Meshtastic
I purchased two additional LilyGo LoRa devices, giving me a total of three. I bought another TS S3 and a T-Deck. All three have been flashed with the Meshtastic firmware, and I have managed to successfully send test messages between them. I may have inadvertently sent those test messages to everyone on the Meshtastic network in my area, so my next goal is to figure out how to send messages directly to my own devices.
NixOS on WSL
I recently learned that there is a NixOS installation package for WSL. I’m excited about this as it gives me an easy way to deploy a basic NixOS system that I can use to learn how Nix and NixOS work. I like the WSL target as it makes it easier to experiment without fear of messing up my laptop. If I manage to completely bork the installation, I can easily delete that WSL installation and start over. So far it kind of reminds me of the Fedora atomic family of distributions.
FlipperZero Debugging
I finally managed to get the debugging interface working with my FlipperZero and the developer board. Apparently it only works over USB-C. I was initially trying to get it to work using a USB-C-to-USA-A cable and I was unable to see any debug logs. Using USB-C it works as expected. This is a little bit of a bummer as I was hoping to do my FlipperZero development on my dedicated Linux laptop, but it only has USB-A ports.
Subtrace
Subtrace is a new program that bills itself as “Wireshark for Docker containers”. Initially I thought it looked interesting, but after poking around their site and GitHub repository I think I’m going to skip this tool. Based on what I see, it is my opinion that this will end in a license change rug pull similar to Redis, MongoDB, and Terraform. It has all the indicators of a project that will exploit the open source community to build its userbase initially, only to change the license to something mostly or completely proprietary in the future:
- It’s backed by venture capital (Y Combinator)
- It’s using a permissive license
- They aren’t accepting any outside contributions
Since I’ve been burned multiple times in the recent past by tools with similar properties, I’m going to go ahead and skip this one. Thanks but no thanks.
