever walked out of.

Lots of little tools. Various kinds of pliers, drivers, cutters, magnifiers, lights, and a couple of marlin spikes for good measure. Also, a ruler, a tape measure, and a caliper, for even better measure.

This is both hysterical and terrifying. Congratulations.

The world needs fewer cynics and more skeptics.

Yes. Things will get better. We don’t know how quickly that will happen, but it will happen. Meanwhile, take care of yourself and do what you can to take care of the people around you. The whole MAGA movement is based on fear and hatred. Being decent and doing good may be the most effective way to resist and, eventually, overcome it.