cprayingmantis

Locally Verizon coverage has regressed over the past few years and I’m beginning to think about switching to T-Mobile myself. Verizon used to be the king of rural coverage but they’ve increasingly been usurped by T-Mobile who are putting equipment on rural towers at an increased rate.

I keep looking for good deals on a R1T, CT, or Lightning in the used market. To be fair they’ve dipped but not enough to make an amazing deal.

On my iPhone I end up using a screenshot to select text via OCR and copy it from there. It’s frustrating when apps like Facebook won’t let you copy and paste stuff into Google Maps from a birthday invite.

Are there any labs in the US that a regular joe could use to get their water tested? I’ve got quite a few properties with natural springs and I can send the water to get tested for bacteria and mineral content but I don’t know of anywhere that tests for PFAS.

Solar energy has become a significant topic in my rural Virginia county, where I serve on the Board of Supervisors. During our discussions, the issue of food production has come up a lot. While I understand people’s concerns about maintaining a resilient food supply, they often overlook the amount of farmland that is abandoned and rendered unusable for crop production.

I see it happen all too often, farmer dies, kids don’t want to do anything with the land so it sits growing up becoming unusable. The rate at which farmers are either retiring or passing away far exceeds the rate at which agricultural land is being converted to solar farms. For many farmers, this transition has become a valuable secondary source of income and allowed them to continue or expand their operations.

I noticed something similar with images as inputs to Claude, you can scale down the images and still get good outputs. There is an accuracy drop off at a certain point but the token savings are worth doing a little tuning there.

I’m so glad to see this game getting some love. It’s been a constant for me ever since I found it at Dollar General when I was a kid.

Very exited for this, hopefully it works well.

If anyone from Starlink or SpaceX is reading these comments here’s what you want to do: Sell your own branded trail cam with solar charging and LTE from orbit. You can charge $25-$40 a month for unlimited pictures sent from the cam. This would open up hunters, nature enthusiasts, and researchers to be able to place their hardware anywhere in the field without worrying about connectivity. Here in SWVA we have deep hollows that can’t get LTE without dense tower coverage that we don’t have the population to justify, but you can grab a satellite connection.

After writing this out I’m beginning to doubt the market would be big enough but I know at least 20 people with 2 or more LTE cams for deer season.

How does one get started with robotics? What's a good onboarding project?

Are there any good blogs, communities, or Discords to get more into robotics? Specifically outdoor applications?

Love this! I'd love to take the underlying data combine it with data like average income for a county and see which counties had the most affordable Taco Bell.

It hit this area hard. I’m from neighboring Scott County and I left in 2015 to pursue a job in a larger market. When I brought my family back in 2021 we shocked to see just how much the opioid crisis had hollowed out the community. Whatever big pharma has paid it’s not enough to repair the generations of damage it’s done to the area. I am on the local Board of Supervisors and I’m trying my best (along with the rest of the board) to get everything running back in the right direction.

You'd be surprised! I'm a politician in a rural county in the USA and Cell Phone coverage is one thing that people complain about the most. Probably only 30-40% of the county has good signal strength. I'm really excited about this because has the potential to make things so much safer for folks around here.

I think an equally interesting point might be why Daffodils tend to outline the foundation of where a house used to be. Yes of course because people planted them there but then you'd expect wild animals to eat and carry the seeds away. Which would mean that the daffodils would expand out adding some background noise; this doesn't happen though. My theory is it's because not many animals eat daffodils and spread the seeds around.

Probably not very many. Fun anecdote: When the Google Glass first came out I wanted to use it to record procedures so that we could create an annotated video dataset of medical procedures to see if we could match outcomes to actions. When I talked to medical professionals about it though they told me no Doctor would wear it for fear of malpractice lawsuits so it never really got off the ground. I guess you could go the opposite way and talk to the insurance companies about forcing surgeons to wear it but that didn’t sit well with me.

Either you become their inspiring leader with your zeal to push your self or you become like them. There is no middle ground. So think about what you want and act accordingly.

Btw being a leader is way more than having some senior position, a leader is someone who the team looks to for guidance, inspiration, and growth. Don’t need to have some fancy title to give that, don’t have to be formally in charge either.

No one ever seems to talk about the fact that RSUs should be treated as bonuses not as real income. It’s nice if they work out but you should never rely on them being worth anything.

Adding to this if voice recognition is just the first part of a process can you eliminate it? Can you show them an example of how to use it based on text? For example “type your command/query” instead of speaking it.

Here in Southwestern VA I’ve seen an interesting trend: people are buying yard barns. Sometimes very large yard barns and are converting them into living quarters. These are folks that don’t have a ton of access to capital or financing but they can scrape together enough for a barn, insulation, a window AC, and plumbing. They’re getting by with them because they’re not sold as livable structures but who knows how safe they are. Mobile/Manufactured homes are too expensive I guess.

Scott county VA: https://datausa.io/profile/geo/scott-county-va

Property mentioned: https://apps.realtor.com/mUAZ/edgtb14h

Hey we should talk! The county I live in has pretty good fiber with a population under 20k. I’ve been tossing around the idea of creating a curated list of properties for sale here. There isn’t a tech community here yet but the property prices are cheap ($325k for a house and 40 acres, also has city water).

What made you interested in rural communities? What would make you likely to move to one? It’s quite a different way of life out here but I have no doubts that one could adjust.

I'm from a rural area in the mountains of Appalachia, grew up on a farm, and I just recently moved back with a remote job. I have seen at least 4 families move in from places like Florida, Pacific Northwest, and Pennsylvania, to try and attempt "homesteading", to say it's going poorly for them would be an understatement.

I would absolutely not recommend homesteading or owning a farm to anyone because the operation of homesteading or farming is inherently fragile. That means that all your free energy is going to be put into maintaining that fragile system. Let me give an example: Say you move out to a farm and decide to be "off grid" and for you that means you don't want to hook into a power or water. You dig a well, mount some solar panels and hook it all up your household. Now imagine you have some bad weather for a few days can't get a full recharge on your batteries you slowly loose all your power. Now because you have no power you have no water, then you decide to house potable water in a tank so that you don't lose out. That require some maintenance and plumbing knowledge Not only that you decide to buy a generator so that you have a stand by in the case of emergencies. That generator requires service that you may not know how to do and fuel that you have to go to town for, so once again you're taking more and more time and energy just to survive.

If you want to be a part of a rural community I would recommend buying a place with acreage that can still be connected to the grid; power and water preferably but power as a bare minimum. You can still have solar, you can still spread out and have a bit of freedom and you won't be as fragile. If your place has a field or farmable land I would lease it out cheaply to a local farmer. Leasing the farmable land helps the farmer, gives you a connection to the community, and helps maintain the land's current state.

I'd say gearing in the transmission is the biggest factor. Newer cars have more gears, more gears and better shifting mean that your engine gets to work at max efficiency more of the time.

Happy New Year! Hope you have a great 2022!

My themes for 2022 are as follows:

I want to spend more time with family. We recently moved back to the area where my wife and I grew up and we're really looking forward to seeing folks we love more.

Write more and be more effective at writing. Last year I made it to March or April journaling every day this year I want to try and make it a bit farther.

Be a larger part of my church and community. What form that takes I'm not sure as I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to measure that.

If you or anyone else has the time I'd love to talk about what in your opinion makes a great co-working space. Looking into setting up one in the rural region I'm in.

The thing I learned from our first child is that she’s going to be fine, she’s her own person, and she will be who she’ll be when she’s ready. My job as a parent isn’t to make sure she’s on track/time, my job is to help her be the best she can be. Once you start looking at it that way it’s very freeing.

I'm sorry I'm unfamiliar with this abbreviation.

It's all about what you value. Do you value living more financially sustainable or do you value being closer to entertainment, people your age, and outlook on life? Not saying either is right or wrong but it's a choice. My wife and I had this discussion earlier this year and we value sustainability and being close to family so we're moving back to the rural county I'm from.

Something that blew my mind when researching internet there was that 90% of the county has fiber to the door with 1GB speed. The entire county has a population less than 25k distributed pretty evenly throughout.

I just experienced the same thing! It was so frustrating to see that no one was looking over the documents. Finally I took a day off and sat on the phone with them all day to figure it out. It was a worse process that dealing with an actual mortgage broker.