WirelessMoves – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

MeshCore – Part 4: Observing the Hops

After looking at the direct range between two MeshCore devices in part 3 of this series, another exciting aspect of MeshCore is how messages are forwarded between repeaters in the network. In the smartphone app, one can see the list of all repeaters that have forwarded a message, as each message does not only contain the content, but the chain of repeater IDs it has gone through. The screenshot on the left is a good example of a relatively direct path.

Replacing Logitech M650 Mouse Buttons

When it comes to input devices, I do have my preferences. For many years, I’ve been using Logitech M650 mice for many reasons, the main one being is that they have silent keys. The main drawback of them, however: The buttons wear out over time. Very irritating. My fix so far: Buy a new mouse. But these mice are expensive, so I was wondering if one could perhaps exchange the switches used below the mouse buttons. And indeed, this is possible and it costs almost nothing!

Wireguard as Client on Ubuntu 26.04

Some things take a bit of time. 2 years ago, I started my first experiments to replace my OpenVPN server instances with a dockerized Wireguard sever. It worked, but Ubuntu 22.04 I used at the time did not have a built-in GUI plugin for it. As I skipped Ubuntu 24.04, I had to wait for 26.04. With this in place now, I was wondering how well Wireguard runs on this platform. The quick answer. Rock stable!

MeshCore – Part 3: Range

One of the things that surprised me quite a bit when I started experimenting with MeshCore is its range. The technology only sends small data bursts and hence can focus a lot of signal energy into the transmission, but still, I could hardly believe the ranges I got.

MeshCore – Part 2: Web Serial For Flashing

After having had a first look at MeshCore in the previous post, here’s a follow-up on how to actually flash software to devices. This used to be a bit tricky, as flashing devices over USB in the past typically required downloading a binary for the device and an app to flash the device from a PC or notebook. Then, Web Serial for web browsers came along. Until now, I’ve never used it and always preferred the manual way. MeshCore offered the perfect opportunity to give Web Serial in the web browser a try and learn. I was expecting a bit of resistance and a steep learning curve, and was surprised that what I got instead was an easy process and a working device in 2 minutes.

MeshCore – Part 1: What is This?

Recently, I heard the term ‘MeshCore‘ a few times from people who were quite enthusiastic about this rising star in the mesh radio networking domain. After listening to a talk about it (in German), I decided that I wanted to try it out as well. A device costs around 50 euros, so I ordered a few. Just out of interest, without a particular use case in mind (yet). So what is this ‘MeshCore’ then?

Getting eth0 back on a Debian 13 Server

A quick rant today: Having a network interface name tied to where a physical network interface is actually connected in the overall system can be good idea, but on a virtual machine, this renaming just gets in the way. I want my eth0 back! Here’s a link to how that is done on an Ubuntu server installation in a VM that uses netplan. As I’ve started to experiment with Debian as my VM OS, I wanted to have it there as well. Debian continues to use /etc/network/interfaces for the network configuration, so getting eth0 back works a bit differently there. The fix here: overlay the udev rule that does the renaming:

ln -s /dev/null /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-setup-link.rules

sudo update-initramfs -u

Done!

P.S.: If you are interested why the initramfs has to be updated, have a look at this Debian Wiki entry.

A Debian 13 VM with 300 MB RAM

Virtual machine RAM use with Debian 13 and Wireguard running in a Docker container.

Back in 2022 I upgraded most of my virtual machines to Ubuntu 22.04. As I had quite a number of VMs that only ran a single program, I ran them with 512 MB of RAM. The bad surprise: Ubuntu 22.04 significantly increased the RAM requirement out of the box, so the VMs wouldn’t even boot anymore after upgrading until I increased the assigned RAM to the VM to 768 MB. Disappointing, but what could I do, I thought at the time. Now I know: Go back one step and use Debian as basis for my VMs. This gets rid of all the stuff Canonical has added to Ubuntu over the years, which I really don’t need on my VMs. Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the learning curve was not that steep. But RAM usage is now even less than what I ever required for an Ubuntu based VM!

Pixel 8 vs. 10 – Do I Upgrade?

The Pixel 11 has recently been released, so it is time to get a Pixel 10 while it is still on the market. The discount is significant. I’ve been using a Pixel 8 for the past 2 years and I needed a backup device so I went for it. I then installed GrapheneOS on the Pixel 10 and installed all apps I have on my Pixel 8 as well. What I didn’t do so far: Move all my data and configure all the apps. This is a lot of work, so the question is if I save myself the extra work for now or go for it? I decided that the answer depends on what kind of benefits I would get from the change.

Buying ASAP vs. Holding Out

Prices for RAM, Flash, hard disks and graphics cards keep rising and rising. The AI bubble keeps inflating and it’s anyone’s guess when hardware prices will return to sane levels. This definitely has an influence on my buying behavior but interestingly enough, in both directions: I buy some things right now because because I expect that those things will get more expensive, and I’m holding out at buying other things which I would have otherwise bought, because I have enough in stock, or because they are good enough. I haven’t made an exact calculation, but overall I think I’m spending less, despite buying things now.