If you want to introduce someone to the ideals that: - technology should benefit people, rather than to exploit them - information should be free instead of being controlled by gatekeepers and - privacy is better than mass surveillance Buy them a copy of the novella "Connection Timeout".

Connection Timeout: The PingStarved Chronicles - Book Release – ReK2 Gemini Blog

The author (Rek2) is the real deal. While the story is fiction, it's setting it not. The tools he talks about are real. They exist now. He got the tech and the ethos exactly right. From LoRa based mesh networks to the intrusion tools, the tactics and techniques, the mentality... it's all spot on. It's a great way to introduce friends and family to the ideas of freedom tech. It's not a lecture about what they should or should not be doing. It's a fun story about a hacker who is dismayed with the state of the world in 2030. Cameras don't just use facial recognition and gait; it got much more invasive. Boost this note to spread the message. #freedom #tech #FreedomTech #hackers

Shill me your favorite open source hardware project. Show me what you got #nostr #asknostr View quoted note →

To anyone who followed me because I post about home made electronics and are now seeing me post about off-topic things like black raspberries, real economics, and lightning payments... That's what you get when you follow me. I am not a brand. If you don't want to see some of these things, feel free to mute whatever words make sense. You should get what you want in your feed, and I'm going to keep posting about what I do. ❤️

Proof of work: 1.25 lbs of black raspberries. Homegrown and hand picked. Fun fact: strawberries are apparently way more dense than black raspberries, which I was extremely surprised to learn!

The only good review is an honest review. I tried to use @ZEUS wallet to pay at Steak 'n' Shake today. It did not go smoothly, but that may be my fault, at least in part. First, it failed. I manually bumped up the fee and retried. It failed again. A third time, this time also selecting the first hop. It acted like it was going to work, but just hung at the sending screen. The cash register timed out, then Zeus timed out. I tried again from the register, scanned the new QR code, selected the first hop, cranked the fee way up, and it sailed through exactly as I'd have liked to have seen the first time. In the end, I believe the core issue was the default fee being too low. I just checked my settings and it was set to 0 sats, 0%, so it looks like these failures may have been my fault. I've adjusted these to reasonable numbers and will continue to report back as I use the wallet with real world transactions. Shout out to @EVAN KALOUDIS for putting in the work and helping people on social media when they have issues. 🤙

Side note: this particular board is not a @Signet. It's a board to convert between a USB keyboard and a computer's PS/2 port. Why? Security. Having a PS/2 keyboard allows blocking all USB keyboards from using dom0 in Xen (in my case, on QubesOS). That means if I plug in a malicious USB device that acts as a keyboard, it can't send keystrokes to take over the entire computer. It's a very specific use case and I've sold exactly one of these boards, vut to the people who want them, they're very valuable, and much cheaper than the closed source alternatives, too! It turns out, once people pick up the skill of making custom PCBs, they rarely stop after just one board. 😅 View quoted note →

Not sure if any of my followers are interested in how stuff is made, but if so here's a pic of electronics assembly. More specifically printed circuit board (PCB) assembly. The metal is a solder mask so the solder only goes onto the metal pads on the board. It's thickness determines how much solder is applied. Too much, you get a short circuit. Too little and the component falls off. Here's what it looks like after the solder is applied and after the component are placed. After that, just put it on a hot plate or an oven dedicated to electronics, heat until 180°C and make sure all of the parts are properly aligned while the solder is still liquid. And that's pretty much it for surface mount soldering. These boards also have through-hole components, but that's a more common skill, so I'll skip over that for now. If you found this interesting, give this not a boost so others can enjoy seeing how PCBs are populated. ❤️

Finally getting some much-needed rain. #blessed 🙏

If you don't understand how the Keynesian perspective can smooth out an economy and help the average person you should read p222 of Broken Money. If you think the Keynesian model works well in practice, you should read p223 of Broken Money. Really, everyone who cares about this topic should read every page of Broken Money. @Lyn Alden does a great job laying it out in a way that explains both perspectives and includes her take on the situation. She also does an excellent job at making it clear when it's her opinion on a topic versus the view of some other group (Austrian school of economics, Keynesian school of economics, users of the currency, central bankers, private bankers, etc.). This book was worth every penny.

Apparently you can only rent Hummingbird in USD and only pay-per-second with lightning. Heaven forbid anyone want to rent it using lightning, or (gasp) actually buy a copy so they can watch it offline. I like the idea of IndeeHub, but I'm unimpressed by the implementation.