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All of the general blogs at once!

The general stream of consciousness fills your brain tubes! This is every blog posted on this site unfiltered and sorted by date. Have fun reading and thank you very much for checking out this very blog! If you would prefer a more filtered approach to reading you can check out BLOG.TXT for more information. As always, if anything goes wrong in terms of the web itself you can always contact us.
Server protect you.

Phone enshitification.

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Here comes the endless e-mails.

We've been getting our fair share of e-mails from our carrier trying really fucking hard to get up to upgrade our phone. This may come as a shock to some of you out there in FOSS land. Because we actually have two phones. One on an Iphone 12. The other phone is the Google Pixel 8 Pro. Now we never really focused much on the phone review tech blogger scene, as we feel the majority of the bloggers out there are either AI-generated or shilling really fucking hard so they can get free swag and product. Not only that. But we're not sure if we can nerd out hard on mobile technology, as it feels the entire ecosystem is kinda shitty with paying thousands for a device that is used against you to blast even more ads.

Read onward for our diatribes.

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MOAR LoRa! MeshPocket QI2.

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LoRa MeshPocket Qi2 Title.

Small review of the MeshPocket QI2.

We travel a lot. Hang out in a lot of airports. Thus, we couldn't take our Heltec V3 with us to the airport because well!! That bodge solder job is going to make a TSA agent worry a little bit. But also near the end of my travel cases blog, we went on a bit of a rant about how to survive being in the airport. Saving one on the trip from going to one of those hipster bloggers about travel. Part of that blog talked about battery packs. On how it's important to have one, as you are never supposed to trust a single outlet that an airport provides to you. It's not the maintenance team's fault that outlets get worn out and destroyed. Some of those spaces within the terminal were not meant to be over capacity all of the time; space is money, and these airways cram as much as they can with as little sitting space as possible.

So when my original 8000Mah battery started to feel like a 500Mah battery (testing it on my lithium charger, one of the four cells was functional. Last cell held a charge at 550Mah, original rating at 2,300Mah.) Which is fine. had it for 5 years. beat the hell out of it. Forgot it in my travel bag for over a few months and it committed lithium seppiku. It's time for a new one. And placing this review on Amazon is pointless when we have our very own website to post to. So why not get a battery pack that has LoRa built in?

Read on if you want to know more.

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I2P as a client.

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I2P Title.

And now, from the end-user POV of I2P.

In a previous article, we also thought about the NotBob review. Our experience was setting up I2P on our VPS so that we could share our website on another alternative network out there. After all, with our moderate success with .onion/Tor networks. Why stop there?

We think that article was so focused on setting up "i2pd," which is a Java-less version of the i2p gateway software. perfect for hosting on VPS systems, which may have restrictive amounts of RAM or single-board machines. That we never really set up "I2P' as a client, instead, rely on the self-contained client downloads from the i2p-project webpage. In the past, it was criticized for being a little hard to use, and when using a Windows machine. The software is getting flagged by virus checkers.

It's time to set up our home client correctly now. Or at least in our view of what "Correct" is. Read on to listen to my diatribes on this.

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Returning for the thermal printer love.

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Z4M+ Thermal Printer Title.

Hello, magic printer that gave me a job and fed me in the early 2010s.

If you work in an environment where you have to constantly ship physical goods out the door. Hell, if you've even visited the post office and had a clerk print you a label. You've probably seen a thermal label printer in your life. During the 2010s the job market was certainly turbulent times with many phone jobs getting moved overseas. And field repair being sourced to the lowest bidder instead of asking the question if it's even the RIGHT company/technician that can do such a job. A lot of carelessness resulted in us having to rethink our careers.

For the first article, where we take you on a crash course in thermal printer repair, click here.
For the second article, where we teach you out to use common raster programs for these printers - Click here for Adobe or here for GIMP.

Read into my diatribes for the revisit of this topic!

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Sleeper PC – X205 living room machine.

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IBM E-Server Title.

We're back at it again!

For those who witnessed our first sleeper PC blog, our second sleeper PC blog, and finally putting a stupid fan into said sleeper PC.. Thank you. Hardware hacking articles are super fun to write. This opens up opportunities again to hack modern technology into ancient gear. This time around, a Gigabyte Strix H370F into an IBM X205 E-Server.

Care to read more? Enter the diatribe!

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LoRa time!

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LoRa is essentially an SMS-based CB Radio for nerds. Saved you the read.

Sometimes, you gotta get out. Touch grass. Walk around downtown. Hang out at your local coffeehouse while hipsters come up to you asking for money. Offer them your still-wrapped chocolate muffins if they publicly state that the B-52s are and always will be a terrible band, only for the profanities to fly as they storm out of the shop in a fit of rage. When in reality, they could've just complied, eaten the muffin, and resended his statement. But during all this, I've gotten into a cheap electronic hobby of LoRa, which is low (as in 900-915Mhz in the States) frequency radio hunting. For those who aren't feeling like getting into my diatribes. It's like a cross between Citizen-Band Radio mixed with instant messaging. Oh, and you can encrypt your messages, which somehow scares the shit out of universities, as it could promote "Anarchy" or some bullshit like that. Saved you a fuckload of time. Read on to continue downward the spiral.

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Dillo is back!

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Dillo Browser Title.

The little browser is back.

Although they are now on version 3.2.0, Version 3.1.0 of Dillo was brought back to life by a developer by the name of Rodrigo Arias Mallo in 2024, with the first release adding SSL support to this browser. Dillo was born in 1999, which is right at the Dot-com explosion of browsers and ways for people to access the internet. Dillo was ultra-lightweight and had minimalistic features that, at the time, were not required on the internet. In fact, back when we were playing with Red Hat Linux. Dillo was included in distros because we were loading it on old machines, like a 486, as an example. And for as limited as that may be to launch a browser on a 25MHz CPU. Dillo responded very well back in its day.

Want to check it out yourself? The actual website is here at https://dillo-browser.github.io/ . Would you like to know more?

Read onwards into the downward spiral!

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