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.