I ordered these two little ESP32 LoRa boards to try out #meshtastic. They were super easy to set up and they found each other quickly and formed a mesh. I can send messages between them with my phones in airplane mode :) unfortunately they don't detect any other nodes in my city. I need to post on the meshtastic forums to see if anyone near me has a node.

Fortunately I am heading to DWeb camp in a couple weeks and have already heard talk of setting up a meshtastic mesh there. After that I'm going to Denver which also has a mesh I hear.

I think I could also flash #tinyssb on these? They are Heltec v3 boards. I see that tinySSB supports Heltec v1.2 so how hard could v3 support be?

The second attempt was a huge success! I was only planning to get through the soldering but I had so much fun that I finished the full assembly in one night. @epk I didn't realize desoldering was even an option on my first attempt, but it made the whole thing much less stressful.

More open-source hardware kits, please. I originally found the Ploopy mouse when looking for trackball mice with high-res sensors and a thumb scroll wheel. My right hand often hurts from scrolling with my pointer or middle finger so I've been searching for a solution to that for a long time and I think I've found it. I love that, like my keyboard, it's something I can repair or modify myself.

If you are in the market for a mouse (or headphones!) check out their site. I'm now a fan.

Here's a photo of the finished product:

Just heads up that I will be shutting down most of the #planetary pub servers over the next couple weeks. We are going to leave couple of the system pubs running and also the room server at planetary.link. I don't think this will impact anyone's scuttlebutt experience dramatically. All Planetary users should be set up to talk to all the system pubs unless they opted out, and as I said a couple of those will keep running.

I'm not sure how many folks know but when we were playing with the idea of topical pubs we spun up quite a few. We have 30 digital ocean droplets still humming along. But we're trying to reign in our infrastructure costs and the topical pubs which were never really that useful are an easy target.

I'll also be shutting down the Planetary Push Notification service, which watches the Planetary pubs for mentions of Planetary users, then sends a silent push notification to their app. The app fires up in the background and does normal syncing with pubs and rooms, and notifies the user if it downloads the posts where they were mentioned.

What's cooler is because most of the smarts are in the Planetary client, Planetary users will continue to get notifications even after we turn off the web service. Because the same routine runs when the app is launched in the background. And foreground. The web service just enabled it to happen a little faster. Github says @Christian Bundy wrote this service 5 years ago. It had a pretty good run.