Edward Vielmetti @vielmetti@mastodon.social
Special projects director at Packet.net.
Amateur radio: W8EMV.
Ann Arbor, MI (Go Blue!)
Joined Apr 2017
At the laundromat doing Sisyphus's laundry
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
Well that was fun. Got a prototype going for what I'm tentatively calling "Tootdeck": a multi-account Mastodon client. Very barebones, but I'm hoping to get it plugged into streaming & apply some styles tomorrow for an alpha release.
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
Oh, #Libreboot is getting their shit together! Good news! https://libreboot.org/news/unity.html
Leah's apology is especially noteworthy and valuable, as it's the exact opposite of the regular "non-apology apology" usually issued in such situations.
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
Don't really understand folks from an instance that's "anti-censorship" trolling & whining about an instance that's "pro-moderation". You've already got your safe "free speech" space and the other one isn't taking it away.
It's like someone says "I don't like popcorn" and your response is to rush over to shove a gavage tube down their throat so you can force-feed popcorn until they like it, desperately screaming "ALL MUST CONSUME POPCORN" the whole time.
It's just kind of rude, you know?
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
I think I might have lost the last post. tl;dr Tusky on Android with an external keyboard is great but needs a little love for fancy keyboard actions.
Do any of the Mastodon network mapping tools have visibility into network locations down to the state or county or city level?
salt is a pain to get started using, but once you have it going, provisioning new things is really easy.
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
Looks like #AREDN is on the bird site as "arednmesh"
One problem with microwave communications is the fade caused by vegetation, which we have a lot of here in Tree Town. That will limit the range to be sure.
The core application of #aredn as imagined by the developers is emergency communications. That would imply some way to use it for weather spotting, e.g. in Washtenaw County to get the EOC involved and apply it to the #Skywarn spotting network.
The desired high ground node locations would be any of the existing repeater sites for VHF, towers currently used for emergency voice comms. But first it would be great to do at least a few actual tests and find someone using it.
A suggestion that a #hamradio instance support running over #aredn a mesh network based on microwave links.
AREDN is the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network, with an introductory Youtube video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkl5Nbnz24Y
#OLSR is "optimized link state routing".
The hardware that gets used is repurposed wifi gear, and hams can use higher power.
Federating with the greater Internet is tough (FCC rules) but a ham-only federation would work fine.
Just musing for now.
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
Trying to read about some of the protocols OStatus is based on. Lots of dead links. Salmon, portable contacts (poco), lots of draft pages. No wonder everyone implements these things differently - finding the correct documentation is actually pretty hard.
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
So, are there any other #HamRadio operators here?
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
Thinking of a Mastodon instance that would be dedicated to ham radio operations.
https://github.com/vielmetti/mastodon-ham-radio/issues
is a stab at issues.
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
@jpmens Setting up Mastodon wasn't easy. It took me 1-2 hours to follow the installation docs and to fix two problems that were not mentioned (postgres had wrong default charset and the correct apache proxy settings were missing). Upgrading Mastodon is documented, but I'm not sure it that is a stable way. How to upgrade the other ruby stuff will be interesting... @vielmetti
Edward Vielmetti
boosted
All right! Release time!
lua-mastodon 0.1 is tagged and available from https://luarocks.org — send toots from Lua!
More info here: https://github.com/hishamhm/lua-mastodon
What works: tooting!
What doesn't yet: media uploads (requires improvements in lua-requests) and streaming API (not written yet)
Shout outs to @halcy for Mastodon.py (which I translated almost line-by-line), @aeonofdiscord for the bugfix and @vielmetti for user feedback!
Still can't help myself to think that a ham radio focused Mastodon would be fun. Perhaps if my criteria for taking people in was constrained enough, that I could do it on a very minimum config.
access to server hardware is not the issue, got that covered atm. but access to time is finite.
Special projects director at Packet.net.
Amateur radio: W8EMV.
Ann Arbor, MI (Go Blue!)
Joined Apr 2017
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!