Came here to say this but you covered it pretty well! So I’ll just leave this image of steel being “cut” under an electron microscope. You can see the deformation and change in structure.

Dang, that’s a nice throwback.

Ah, a fellow engineer!

Depending on your preferences, !biodiversity@mander.xyz and !biology@mander.xyz are both pretty great.

I’ve had tidal for the past few years and I’ll never leave by choice. They even lowered their subscription price last year.

Perfect use of scientific vocabulary.

I think they’re referring to this species. Although the cloning aspect adds yet another layer of wtf on top.

Ant queen lays eggs that hatch into two species

Add to that the capability of Meshtastic to do basic encryption and a device entry fee of <$15. Limited scope doesnt matter as much if it’s widespread enough.

I read through that entire thing, saw Charles, and just skipped right over it. That’s perfect though.

You could also get one of the SSD drives that look like flash storage. I got a “usb stick” with 512GB SSD for about $60 last year.

The one with a bunch of golden lab dogs dressed in lab coats? It’s still hanging on my fridge.

I’m trying to get back into HAM after 30 years out of it. Starting with meshtastic let’s me play around without spending a lot on hardware, and before I get my license back.

There are great prebuilt nodes for under $50, and as low as $20 if you build your own from parts.

Agreed! Though their claim of making an impregnated wound dressing with good results gives me hope.

Aww dang. I was holding off on getting a T-Deck until Mestastic 2.6 dropped, and would’ve really preferred an E-Ink version.

Woo! Thanks for the mander.xyz shout out. Come for the science memes, stay for the top-tier science discussions.

I think it’s still a valid question if you frame it along the lines of “something useful at protests, but also in everyday peaceful life”.

Meshtastic LoRa is worth looking into if you’re going to protests with friends/family/cohorts. You can get a waterproof, GPS enabled, credit-card sized module with multi-day battery life and no flashing required for $35 (T1000-E). That’s specifically because it can also be used when hiking, going to festivals, or just for fun.

I was just at a Mardi Gras parade and text messages couldn’t go through due to network congestion from too many people. With a couple of meshtastic devices our phones could still text each other and see our GPS positions on a map. All with encryption enabled.

Love the idea so much that I tried it. Turns out a url for a babel page is around 2,000 bytes :-(

No worries! If you’re starting out you can’t go wrong with a T1000-E. It’s water resistant, has GPS built-in, and ties everything together in a neat package for ~$35. There are plenty of other nodes out there but it’s more of a build your own kit situation. If you’re into microcontroller programming and stuff like arduino/RP/etc then Heltec v3 Lora boards are good tinker hardware.

We also have a community here on mander for meshtastic.

Yes! If you leave the default channel enabled it will join the public meshtastic network. But you can run eight channels at once, and the others can have different encryption keys.

The default setting is also to forward any received packets to the mesh, even ones it can’t decrypt.

For a good compromise, use Meshtastic. Long-range radio mesh network for texting that phones can use instead of cell networks.