I’d rather pay for preventing the front passenger from reclining into me.

I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:

• As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
• Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device
• When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
• Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn ‘ON’ events without the device being exposed to the sun
• When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again

I speak spanish natively and at during uni I would hang out with a group of Brazillian friends. I would speak a mixture of portuguese and spanish with them.

The mom of one of these friends made a Brazilian dish for us (Feijoada) and asked me how it was as it was the first time I tried it. I answered that the dish as ‘exquisito’, which in Spanish means delicious (similar ‘exquisite’). She seemed somewhat disappointed and upset by my response so I probed a little and found out that ‘esquisito’ in Portuguese actually means ‘weird’. She thought I was calling her dish weird tasting. I found quickly enough to clarify, but I did feel bad about making her fell that way… She was very excited about sharing her cooking and she thought I called it weird.

No worries! If you need me to test something with it I can this week, just let me know

I am currently near Cologne in Germany. I placed one of these LycaMobile SIM cards from NL and it activated automatically. It does recognize that it is connected to the German network and roaming, and still activates data and assigns a phone number.

So, it seems to work fine

It’s spider season! That’s very normal in September/October. At least in the Netherlands but I imagine it’s similar in the UK.

I didn’t know about Foxes. I very rarely see them.

El del presidente de los eeuu no lo vi… Cual es? Mi favorito es el de Willem Alexander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbgPqccCQcs

The use-cases that I see advertised are not things that I do in my day-to-day. I usually place my phone on a drawer or leave it in my backpack - I definitely don’t want it on my face.

So, to me, smart glasses feel like an uncomfortable gimmick at this point. Maybe there is something amazing about them that has not yet clicked with me, but for the time being I don’t see me buying one of these for the foreseeable future.

I also did not know of him at all. I did know who Ben Shapiro is. This week has been an educational one: I have learned about Nick Fuentes and ‘groypers’, Candace Owens, and that the change my mind meme guy is called Steven Crowder (I first thought it was this guy when I saw the video of Kirk).

The US political commentator that I do watch some times is Hasan, but not too often. The US lore goes too deep and moves too quickly, hard to keep up.

Jajaja, al menos lo intentó 😅 Un 8 por el esfuerzo!

✌️😀🤘 💯💯 🎉

It always surprises me when ppl don’t know about torrents. They were the only way to get things before streaming services privatized all this content, and still remain better, by using the latest encodings and quality formats for media.

I did know enough about torrents to do practically use them to download things since the Limewire/Ares times. But what I meant is that I never actually knew how they work at a technical level - I never opened a torrent file and looked inside, or knew what a magnet link was. So, then, the topic as a whole is still opaque to me. But I did some reading today and I’m getting into it.

So new content would be no different than the thousands of people seeding existing content.

I see it, but I also see why this concept might be intimidating to some. I (and probably many others) make use of torrents in rare occasion when I cannot find a movie, a series, or want an album. I associate torrenting with acquiring a large file for long term storage. Streaming feels different - videos exist in my computer only while I need them, and then they leave no trace. As I understand it, a torrent-based system would actually download all (or some) videos to disk to be able to seed them.

Still, I do think that a youtube-like torrent-based client would be successful - especially if implemented in a way that is simple for the user. An interface to find content, transparent and adjustable torrent settings with control over disk space allocation, and the torrents/magnet link management mostly hidden from the user.

Yeah, I’m still looking. This is the closest I found so far

Thanks. I don’t know much about torrenting other, and I never looked into the concept of what Magnet links are.

It is actually very interesting! Such an elegant and simple solution.

And I think it is even simpler than what the instructions imply… I can write the following into the terminal:

transmission-cli "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:563cf8f2a0bdd5564ae9ef3d3302eecef639328b"

And that’s enough to pull the first episode of alien earth that you shared. That unique hash is all it takes to search for seeders. Very cool.

It is still not obvious to me who would seed when implementing the torrent-based YouTube alternative. Would it make sense that users set some torrenting ratio, a file lifetime, and a size limit, and ‘collect’ videos as they watch them so that they can seed for other users?

All that’s needed is for people to learn how to seed their own videos, and post magnet links around.

I’m in! Looking into it. Now I need to go make something worth sharing.

It seems like as of right now meshtastic devices don’t have the ability to finely control LEDs/button actions to work for my use case. Which is a shame since I was hoping I could just buy a meshtastic device that has some programmable buttons inside a pre-built enclosure.

Maybe they do have that ability already. I am not sure. I have mostly used Meshtastic devices for communication and I have played a little bit with LoRa modules for more basic sensors and logging. Perhaps someone else knows more about the Meshtastic-specific features when it comes to telemetry and triggering devices.

Ha, maybe! I don’t remember if I ever saw a 180 flip. This is the closest I could find from a quick search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpIglVnYuY

If you have a video with the 180 degree flip I would really like to see it. This context seems like a plausible place to see such a move in modern days. I would imagine that in some martial arts this effect would be well known.

Some of these ‘games’ do trigger real physiological mechanisms. A well-documented example is the Valsalva maneuver, where forcefully exhaling against a closed mouth and nose affects heart rate and blood pressure.

In some games, this maneuver (or similar) is combined with a second action that normally increases blood flow demand to the brain. The mismatch between reduced blood pressure and sudden demand can cause dizziness or brief loss of consciousness due to insufficient oxygen reaching the brain.

Actually, there is a similar effect sometimes seen during heavy deadlifts, suddenly releasing can sometimes make people pass out. There are many “deadlift passing out” videos online.

So, those ‘games’ can work. I have known of kids breaking their teeth after face-planting against the floor while playing those games. Not a very smart thing to do.

If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called ‘tonic immobility’.

Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.

I found a paper from 1928 titled “On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates” written by Hudson Hoagland (PDF link).

In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:

OK, but, that’s still not it… The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:

Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them… Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure.

Hmm this is what I think about this:

On the device by the gate:

Continuous loop:

• Switch to transmit mode

• Check if the gate is open or closed

• Transmit the result

• Switch back to receive mode and wait 15 seconds

When a message is received:

• Run a security check

• If the message is the Open or Close command, forward it to MQTT

On the device in the car:

Continuous loop:

• Decrease the timer value

When a message is received:

• Set connection state to connected

• Enable the Open/Close display and set it to the received state

• Reset the timer to 45 seconds

If the timer ends:

• Set connection state to disconnected

• Disable the Open/Close display

On button press:

• Stop receiving

• Generate a secure message (Open or Close)

• Transmit the message

• Resume receiving

Option 1: Use an ESP32 with WiFi and a LoRa module near the gate. This device can handle both the LoRa interface and the MQTT push with relatively simple firmware. For the device in the car, WiFi is not needed, so you can choose any microcontroller and a LoRa module.

For the interface, LEDs are the simplest. Map the GPIOs to four LEDs (Red, Green | Red, Green). For example:

• Red and Off = Disconnected

• Green and Red = Connected and Closed

• Green and Green = Connected and Open

Two more GPIOs in input mode can handle the two physical buttons for Open and Close.

If you want a screen, there are many options. You can use a small OLED, touch screen, or colored E-Ink. The choice depends on whether the car device is battery powered or has constant power, and how much complexity you want in the code.

Option 2: Use Meshtastic. The device by the gate can be connected to something like a Raspberry Pi, and a Python script can process incoming messages and handle the heartbeat transmissions. Meshtastic gives you some built-in security, but you still need to be careful. The difficulty is keeping track of the connected state and the Open/Close state from the heartbeat, and then mapping that to a display or LEDs. That would probably require customizing Meshtastic firmware.

Because of that, I think writing custom firmware is easier than trying to adapt Meshtastic for this use case. BUT - I have not been keeping up to date with the newest Meshtastic versions, and I don’t know all of the sensor-related features. So it is possible that there is already some built-in method that replicates this and I just don’t know about it.

That’s a very interesting resource!

Actually, the countries where I have been able to purchase anonymous SIM cards are in the list “As of 2021, the following countries do not have mandatory SIM card registration laws”. So, it appears like I just happen to have been lucky and I should not make this as such a general recommendation…

Funny, about Mexico it says:

Countries expected to implement mandatory SIM registration in 2022: Philippines, Mexico.

I can at least confirm that I was not asked for ID when buying SIM cards last year in Mexico.

I just looked it up and found the proposed law for Mexico on Wikipedia. It was struck down in 2022 as unconstitutional.

So, then, I really have no anecdotes to say that it is easy in places where it is formally illegal.