TECSUN R9012. This is one of the best "bang for buck" portable radios that you can get today. It doesn't have all the fancy features that some of its contemporaries have but it makes up for it by only using 2 AA batteries. Since it's as basic as radios go, it also means that any battery that you put in it will go a long way. I've been running my R9012 on a couple of cheap batteries and it's still perfectly fine after a month of intermittent running.

I think portable radios are one of the most underrated pieces of technology today. It doesn't require an internet connection to "get news and content" and most entry-level ones are incredibly cheap. I personally think that it's a good idea to atleast have a small portable radio on hand at all times.

There's nothing more drab and soul-crushing than "enforced fun."

I've seen a bunch of nostr relay implementations that focus on high performance, high throughput scenarios. While those can be great for large public relays, I hope someone takes the torch and makes a simple and easy to deploy relay that focuses on individuals and small groups.

I think modern social media websites warped a lot of people's expectations on data hosting.

The word "toxic" carries the same weight as "engineer" nowadays. Haphazardly put on things that represents neither.

One of things that always lingered in the back of my head with Bitcoin is its feasibility for use in interplanetary trade. While the idea of interplanetary trade is still a stuff of science fiction, I think it's a nice brain exercise to ponder on how Bitcoin will adopt to that kind of environment. I found this fun bitcoin stackexchange thread that asked the same question that I've been mulling over if you are interested in picking apart this question [1]. [1]:

Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Is it possible to use bitcoin as interplanetary money/store of value?

Let's say humans have finally made a successful colony on Mars, how useful would bitcoin be to transfer value between Earth and Mars?

And ...

I finally got myself to upgrade postgres on my relay box. It was supposed to be a quick job but a mistake on one of the commands made it longer than it should have been. Either way, it's all good now.

Why do "modern" websites do this?

I think manpages, especially OpenBSD manpages, are one of the most useful parts of a UNIX-like system.

Spartan is a nice, lightweight document transfer protocol that removes some of Gemini's fluff while retaining the ability to use gemtext markup and its niceties. It also doesn't require a TLS certificate to function properly. While this makes the protocol a little less secure, it makes up for it by reducing the amount of complexity when hosting and maintaining a site. You can learn more about spartan by going to the protocol author's gemini page [1]. [1] gemini://spartan.mozz.us