Well, I suppose I should provide a bit of an update post. Things have been a bit weird as of late. With the news being what it has been I have definitely been expecting something to go horribly wrong. After all, the amount of protests on college campuses is at such a high level that the risk of violence is pretty high.

I am leaving for now the podcast grabber code running on the Oracle virtual private server based in Canada. The counterpart Raspberry Pi routinely grabs the downloaded podcasts from the VPS. It provides a parallel download of everything in the listening profile at the moment so that if things went down I would have somewhat easy access to a backlog.

I had the chance to hear Mike Pondsmith explain the concept of “data pools” as seen in Cyberpunk RED. With the level of instability in the political process picking up, it is an interesting idea to consider in terms of how to implement such a thing in real life. How would you essentially implement a walled off MANET (metropolitan area network) where most out-of-network access requests get rerouted back to an in-house bulletin board system? I have been trying to conceptualize how to do this with the basic level of hardware available to me at the moment and I think I could at least get the central pool built in fairly short order. Building the connecting limbs, metaphorically speaking, in the community would be a problem, though. Essentially it would have to be a mesh network over a rather large territory.

If I get an appropriate software-defined radio up and running I would be able to at least to drag in the weather broadcasts from the Coast Guard. Shortwave fax image broadcasts may be old tech but they’re still fairly effective in even adverse conditions. Getting that up and running on a somewhat automated basis could be very useful. Of course, much of the data is provided by NOAA and Project 2025 is proposing eliminating the agency in whole and letting the private sector try to pick the pieces.

I need to look at alternative pathways to get appropriate medical care for myself. Project 2025’s plans for health care are scary. If we manage to stay intact as a country until Inauguration Day in 2025 I would be scrambling to find new coverage.

I suppose I should try to find other options. Sometimes when a door closes a window opens. The change of pace is just picking up.

Spending more time reading comic books it probably a very, very good idea. Building a data pool mock-up is probalby a good idea, tool. After all, BBS software already exists. That’s probably going to have to be the core of any such monstrosity.