good morning fediverse. :cofepats:

still no regrets about moving my social media into the fediverse seven years ago today.

https://mastodon.social/@djsundog/1396641

:blobpats:

announcements about the FCC cracking down on pirate radio stations around USia really feels like a challenge, like it's time for the 21st century mashup of Cannonball Run and Pump Up The Volume.

you can pretty much start a wireless ISP with a router, a couple antennas, and a story.

there are lots of places where a wireless ISP could enable access for underserved communities.

some of those places could be in your neighborhood.

"starting an ISP" of any flavor sounds hard. complex.

the reality is, almost every ISP connects with the rest of the internet with one or more biggish connections to other ISPs, and they split that biggish connection up across a bunch of smaller connections for their customers.

everything else is really extra - that’s the core gig.

you can learn enough networking skills in the process of setting one up to keep one running for an arbitrarily long time.

it’s not as hard as it sounds.

might even go so far as saying if it was complex it never would have worked. it had to be easy enough to implement part of it that lots of different people with different backgrounds and different equipment could make it all work together. the higher the complexity of the necessary subsystems, the higher the likelihood of failure states.

@freakazoid yeah, operating a profitable ISP is a whole different kettle of worms for sure.

I like to encourage others to maybe do a thing that I am about to do because it maximizes the pool of potential question answerers when I invariably run into issues doing it myself.

@ajroach42 @suetanvil honestly it’s a big van. could probably do both.

I see you get on public transportation with a briefcase handcuffed to your wrist. inside the briefcase is a single item that’s quintessentially you.

what is it?

sees the flashes of light in the sky that occur when the fediverse sees an influx of new users and instances come online

ah, so.

walks through the quiet dimly lit old quarter nodding to the other olds

every band's debut album is also its greatest hits album as of that time.

I'm about five hours early but happy fifth #fediversary to me today.

Moving my social networking out of the silos and into the fediverse has been beyond simply "nice" for me; it has literally affected my life in so many positive ways that it's hard for me to enumerate all of them.

Thanks to each of you whomst contributes to my general well-being by being here and sharing what parts of your lives you're comfy sharing. My world is bigger and brighter than it's ever been thanks to you!

:blobpats:

my birthday is not coming up any time soon but if one of y'all wanted to go all out, well, this exists: https://reverb.com/item/41506700-b-3-w-2-leslie-122-speakers-1965-walnut

@ajroach42 save five keystrokes? endorphin kick of living on the edge?

@stibbons I'll make sure we injection mold a pull handle grip with this one for the first one we build so it will be at home in the room with the 3d printers printing 3d printer parts

my first thought upon setting eyes on the new injection molder at the makerspace was "heck yeah, nice!"

my second thought was "we can totally build these ourselves."

I have become a type of guy.

tis a damn shame "don't tread on me" is so often interpreted as "go tread on somebody else" rather than the vastly superior "stop fucking treading on people entirely"

"the world's best weather modelling system is a shipping container full of broken iPhone 4s" would be the best headline in supercomputing ever.

let's get on it.

kinda wonder how many old smartphones with cracked screens we'd have to root and cluster to make it into the Top 10 Supercomputers list...