MeshCore is a peer-to-peer encrypted mesh radio communications system. It runs on inexpensive hardware and operates in license-free sub-GHz bands worldwide. MeshCore radios (called “companions”) require an interface to send and receive messages. Most commonly, people use one of the available mobile apps, but this requires physical proximity to the radio for Bluetooth or Serial communication.

The existing clients were alright, but weren’t quite doing it for me. So, I built Remote Terminal for MeshCore (RemoteTerm), an open-source application that runs on a server with a connected MeshCore radio. RemoteTerm provides an interface to the local MeshCore mesh, allowing any device on the same local network to send and receive messages via the radio. It’s extremely mobile-friendly, and also enables additional abilities such as:

I’ve been playing around a lot with MeshCore, a peer-to-peer, encrypted, routed radio network run by average citizens using LoRa modulation in unlicensed sub-gig bands (902-927MHz ISM band in the US). It’s very similar to Meshtastic, but a lot less chatty (pull-not-push messaging, with conservative advertisement intervals), and thus a lot more reliable at passing messages (although recent Meshtastic firmwares have introduced routing, which helps a bit). The off-grid and encrypted-by-default nature of these networks appeals to my sensibilities, so I’ve been building a few tools while getting my own repeaters set up around town (Remote Terminal for MeshCore, a server + web frontend for serial-connected radios, and a WebGPU bruteforcer library for semi-public hashtag rooms, most concretely – both experiments in development oriented around guiding LLMs as opposed to hand-writing most of the code).

An Uncomfortable Scenario

You’re in a foreign country, and you’ve been mugged¹, completely — you’ve got the clothes on your back, and nothing more. Maybe you beg a phone call from someone to get in touch with a loved one to wire you some money. You’ve now got enough to buy a basic phone and use wifi to access Dropbox or Google to get at important papers, password manager data files, credit card numbers to set up contactless/mobile pay, etc.

I love me a typewriter. They’re gorgeous, mechanical works of art. Sadly, they’re loud, and I’m just not as fast on them as a keyboard. So, I made a “Writer Deck,” a subspecies of cyberdeck, the science-fiction-spawned concept of a small, self contained compute device that’s hyper-portable and often kept on one’s person. Writer decks deemphasize general computing and instead focus on distraction-free systems optimized for focused writing and composing. I’ve been writing some more fiction lately, and I’m an easily distractable man (I mean, c’mon, it’s the internet – it’s awesome!). So I made myself one:

ohai. Been a minute. The brain hasn’t been braining very well lately from a health perspective but we ball.

I’ll do a more full post on it sometime soon, but I’ve been having fun with a Docker-contained VNC honeypot. @Xtrato did something similar but I wanted something that I could blow away easily and that was slightly (as barely as Docker is) more isolated. It’s been a ton of fun watching randos drift through, and it got more fun when I put an nvidia-smi executable that indicates that I have 3xP100s attached to the system hehe. I get about ten connections a day, mostly connect-then-drop, but have seen:

And boy that came out well 😍😍😍

TL;DR No.

I swore Narrator on Windows XP was saying “pothole,” as in “pothole start” and “pothole menu end” – maybe even something closer to “pothole-p” with a plosive at the end. I finally got fedup and cracked open an XP VM and ResHacker, and sure enough, it’s saying “popup” with the world’s worst diction.

What I heard:

Reality/Proof:

Always wanted to build one of these and now I have!

This is a more frenetic color-demo mode, but my goodness I love it so much. The video doesn’t do the colors justice; they’re so vibrant. Sadly my phone struggles with the refresh rate of the board, but there’s no tearing in person.

This weekend I set out to build a 64x64 LED matrix version of Conway’s Game of Life. For compute’s sake, the board would be wrap-around i.e. on a torus. I wanted each set of generations to run for as long as possible until stagnancy and reset, so I wrote an analysis script to determine what alive-percentage for a random fill would be optimal to keep the game going as long as possible.

I scoured the web for an easy-run RFC865 Cookie/QotD server that I could throw into my Docker host and serve a proper DHCP Option 8 on my home network, but none existed so I vibe coded one. Now, my home network can vibe out like it’s 1983.

Open source as always, I wrote a version that spits out a generic 8-ball fortune (Outlook good, My sources say no, etc.) as well as one that does a classic cowsay | fortune.