Date: 2026-08-04T08:05:01.490795Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/28721366
Post ID: 822466
Community ID: 1330

Hey, sorry for the slow response. Feel free to appoint me as a mod until someone else wants to fully take over so that you don't feel pressured to hold that spot for longer 

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Date: 2026-06-30T21:29:32.005756Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/28031854
Post ID: 759516
Community ID: 1363

Interesting... Good to hear!

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Date: 2026-06-28T21:48:51.280656Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27989271
Post ID: 759516
Community ID: 1363

Sorry, I am in the process of moving and have not been able to keep a close eye, and the disk filled up. I have increased the disk size now, but I see some errors with the images. I need to sleep now but in the morning if it is not fixed I'll figure out what is happening. 

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Date: 2026-06-11T23:51:55.140427Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27665409
Post ID: 724757
Community ID: 75

Is your friend alright?

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Date: 2026-06-10T16:58:10.555721Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27637938
Post ID: 721240
Community ID: 1321

Yes, there is a lot of potential. There are micro-spectrometers available covering this range, like the [MEMS-FPI](https://www.hamamatsu.com/content/dam/hamamatsu-photonics/sites/documents/99_SALES_LIBRARY/ssd/mems-fpi_kacc9008e.pdf) type spectrometer or the multi-pixel arrays with filters (example: https://www.mantispectra.com/products). But this new kind of detector seems to come with higher resolution, faster readout than the MEMS-FPI, and more sensitivity. It is quite exciting, I'm curious to see if they commercialize it soon. 

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Date: 2026-06-10T12:07:15.595506Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27632798
Post ID: 721240
Community ID: 1321

I am not 100% sure, but I think that the designer bears the cost of the wafer yield. 

The PDK is specific to the manufacturer, and I imagine that the risk associated with specific features is known and the yield range can be estimated. A design with more and riskier the features would lower the expected yield, and it makes sense that this risk gets passed onto the designer. The contract may have some protections for the case when the yield is significantly lower than expected because of the manufacturer's fault. Just a guess though, it would be great if someone with real experience can answer.

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Date: 2026-06-10T07:30:38.590895Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27629820
Post ID: 721240
Community ID: 1321

Very cool!

I also like that they included a device cost analysis. I think they used some aggressively optimistic assumptions (100% yield from the wafer) and large-volume procurement prices that I am skeptical of, but if true it is valuable info.

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/b31525a5-3be5-48ae-b722-f7ebdddb726a.png)

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Date: 2026-06-09T19:50:43.046548Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27620793
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

Thanks! :)

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Date: 2026-06-09T19:50:13.056891Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27620778
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

Thanks! 

>The way submitters didn’t played by the rules

It is not that the submitters did not play by the rules. The 'rules' of the instance set the scope of the kind of communities that belong here, but I would not expect users from other instances to be aware of these rules. So, it was a mistake on my end not on any poster's. It would have been better to react sooner, but better now than later. 

>There are ways this community could have been both science

From the name my impression was that the community was about more aligned with futuristic sci-fi, which would be a bit on the edge of the scope but acceptable. 

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Date: 2026-06-08T17:49:04.263843Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27599610
Post ID: 718812
Community ID: 2070

That's awesome!! Are they in a terrarium or outside?

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Date: 2026-06-08T16:12:24.218108Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27597883
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

You can have a look at some communities that often have content where science intersects politics:

https://mander.xyz/c/academia
https://mander.xyz/c/earthscience
https://mander.xyz/c/publichealth

Minimizing politics does not strictly mean being extreme about enforcing the no-politics rule. Posts that are about the interaction between politics and science generally contain enough overlap with science that it is acceptable. But that is not the case in this community, it is mostly general topics and politics. 


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Date: 2026-06-08T15:41:19.413949Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27597251
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

Haha, thanks but no worries, the wound will heal 😁 

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Date: 2026-06-08T15:22:13.731473Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27596923
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

The instance has had this policy for over 4 years. The sidebar reads:

>The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.
>
>Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

The goal when creating this instance was to a place to discuss about scientific discoveries, post pictures of nature, and have a set of communities for this while avoiding polarizing content. If someone wants to discuss politics they can click on 'All' and go right to it. The scope is explicitly anti-politics because I do not want to moderate a politically charged or polarizing environment, and I know that many people with interests like mine will also appreciate such a space existing because they see enough pictures of Donald Trump and polarizing discussions elsewhere. 

> y’all are a science community and science is being hunted down and destroyed systematically and your response is to try to become less political?

I do not disagree with you broadly, and that is to an extent why I use common sense and do not enforce the "no politics" rule religiously. There is quite a bit politics that gets through. Although I do prefer to offer users of this instance a politics free experience, if no one complains I usually let it go.

In this case: I have noticed posts in the front page that have nothing to do with science lately, and they came from this specific community. I then saw some US politics characters attached to articles that had nothing to do with science. I looked through the community and most of it is off-topic, so it makes more sense to lock the community.

I'm sorry this upsets you, I should have removed the community as soon as it was created, but I did not realize what it was. 

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Date: 2026-06-08T13:35:49.801327Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27594975
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

Ok! done

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Date: 2026-06-07T20:43:47.115510Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27583297
Post ID: 717058
Community ID: 1368

Oooh, you are right! I actually did not know I had that toggle available. Thank you  😅 

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Date: 2026-06-05T18:13:43.375822Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27544019
Post ID: 712846
Community ID: 2938

Nice!

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Date: 2026-06-05T17:45:43.205886Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27543444
Post ID: 712846
Community ID: 2938

You may have disabled the visibility of bot accounts in your user settings

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/2028438b-da37-47cb-a07d-0c12c015cd30.png)

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Date: 2026-06-04T18:20:05.505852Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27523258
Post ID: 701078
Community ID: 304

I could see the credits for "Everything’s Gonna Be Alright" in Deezer, but I am not sure about how exactly Deezer determines this: https://www.deezer.com/us/album/951602381

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Date: 2026-06-04T18:09:45.228942Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27523044
Post ID: 710534
Community ID: 51

I would make use of a VPS to serve a directory with the files using Nginx. The VPS is ~$5 /month. You can share the ip or buy a domain name for ~$10/year. If you are not opposed to vibe-coding, you can probably generate the Nginx + HTML config to play through the songs without having to click them individually with little effort.

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Date: 2026-06-04T17:57:25.072354Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27522759
Post ID: 710325
Community ID: 75

Wait what, how do you know my code?

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Date: 2026-06-04T17:55:24.263885Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27522724
Post ID: 708309
Community ID: 75

Also: I use the timer very often, and I find setting a timer on a phone to be more awkward. 

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Date: 2026-06-04T17:52:22.705789Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27522665
Post ID: 708309
Community ID: 75

Sport watches.

Combination of two tings: I used to think that wearing a watch was irrelevant because I could always see the time in my phone. And I did not want to have an app knowing how many steps I take.

What changed a few years ago: I stopped having a phone on me most of the time, so a watch became extremely handy for knowing what time it is, and I found out that Garmin watches work perfectly well without an app. So, now, I really like my watch. I am considering getting a fancier one with solar charging, and I even got a chest strap to improve measurement accuracy while running. 

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Date: 2026-06-01T07:25:55.976476Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27452185
Post ID: 701078
Community ID: 304

Very interesting! Thank you a lot for finding and sharing that, I couldn't find any good info myself via online searches.

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Date: 2026-05-31T20:00:18.423004Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27444477
Post ID: 701078
Community ID: 304

The song Everything's Gonna Be Alright is a cover of the song from Sweetbox (1997) that goes by the same name and is based on Bach's Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3..

I think that the rest are originals. Not 100% sure. I am surprised by how little information they made available, they just randomly dropped this with no context after almost a decade since the previous one. I ordered the physical album so hopefully it comes with some additional info haha. 

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Date: 2026-05-17T15:21:55.130801Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27169430
Post ID: 669200
Community ID: 3046

Yes, this is a problem that happens with a lot of detector types as one tries to push them to detect lower energies.

In this specific case, light is captured by a retinal molecule that is held within an opsin protei  and this excess energy allows it to twist. The opsin protein envelope tunes the environment around the retinal molecule such that it absorbs photons of specific colors. To tune these to lower energies means altering the energy landscape in a way that makes the twisting of the retinal molecule require less energy. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of molecules, and some molecules at room temperature can move with kinetic energies that match the energy of infra-red and sometimes near-infra red photons. So, from time to time, molecules with enough kinetic energy may collide against the protein with enough force to induce the twist without light. Absorbing near-IR light would lead to an increase in thermal noise, because the opsin becomes activated by a collisions more often as opposed to light. 

Here is an image showing the retinal twisting and the energy landscape. The 'hv' arrows indicate light absorption, and the opsin's structure alters the energy curves. 

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/31c1518c-c0b6-4964-9ed0-6b652a2bc7e9.png)

The core-shell upconversion nanoparticles are special in that the photoactive region in the core is protected from the environment by an inert transparent shell. Light can pass through the shell and create localized electronic excitations within the core, while it is much more difficult to transfer the energy from a molecular collision against the outer layer into a localized excitation in the core. This shell is a strong dampener that protects the core from external influence.

Here is an example image of the core-shell structure, for reference:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/ccf7b14e-f251-46dc-82dd-509fe7a696f5.png)

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Date: 2026-05-17T08:50:04.094263Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27164635
Post ID: 670632
Community ID: 2291

What is the justification for selecting the range 2022 - 2025? I suspect that this is cherry picking.

One of the data sources they reference is: https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/data-research/cases/index.html, this site has data up to 2023 (I could not find 2024 - 2025). Here is the plot of the total hantavirus cases in the US vs year:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/73537313-0244-414e-bb41-98e34fc05186.png)

The number of cases vs year is rather noisy, and 2022 was a particularly low year. Saying that there is a '192% increase' might be technically true but misleading.  

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Date: 2026-05-17T08:04:40.223942Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27164261
Post ID: 669200
Community ID: 3046

If you are looking for eye bio mods you might also like this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867419301011

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Date: 2026-05-14T09:51:09.799012Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27109478
Post ID: 653508
Community ID: 1385

All volunteer efforts are welcome, and using AI tools to support volunteer work is completely reasonable to me.

I personally value well-crafted human-made art more highly than AI-generated art. If someone wants to invest the time to create original icons and donate them, I am always very happy to see that!

That said, requiring unpaid contributors to meet a craftsmanship standard before they are allowed to help does not seem constructive to me. Volunteer communities usually work best when people contribute with the time, skills, and tools they actually have available.

A middle-ground alternative to AI-generated work is searching through Creative Commons assets, but even that still takes time to source, filter, adapt, and integrate. Expecting volunteers to always provide fully custom artwork or spend significant additional time curating assets does not seem like a fair expectation to me. 

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Date: 2026-05-13T19:39:06.043251Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27098415
Post ID: 538225
Community ID: 1363

Sorry, I missed this! But I think that this is due to bots. From time to time, bots attempt to scrape the instance and this makes the site a lot less responsive. 

I try to manually block these IPs, but sometimes new IP ranges show up. 

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Date: 2026-05-11T11:18:19.636366Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27047948
Post ID: 642783
Community ID: 4472

Here is the homepage, and that is not what it says: https://meshtastic.org/

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Date: 2026-05-11T11:07:12.306274Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27047806
Post ID: 642783
Community ID: 4472

I promise you I am not lying to you. I may be mis-understanding you.

Here is the source code for Meshtastic firmware: https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware

But I am assume that we have a different understanding of what is and what isn't open source. 

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Date: 2026-05-11T10:55:37.845025Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/27047675
Post ID: 642783
Community ID: 4472

Don't worry, I wouldn't ban you for this.

Yes, the physical modulation implemented by LoRa transceivers is proprietary.

It is not entirely correct to say that the "mesh" itself is proprietary. Meshtastic is open source, even if it relies on proprietary radio hardware. In principle, one could take the Meshtastic codebase and adapt it to a different physical layer.

It is perfectly reasonable to reject a technology because the full stack is not open. That said, once you look closely at most modern digital and RF hardware, you are extremely likely to encounter proprietary ICs, firmware, or physical layer implementations somewhere in the stack. 

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Date: 2026-05-05T17:43:10.127590Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/26947977
Post ID: 629117
Community ID: 4472

I'm not familiar with Canadian suppliers, sorry. I have bought directly from them in the past, but I'm not sure about shipping to Canada. 

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Date: 2026-05-05T05:01:37.926192Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/26942899
Post ID: 629117
Community ID: 4472

Yes, you have many options. It depends on how much "from scratch" you want to go.

The simplest method is to purchase a module with the radio transceiver + microcontroller, flash it, and assemble it. If you don't want any sensors, you can for example purchase from RAK the kit a kit with a 'RAK19003' base board + 'RAK4631' module (nRF52840 micro-controller + SX1262 transciever) . For Canada, you would pick the 900 MHz version that operates in the 915 MHz band. (https://store.rakwireless.com/products/wisblock-meshtastic-starter-kit?variant=43884035113158)

For an enclosure, you can look up 'Project box' or 3D print a case. 

If you want to go even more "from scratch", you can buy a module without a micro-controller (Waveshare core1262, Ra-01SH, Wio-SX1262), and interface with these using a micro-controller via SPI. At this layer it starts to become more of a hassle if you want to implement Meshtastic, because you will need to either copy an existing configuration, or modify the firmware so that it matches the way that your electronics are connected.

Then, if you do not want to purchase a module, you would buy the transciever directly (for example, the [SX1262](https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/6/b/5/1/4/SX1262_datasheet.pdf)), and assemble your own module. You can look up the schematic of the basic modules to get an idea of what this looks like. For example, you can see the Waveshare Core1262 schematic here: https://files.waveshare.com/upload/c/c1/CoreSX1262_Sch.pdf

If you do not want to rely on an already existing LoRa transciever, but instead use a more general radio transciever, that is also possible. But, more expensive, and is unlikely to match performance. This is something that one might want to do if you already have an SDR transciever connected to raspberry pi and want to use it to interface with LoRa (still, it is much easier to connect a LoRa device over USB). I would not recommend building a meshtastic device from more general transcievers. 

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Date: 2026-04-25T09:27:38.151721Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/26754059
Post ID: 606691
Community ID: 949

About the immortality of the crab

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Date: 2026-04-24T17:44:21.367300Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/26743034
Post ID: 604781
Community ID: 11

They are banned

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Date: 2026-04-24T15:39:25.690700Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/26740364
Post ID: 604781
Community ID: 11

Not really, no

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Date: 2026-02-05T07:13:24.838462Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/25051342
Post ID: 425507
Community ID: 65

Since my work involves sensors, I set up a continuous testing setup on a raspberry pi and got its IP whitelisted. I ssh into it when something is annoying to do in the Windows laptop. 

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Date: 2026-02-04T07:08:36.203606Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/25026991
Post ID: 425569
Community ID: 949

I'm surviving, and definetly not the fittest.

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Date: 2026-02-03T00:05:54.500623Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/24998737
Post ID: 423142
Community ID: 51

I think that the TinyTapeout concept is super cool (https://tinytapeout.com/). In the past, it was not really feasible to design and manufacture a semiconductor device as a hobbyist... Unless maybe an extremely wealthy one.

Now, we have open source design tools, open process design kit, and the ability but small part of a manufactured wafer.

There are also now multi-project wafer runs for photonic chips at reasonable prices for startup/academia. I think these developments are pretty cool.

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Date: 2026-02-02T21:28:36.518750Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/24995719
Post ID: 405518
Community ID: 63

Thanks a lot for the examples! I have been looking through these, and, as far as I can tell:

1) In SSL stripping, the site would appear to your client as HTTP, not HTTPS. If that's the case, I think SSL stripping is blocked when using 'HTTPS-Only' mode
2) For DNS spoofing, the visited site would show up as insecure because they would not be able to generate a valid certificate for the target website

I still have not had the chance to look into leaky metadata. But, generally, I think metadata issues can in part be addressed by not generating much metadata. 

> Probably the biggest vulnerability is the captive portal. There is no way to verify you’re connecting to an official Starbucks router.
I think that when connecting to a public router it is wise to assume that it is malicious. 



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Date: 2026-01-28T06:40:17.076155Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/24868098
Post ID: 405518
Community ID: 63

I'm curious about an example that comes to your mind as you say this. In your view, what is a privacy risk associated with public WiFi use that is not easily mitigated? 

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Date: 2026-01-15T22:54:32.565872Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/24596778
Post ID: 380907
Community ID: 4370

Wow! Never seen this one before. It's amazing!

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Date: 2025-12-21T13:29:39.330484Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/24052464
Post ID: 319882
Community ID: 1874

Thanks :)

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Date: 2025-11-26T15:46:02.398685Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23554371
Post ID: 269827
Community ID: 1362

It depends. In my experience: in an academic laboratory I have been able to use common sense. 

For example, gloves go on when working with strong acids/bases. The statement:

>gloves apparently only give researchers a false sense of security that can dull the sense of touch and prevent you from recognizing chemical exposure

Does not apply as much when you are working with such corrosive agents, because you really should never be in a position where spilling 4 M HCl into your hands would go unnoticed. 

When working with large quantitites of oils, even if non-hazardous, gloves go on and they will probably get oil in them. 

When working with cell cultures, the goal is often to not contaminate the cultures. Some people prefer to wash their hands thoroughly and not use gloves, and they have been working at it for many years and they seem to do just fine. It's a risk mitigation strategy - if the cultures have antibiotics and fungicides, risk is already not too high.

In an industry setting it is different. Companies often comply with specific standards and health and safety regulations. While the individual can use common sense, the people in charge of ascertaining compliance (sometimes 'EHS', Environment, health and safety personnel) aren't necessarily chemists themselves, nor should they need to be aware of the identity of the transparent liquid in the flask that you are holding. So, generic rules are often set in place not only because of their practical utility but also to simplify enforcement. In some cases external auditors can come in (announced or not) and verify compliance - this, again is much simpler when the rule is 'lab coat behind yellow line, gloves always on when touching a container with a liquid' than having to interview each person to understand what they were touching without gloves and to understand their philosophy of why they chose to do so. 

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Date: 2025-11-16T16:44:37.019229Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23350548
Post ID: 228479
Community ID: 1363

I have experienced issues both over tor and over clearnet. The tor front-end exists on its own server, but it connects to the mander server. So, the server that hosts the front-end via Tor will see the exit node connecting to it, and then the mander server gets the requests via that Tor server. Ultimately some bandwidth is used for both servers because the data travels from mander, to the tor front-end, and then to the exit node. There is also another server that hosts and serves the images. 

What I see is not a bandwidth problem, though. It seems like the database queries are the bottleneck. There is a limited number of connections to the database, and some of the queries are complex and use a lot of CPU. It is the intense searching through the database what appears to throttle the website. 

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Date: 2025-11-15T20:49:52.268842Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23336103
Post ID: 248219
Community ID: 75

By hand. We are only two people, and we usually clean after we cook/eat. When one is cleaning only 2 plates + a pot/pan at a time, it is easy to use little water. Spray of soap, metal scrub, sponge scrub, and then turn the tap on to rinse for a few seconds. Utensils get individually scrubbed and then all rinsed together for a few seconds.

Maybe when we have kids a dish washer will make sense. 

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Date: 2025-11-11T07:30:51.261956Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23235374
Post ID: 231138
Community ID: 75

I have been happy with my Garmin. It is functional without having to connect to anything, and data can be easily exported to a computer for more advanced processing. It is a handy GPS receiver that lets me monitor heart rate and log running metrics. 

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Date: 2025-11-09T16:22:14.457575Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23199470
Post ID: 232973
Community ID: 1414

Thanks! The problem I run into is that the bags end up taking up a lot more space than the components themselves. Yesterday I started testing printing a small label with the component's code and sticking it into the reel. 

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Date: 2025-11-09T12:31:41.254260Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23195964
Post ID: 232973
Community ID: 1414

Ooh, I like that idea for the larger components that don't fit into the smaller binder. I bought some trading card sheets to test. Thanks :D

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Date: 2025-11-08T09:23:46.732899Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23175517
Post ID: 232973
Community ID: 1414

I do have a wall with similar boxes. From the image, I am not sure if they are the same size. I just measured one of my small drawers and it is 14 cm x 5.5 cm x 5 cm. Since I have many different tiny components, I quickly ran out of space when I tried to give each component its own drawer. 

But I think that I might be able to do a better job with these if I take everything out and start organizing again. I set the rules for how to place things before I started buying SMD components, and many of the through-hole components I can combine without problem. An improvement would be if I can find something like this but with many more and much smaller boxes. 

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Date: 2025-11-08T09:18:16.661183Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23175470
Post ID: 232973
Community ID: 1414

When you mix different components into one of the boxes, do you have a system to label them? Or are the components easy enough to recognize by looking at them? 

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Date: 2025-11-07T08:46:23.893505Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23153614
Post ID: 228479
Community ID: 1363

This morning I woke up and a new IP sub-net (43.173.0.0/16) was excessively hitting the site from multiple IPs, probably scraping, making the site unresponsive. I blocked that sub-net and the site is responsive again. 

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Date: 2025-11-06T19:25:47.807745Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23141865
Post ID: 228479
Community ID: 1363

Thank you. 

A few days ago, I blocked several IP ranges to solve this. I unblocked them about two days ago in an attempt to solve some federation issues... The bots from this IP range came back.

This time I blocked only the IP range that has the most bot-like activity. Hopefully that resolves it.

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Date: 2025-11-02T11:12:00.888338Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/23054991
Post ID: 221483
Community ID: 1327

Woah! Congratulations!!!  🥳  🎉 

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Date: 2025-10-18T09:45:14.359598Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22740826
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

No problem! Happy to contribute

========================================

Date: 2025-10-15T06:53:46.597522Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22667862
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

Thanks!

I don't see those specific IPs, nor 16514. But now I see what scrapers tend to look like in the logs :)

I am now pretty sure that the cause was scraper-like activity coming from the Mlmym front-end that I am serving over an onion site. I am not sure if it randomly started mis-behaving or if a tor scraper was using it.

After blocking this, federation was restored, performance increased, and CPU use came down:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/2f9038f0-05c0-472b-b98b-2171cb546a34.png)

========================================

Date: 2025-10-14T21:46:34.463314Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22650230
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

I just realized that it is not a 'scraper', the requests came from the server that I am using to provide an interface to the site as an Onion site. The amount of requests was suspiciously high so maybe a bot is scraping through Tor. I will leave it off for a few days and see if I can turn it back on later. 

========================================

Date: 2025-10-14T21:38:55.932535Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22649244
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

Thanks! It seems like the lag may have been due to a scraper 

========================================

Date: 2025-10-14T21:33:06.124145Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22648586
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

I did not update or change anything in the past few days.

But, now that you mentioned an AI scrapper I looked into the logs and noticed some heavy requests to the API from a specific IP. 

Requests look consistent to scraping - just consistently and continuously issuing GET requests to different API endpoints. 

```
XX.XX.XX.XX - - [14/Oct/2025:21:28:54 +0000] "GET /api/v3/community/list?limit=20&sort=TopAll HTTP/2.0" 403 107 "-" "Mlmym"

``` 
I have started denying their requests and it is the first thing that seems to have actually helped!

I don't want to speak too early but I think you may have identified the cause. Thanks!

========================================

Date: 2025-10-14T21:00:59.292596Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22647345
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

So far, I have been able to 'control' the CPU use by setting limits to the process that pulls stuff from the database (pool size, CPU, memory).

This does release some of the CPU for other tasks, but I think that that what creates the lag might actually be the clogged database queries. So, constraining those resources might not solve the lag problem.  

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/5254e936-eb15-4619-a0da-d84bf19b3418.png)

========================================

Date: 2025-10-14T20:26:36.920703Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22647137
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

Hmm, thanks!

I just made another change. I am not sure why the database suddenly started taking up so many resources, so I have reduced the amount of resources available to it. It did reduce CPU use to 80% as opposed to 100%, but it is still somewhat laggy for me. 

========================================

Date: 2025-10-14T20:02:29.876014Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22646607
Post ID: 189137
Community ID: 1363

I can see that since October 13 the CPU use spiked to 100%...


![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/b8cc2231-94c3-466d-8e9a-436b165574c1.png)

I just reset the server to check if that would fix it quickly. It don't think it did.

I can see the processes that are taking up a lot of CPU (parallell database queries it seems), but I still don't understand what is causing these and why they have spiked since Oct 13. I will need to investigate. 

========================================

Date: 2025-10-07T17:57:13.436531Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22503213
Post ID: 171679
Community ID: 75

Hopefully the English language is developed and Rick Astley gets to make his song before anyone figures it out!

========================================

Date: 2025-10-05T17:04:45.638907Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22456416
Post ID: 173736
Community ID: 76

I'd rather pay for preventing the front passenger from reclining into me. 

========================================

Date: 2025-10-04T17:43:56.395129Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22437723
Post ID: 171679
Community ID: 75

I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:

- As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
- Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device 
- When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
- Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn 'ON' events without the device being exposed to the sun
- When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again



========================================

Date: 2025-10-03T17:20:58.260506Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22415794
Post ID: 170309
Community ID: 75

I speak spanish natively and at during uni I would hang out with a group of Brazillian friends. I would speak a mixture of portuguese and spanish with them. 

The mom of one of these friends made a Brazilian dish for us (Feijoada) and asked me how it was as it was the first time I tried it. I answered that the dish as 'exquisito', which in Spanish means delicious (similar 'exquisite'). She seemed somewhat disappointed and upset by my response so I probed a little and found out that 'esquisito' in Portuguese actually means 'weird'. She thought I was calling her dish weird tasting. I found quickly enough to clarify, but I did feel bad about making her fell that way... She was very excited about sharing her cooking and she thought I called it weird. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-28T07:15:16.129395Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22292266
Post ID: 161050
Community ID: 50

HEY STOP HACKING ME!!!! 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-21T17:11:30.953821Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22146479
Post ID: 146297
Community ID: 1160

Cool to see you here too! 😄

========================================

Date: 2025-09-21T15:58:58.565007Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22145104
Post ID: 128719
Community ID: 63

I am currently near Cologne in Germany. I placed one of these LycaMobile SIM cards from NL and it activated automatically. It does recognize that it is connected to the German network and roaming, and still activates data and assigns a phone number.

So, it seems to work fine

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/8ff1512b-2920-4ee6-b4ad-2f4d4db4b0ac.jpeg)

========================================

Date: 2025-09-20T19:21:12.917742Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22128740
Post ID: 146358
Community ID: 476

It's spider season! That's very normal in September/October. At least in the Netherlands but I imagine it's similar in the UK.

I didn't know about Foxes. I very rarely see them. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-20T19:18:28.122187Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22128702
Post ID: 146297
Community ID: 1160

I'd be happy to contribute to a fedi-organized charity!

'Christmas' can create a bit of a split as there is a wide range of opinions on it, so you could also consider framing it differently if you are not attached to the Christian tradition. For me,  I'm OK, Christmas or otherwise 😁 

If fundraising you may want to put some effort in providing options that preserve anonymity considering that Lemmy has a large demographic of privacy-conscious individuals. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-20T19:02:23.091087Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22128459
Post ID: 145115
Community ID: 76

El del presidente de los eeuu no lo vi... Cual es? Mi favorito es el de Willem Alexander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbgPqccCQcs

========================================

Date: 2025-09-20T07:28:39.198448Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22118165
Post ID: 145301
Community ID: 75

The use-cases that I see advertised are not things that I do in my day-to-day. I usually place my phone on a drawer or leave it in my backpack - I definitely don't want it on my face. 

So, to me, smart glasses feel like an uncomfortable gimmick at this point. Maybe there is something amazing about them that has not yet clicked with me, but for the time being I don't see me buying one of these for the foreseeable future.  

========================================

Date: 2025-09-19T23:26:25.631142Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22112042
Post ID: 145115
Community ID: 76

Jajaja, al menos lo intentó 😅 Un 8 por el esfuerzo!

========================================

Date: 2025-09-17T23:06:05.669952Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22065082
Post ID: 138081
Community ID: 3140

> It always surprises me when ppl don’t know about torrents. They were the only way to get things before streaming services privatized all this content, and still remain better, by using the latest encodings and quality formats for media.

I did know enough about torrents to do practically use them to download things since the Limewire/Ares times. But what I meant is that I never actually knew how they work at a technical level - I never opened a torrent file and looked inside, or knew what a magnet link was. So, then, the topic as a whole is still opaque to me. But I did some reading today and I'm getting into it.

> So new content would be no different than the thousands of people seeding existing content.

I see it, but I also see why this concept might be intimidating to some. I (and probably many others) make use of torrents in rare occasion when I cannot find a movie, a series, or want an album. I associate torrenting with acquiring a large file for long term storage. Streaming feels different - videos exist in my computer only while I need them, and then they leave no trace. As I understand it, a torrent-based system would actually download all (or some) videos to disk to be able to seed them.  

Still, I do think that a youtube-like torrent-based client would be successful - especially if implemented in a way that is simple for the user. An interface to find content, transparent and adjustable torrent settings with control over disk space allocation, and the torrents/magnet link management mostly hidden from the user. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-17T21:49:49.475230Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22063581
Post ID: 136946
Community ID: 75

Yeah, I'm still looking. This is the closest I found so far

========================================

Date: 2025-09-17T20:48:00.881930Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22062231
Post ID: 138081
Community ID: 3140

Thanks. I don't know much about torrenting other, and I never looked into the concept of what Magnet links are.

It is actually very interesting! Such an elegant and simple solution.

And I think it is even simpler than what the instructions imply... I can write the following into the terminal:

```
transmission-cli "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:563cf8f2a0bdd5564ae9ef3d3302eecef639328b"
```

And that's enough to pull the first episode of alien earth that you shared. That unique hash is all it takes to search for seeders. Very cool. 

It is still not obvious to me who would seed when implementing the torrent-based YouTube alternative. Would it make sense that users set some torrenting ratio, a file lifetime, and a size limit, and 'collect' videos as they watch them so that they can seed for other users? 

>All that’s needed is for people to learn how to seed their own videos, and post magnet links around.

I'm in! Looking into it. Now I need to go make something worth sharing. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-17T10:45:20.981562Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22049470
Post ID: 136946
Community ID: 75

Ha, maybe! I don't remember if I ever saw a 180 flip. This is the closest I could find from a quick search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpIglVnYuY

If you have a video with the 180 degree flip I would really like to see it. This context seems like a plausible place to see such a move in modern days. I would imagine that in some martial arts this effect would be well known. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-17T09:57:37.524297Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22049025
Post ID: 136946
Community ID: 75

Some of these 'games' do trigger real physiological mechanisms. A well-documented example is the [Valsalva maneuver](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valsalva_maneuver#Physiological_response), where forcefully exhaling against a closed mouth and nose affects heart rate and blood pressure.

In some games, this maneuver (or similar) is combined with a second action that normally increases blood flow demand to the brain. The mismatch between reduced blood pressure and sudden demand can cause dizziness or brief loss of consciousness due to insufficient oxygen reaching the brain.

Actually, there is a similar effect sometimes seen during heavy deadlifts, suddenly releasing can sometimes make people pass out. There are many “deadlift passing out” videos online.

So, those 'games' can work. I have known of kids breaking their teeth after face-planting against the floor while playing those games. Not a very smart thing to do. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-16T22:25:19.469908Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22039601
Post ID: 136946
Community ID: 75

If you catch a frog in between your hands and quickly flip it around, you can get the frog into a kind of paralyzed state called 'tonic immobility'.

Here is a photo from Wikipedia:

![Frog stuck in tonic immobility](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/PhyllomedusaBurmeisteri_%286%29.JPG)

OK, well, many years ago I was very interested in this phenomenon and decided to look into the literature.

I found a paper from 1928 titled "On The Mechanism of Tonic Immobility in Vertebrates" written by Hudson Hoagland ([PDF link](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2141011/pdf/715.pdf)).

In this paper, the author describes contraptions he used to analyze the small movement (or lack of movement) in animals while in this state. They look kind of like torture devices:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/3f0f714f-f549-437d-a9b9-338803a227ed.png)

OK, but, that's still not it.... The obscure fact is found in the first footnote of that paper, on page #2:

![Tonic immobility or a state akin to it has been described in children by Pieron
(1913). I have recently been able to produce the condition in adult human beings.
The technique was brought to my attention by a student in physiology, Mr. W. I.
Gregg, who after hearing a lecture on tonic immobility suggested that a state
produced by the following form of manhandling which he had seen exhibited as a
sort of trick might be essentially the same thing. If one bends forward from the
waist through an angle of 90°, places the hands on the abdomen, and after taking a
deep breath is violently thrown backwards through 180° by a man on either side,
the skeletal muscles contract vigorously and a state of pronounced immobility
lasting for some seconds may result. The condition is striking and of especial
interest since this type of manipulation (sudden turning into a dorsal position) is
the most common one used for producing tonic immobility in vertebrates.](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/49cdc242-3863-496f-9ba1-952a9153d5f7.png)

Apparently this or a similar effect can be observed in humans too?! In this paper, the author himself claims to have done this and that it works! I tried to locate more recent resources describing this phenomenon in humans but I could not find them... Is this actually possible? If so, why is this not better documented? Or, maybe it is better documented but understood as a different type of reflex today? Not sure. 



========================================

Date: 2025-09-15T17:10:49.753253Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/22009148
Post ID: 134219
Community ID: 63

That's a very interesting resource!

Actually, the countries where I have been able to purchase anonymous SIM cards are in the list "As of 2021, the following countries do not have mandatory SIM card registration laws". So, it appears like I just happen to have been lucky and I should not make this as such a general recommendation...

Funny, about Mexico it says:
> Countries expected to implement mandatory SIM registration in 2022: Philippines, Mexico.

I can at least confirm that I was not asked for ID when buying SIM cards last year in Mexico. 

I just looked it up and found the proposed law for Mexico [on Wikipedia](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padr%C3%B3n_Nacional_de_Usuarios_de_Telefon%C3%ADa_M%C3%B3vil). It was struck down in 2022 as unconstitutional. 

So, then, I really have no anecdotes to say that it is easy in places where it is formally illegal. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-15T06:24:23.063748Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21999108
Post ID: 134219
Community ID: 63

I am not sure about France. When I search online, I often find resources stating "Yes, ID is required", even for the countries where I know that I have bought SIM cards with cash. Well, the SIM is usually free and what I pay for is the top-up code. 

I would imagine (but I'm not sure) that if you try to buy a SIM card at an airport or at an official store from a large telephony provider you are more likely to get asked for an ID. I find them in shops that have signs with the names of smaller [MVNOs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator). Something like what is shown in this image that I found online, where you can see signs of 'Lyca Mobile' and 'Lebara':

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/204a9dbe-e298-4d3a-88fc-cbf01c9de9df.png)

But, your mileage may vary. Probably some locations are more strict than others. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-14T20:24:41.106776Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21991255
Post ID: 134793
Community ID: 3140

I like it.

I find the feature of pulling comments from cross-posts even more desirable now that I see how it interfaces with PeerTube videos, pulling the comment history as well. I still think that improvements can be made. With regular cross-posts, you have different people sharing the same link, often to a resource outside of the Fediverse. But, in the case of a federated piece of content such as a PeerTube video, the original does live within the fediverse. There is a master post, which is the video itself. I feel like there is some way to design a special kind of fedi-cross post that allows to share with a community without breaking the interaction... At least for upvotes.



========================================

Date: 2025-09-14T19:47:56.660772Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21990594
Post ID: 134793
Community ID: 3140

It does get a little complicated and confusing. And for some reason it only works for some PeerTube instances, not for all...

But, for example, let's say I like this video: https://tilvids.com/videos/watch/c8c6a9df-121e-4a00-95c1-b7af4beb73a1

By pasting that URL into the search box, the video is brought into the instance as a post. The channel is also pulled as a "locked" community. If anyone in the instance subscribes to that community, then future uploads to the PeerTube channel will be brought into the community.

Look, here is the channel pulled into your instance: https://sh.itjust.works/c/bpt11_channel@tilvids.com

If a user upvotes post, then the original video will get a "like". If one comments, the comment will appear under the original video.

>But let’s be honest, Peertubés problem is discoverability of content.
>
>I’ve discovered lately that there is a Firefox extension which lets you use Youtube and signals you when a video is already on Peertube. This could be great.

Yeah... I have been going through the effort of pulling channels and subscribing to them from within the instance so that future videos also populate the instance. It is some effort to discover these channels, but hopefully over time we can have a nice library of channels interacting with Lemmy.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-14T17:01:52.122728Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21987697
Post ID: 134793
Community ID: 3140

Thanks. Yeah, I was thinking of writing this as an "enhancement" issue, but figured it might be worth to refine this before bringing it up there.

> Id love to get peertube spread throughout my feeds. My biggest reason for not using it was the fact I’d have to use a different platform and my device is already maxed out on storage. Here’s hoping it would be a quick fix!

I've been looking for channels, pulling them into the instance, and subscribing to try to increase the number of channels in my feed. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-14T09:02:27.520848Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21977880
Post ID: 134219
Community ID: 63

Depending on where you are travelling to and from, you can often get an anonymous prepaid SIM card. That is what I do: buy one with cash, put it into a MiFi router, and only switch it on when I need internet. That way I stay off the records of whoever else is with me and I am not relying on their identity as a shield. I have not found an eSIM provider that gives me the same level of anonymity, so I have avoided those.

If you really have to register a SIM with your identity, it depends on the situation. For example, if you buy a SIM in the EU, activate roaming, and then use it in Mexico, the Mexican authorities can’t instantly demand your subscriber info from the EU. On the other hand, if you or your family buy local SIMs while showing ID, then travel together and check in to hotels together, it makes little difference whose SIM is whose. For Mexico specifically, you can walk into an OXXO store, pay cash, and get a prepaid SIM with a data package, no ID required. Many countries have similar cash options so you check ahead of time.

About whether the worry is justified. The type of surveillance you mention, such as stingrays, requires both strong capability and strong motivation. If a government wanted to, they could stop your entire family at the border before you ever left. But from what you describe, you are just a foreigner who might pass by a protest. That is unlikely to trigger the level of targeting you are thinking of.

Still, I would not call it “in vain.” Building habits that protect privacy and understanding how information flows is always useful. But if you can get a prepaid SIM anonymously with cash, it is usually a cleaner option than tethering from family.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-14T07:14:46.357474Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21977264
Post ID: 131886
Community ID: 1323

Thanks!

========================================

Date: 2025-09-13T18:53:46.679756Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21969810
Post ID: 131507
Community ID: 75

Yeah, I get that. I think that this camera + lens combination would meet your criteria while giving you pretty decent quality and the ability to upgrade. It is what I have recommended in the past to people asking this same question and they have been very happy with it. You can pass the idea through Grok, I think it will agree ;)

========================================

Date: 2025-09-13T17:46:54.588856Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21968611
Post ID: 131507
Community ID: 75

Instead of a "compact camera", I'd recommend getting a used Lumix DMC-GX80 + the 20 mm pancake prime lens. If you don't like primes and prefer to zoom, you can get a compact zoom lens instead. 

Some people really don't like buying used camera equipment... but I have had only positive experiences so far. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-13T11:15:39.991194Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21961864
Post ID: 132533
Community ID: 63

I like the idea of PeerTube, but I tried running an instance and was unable to sustain the experiment for too long. I made it very open and it got quickly flooded by pirated TV series and spammy and heavy content.

After that, I had a difficult time at some point finding an instance to host some videos I wanted to upload - and, having had that failed experiment before hand, I can see why the instances that do survive are often those with more stringent filters and less generous with resources. 

So, I am sorry to "chime in about the shortcomings", but hosting a PeerTube instance can be a demotivating experience. You set up the infrastructure expecting to contribute to a space reminiscent of the old youtube, and you see it filled with spam. The signal-to-noise ratio is just awful and it is expensive. To avoid this, you can be an aggressive gate keeper - but this makes the platform less friendly to people who are looking to find a space to share their original content. Gate keeping is also an additional effort that you need to make. In the end I chose to just shut it off as it was more of a hassle than fun. By comparison, hosting a Lemmy instance is fun, much much cheaper, and little hassle.

I still haven't given up on the idea of Peertube, though... I have some video ideas, and when I finally get to making them I plan to make another instance to host only my channel. Then, I would be able to host my own channel using my own infrastructure via a federated network. This use case would work very well for me, and it can probably work for many others. So that is one way of building the Peertube network.

General permissive video uploads is something that makes YouTube such a powerful platform though, and that is very difficult to replicate.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-12T21:37:58.135360Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21951004
Post ID: 131886
Community ID: 1323

*EDIT: After reading through the Git issue and the other comments in this thread, it is not very clear to me what "combining comments from cross-posts on the post screen" means. I understood it at first to mean that you will pool all comments together and show all of them in all cross-posts, but now I am not so sure. Still, in general terms, I think that mechanisms to share activity with niche communities are good*

I would say yes, there are cases in which I have thought that this would be a nice thing to have. Especially when cross-posting to a smaller niche community.

I can think of a few potential small issues. For example, cross-posters can edit the body of the message, so you might in some cases end up with comments that seem out of place as they refer to the content specific to a cross-post. You also have the rare case in which the same post might mean different things in different communities.

But, overall, I see it as beneficial. Quirks can be fine-tuned later on. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-12T19:12:30.195338Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21947916
Post ID: 128719
Community ID: 63

Ok! I'll update you then  😄 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-12T19:11:43.366606Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21947904
Post ID: 129970
Community ID: 1321

> Fair point - I completely forgot to take the 3D geometry into account. I guess this could be solved by either making both sp³ (sub the Si-O with Si-Cl) or both sp² (sub the H-O-Si with H-N=Si)? But then writing data becomes more complicated than just adding or removing hydrogens that, as you said, isn’t as simple as it looks like.

I think that the solution that life came up with - making a flexible double helix-forming backbone from which base pairs hang is actually a pretty good way of going about it. Similar as with proteins - a standard flexible backbone with different groups hanging off the chain and influencing how it folds. In your proposition you have the silicon backbone and a single atom as the 'side chain', so there is no separation between the backbone and the pairing elements to add this flexibility.
 
There are also some other details to consider. For example, the amount of data you can store in a given chain length changes depending on how many different types of chemistry you have. In your example, you are using only one type of 'base' because the only options are 'hydrogen bond donor' or 'hydrogen bond acceptor'. If you have a chain length of 3, you get only 3 bits, which can store one of 2^3 = 8 values from 0 to 7 (000 to 111). With DNA, you have 4 different base pairs, so a chain length of three can encode 4^3 = 64 values. 

That means that, to get a good information density, you would also want to increase the number of possibilities. The challenge here is that you need to tune the set of possibilities so that the thermodynamics are balanced. You don't want some pairs to stick very strongly while others stick only loosely, and you also don't want certain bases to be able to pair with each other. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleic_acid_thermodynamics

You can perhaps dispense with some of the thermodynamic tuning if you don't need to be able to easily replicate the data through a process similar to DNA replication, as you don't actually need to 'pair' at all - you have a single string of data. But in that case you lose a very powerful method as you are forced to re-synthesize every data chain from scratch - I think that with such a system you lose too many benefits.

If you go through the steps of creating a system of molecular data storage from scratch, I think it is easy to converge towards something similar to DNA. A lot of 'origin of life' research is actually about this - thinking about these systems and how to engineer them from scratch, and... DNA is pretty good at this. When you consider that early chemical evolution was an optimization algorithm to solve this problem, it makes sense that DNA is a good choice.

I do think it is good and fun to explore this. We do have at least some advantages over nature - for example, we have managed to purify many compounds that were not abundant in early chemical soups. So, perhaps we can find something. 

> Like the dNaM / dTPT3 pair, right? That’s perhaps more viable, at least to increase information density.

Yeah, like those. In this recent paper, for example, researchers sequenced a chain of four anthrophogenic base pairs that they refer to as 'ALIEN bases': https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61991-9

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/41bd1407-5ed0-466d-b805-cd4fbaa6ec89.png)

========================================

Date: 2025-09-12T06:53:03.755483Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21934842
Post ID: 128719
Community ID: 63

Hmm, you are right, it is possible that the initial activation is more difficult if you are not in NL. 

I found a forum post of someome having problems with a KPN sim card, but for LycaMobile I still don't know: https://community.kpn.com/prepaid-16/sim-card-activation-doesn-t-work-in-germany-591780

I wil be going to Germany in a few days so I will bring one of those SIM cards and check what happens when I try to activate it, I'll report back.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-11T21:53:37.255339Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21926375
Post ID: 129970
Community ID: 1321

The R2S=O case is closer to a trigonal planar geometry, the other silicon is tetrahedral. The silicon-silicon distances for different pairs of adjacent molecule types will be different. In a very very rough forcefield optimization I see about 3% difference. I don't think this one will work out structurally because the chains will become unable to pair after a short length as the chain will not have the flexibility to create the O--H bond without adding too much strain.

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/2a64c5ea-677a-4050-813d-0fb77d18ef43.png)

But, that's just one thing. You then need to consider how to actually selectively place/remove the hydrogen atoms, how to avoid the molecule from chemically reacting, and how to read out the data.

So, yes, eventually it would be nice to have a fully orthogonal system. There are already several synthetic DNA base pairs that can be used instead of the naturally present bases. But these would still be susceptible to DNAses or RNAses.

The way I see it is that the chemistry of living things is currently centuries ahead of human tech. A large portion of the techniques used in biochemistry rely on using living things to produce the components, and then we purify those components and use them. It makes a lot of sense to make use of that toolkit because the amount of challenges that need to be solved to create this system from scratch is massive.

Your proposal of your silicon chain reminds of the [Ferroelectric RAM](https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/01/05/ferroelectric-ram-update-and-micron/), where the state is encoded by the polarity of a cell that is changed by moving a zirconium or titanium cation:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/3e4cbb29-899a-4cfa-80d5-38a7a4bc2b73.png)

This does work, but it works because the crystal is contained within a semiconductor scaffold, and this is something that we do have a good handle on.

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Date: 2025-09-11T19:16:28.112409Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21922805
Post ID: 129970
Community ID: 1321

Very cool!

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Date: 2025-09-11T12:51:05.409234Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21913923
Post ID: 125312
Community ID: 75

Lemmy, but very rarely

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Date: 2025-09-11T11:22:24.213963Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21912308
Post ID: 128719
Community ID: 63

I looked up LycaMobile in Germany and was surprised to find you have an entire 'Prepaid SIM' wiki, ha! https://www.prepaid-wiki.de/tarife/Lyca_Mobile

Germany is not too far from NL. I think you can just order a Dutch SIM card. If all you want is for it to be active, I don't think it would be a problem as you would not actually use roaming services. Just top up via code every 5.5 months or so by dialing *101*CODE#

I have not tested this myself so there may be some special rules I am not aware of, but I have often kept phone numbers abroad for years - just not Germany specifically

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Date: 2025-09-11T09:16:15.272940Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21910585
Post ID: 128719
Community ID: 63

In NL, one option is to get one of these: https://top06.nl/products/lyca-mobile-simkaart-5-euro-beltegoed

It is also possible to buy one of these with cash from many shops.

This one lasts 6 months each. You can buy several of these and replace every 6 months if you don't mind changing the phone number, or top-up €5 every ~6 months. You can buy the 5 euro top-up code in person from many shops, using cash, or online in a website like this one: https://kaartdirect.nl/beltegoed/lycamobile


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Date: 2025-09-10T21:37:45.776160Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21898095
Post ID: 128099
Community ID: 2742

I love this!!! That's a very cool technique and you draw very well!  😄 

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Date: 2025-09-09T21:18:09.164190Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21872732
Post ID: 125326
Community ID: 1874

Beautiful yellows

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Date: 2025-09-07T17:36:24.620520Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21827460
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

Yeah, as others mentioned, you can get cheaper data plans depending on the monthly data you need.  

However, one of the interesting properties is that, unlike with phones, there is no restriction on the number of pagers that can listen to your assigned RIC. You can use one subscription to communicate with as many pagers as you would like, and each individual pager can be programmed using text filters such that one can implement their own sub-address system.  

========================================

Date: 2025-09-07T12:57:38.494356Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21822883
Post ID: 112042
Community ID: 2689

Oops, thanks  😀 

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Date: 2025-09-07T08:05:52.773048Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819673
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

I suspect so too. I contribute to the local network with a few nodes :) In a controlled, coordinated setting it works well, but continuous reliability and coverage are still challenging. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-07T08:00:25.459254Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819634
Post ID: 112042
Community ID: 2689

Woah! A new term for biology textbooks. *Xenopary*. That's really really cool! Thanks for sharing. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-07T07:46:18.283698Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819520
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

Thank you for reading! Happy you find it valuable. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-07T07:43:47.758171Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819491
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

I think that the Dutch make some good/interesting infrastructure choices.

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Date: 2025-09-07T07:41:53.459029Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819474
Post ID: 111949
Community ID: 2742

Hahaha, didn't mean to send a message 😆 

Whether it "spoils" is a matter of perspective, this guy has a recipe on making a Shaggy Ink Sauce: https://foragerchef.com/shaggy-mane-ink/

It reminds of [huitlacoche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_smut#Culinary_use). I am curious if it equally delicious. I have only foraged them once and ate them fresh, but next time I want to try out this recipe. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-07T07:35:23.871648Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819419
Post ID: 111949
Community ID: 2742

Yes, you did!! 😀

I think this was the photo that I sketched on top of:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/4b38958b-0525-44df-864f-2b6405dea7a8.jpeg) 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-07T07:00:40.465896Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21819032
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

> LoRA is sort of a slower version of wifi and as such, you should assume Meshtastic is monitored, at least for traffic metadata. The actual messages are encrypted though.

LoRa is great in that it gives us direct control and ownership over the infrastructure. One can participate in the network without their identity being known. But, yes, traffic metadata specifying the sender and recipient identifiers are plain text and can be easily logged. 

Default configurations will have your device broadcasting often to contact new neighbors and will re-broadcast incoming messages. Since the device is quite active, and the chirped signal signal so characteristic when seeing via an SDR, someone who is actively tracking a Meshtastic device can do so very effectively. 

Still, the fact that you own fully the device and have total control over it opens up a lot of possibilities. To give one example: if the mesh around here were strong, I could make use of a device configured for Rx only as a meshtastic pager. I might set up my Raspberry pi to inject a message from a randomized sender via MQTT in response to an XMPP message. Then, I would not use any radio transmitter at all.  

For regular peer-to-peer chatting, yes, the default properties are very leaky, but we can change some of what we don't like.

> There is actually still such a thing as a satellite pager, a receive-only device that can get pages that cover regions as big as small countries. They stopped making the receivers quite a while back, but some are still around and the subscriptions are still available, though expensive. This info is itself some years old so maybe they are all gone by now.

That is very interesting. When I looked into satellite devices I only found two way devices, like the GARMIN inReach. I figured that it made sense that satellite comms would be 2-way because broadcasting all over the world seems rather extreme.

I have searched for these now and found the Iridium 9501 from Motorola. It is pricey, ~$680 for the device and either $90 (150 messages) or $150 (unlimited) per month for the subscription. In the description it says that you do need to program three 'Message Delivery Areas' as the messages are not broadcast globally, but I think this is acceptable. 

Thanks for pointing that out. $90/month is pricey.... But it is cool enough that I would seriously consider it if I would travel a lot for work.

 > POCSAG pagers still exist in the US too, though again, they are quite expensive compared to cell phones. Their main attraction is supposed to be higher reliability, so e.g. doctors can get paged even with the mobile phone network is out. I don’t know if that advantage still exists. In the more distant past there was something called ARDIS which I think is gone now. That was quite a robust signal, so you could get paged even in sub-basements of buildings and places where mobile phones didn’t work. Repair technicians who worked in those places often carried them.

I think that the advantage might still exist, especially in buildings with thick walls and underground floors. While looking into pagers I found discussions about them being phased out in many hospitals and replaced with 'EPIC secure chat' and with sharing private cellphone numbers. 

In the Netherlands there is also the P2000 system, which is considered to be very reliable. That network makes use of FLEX to send messages to emergency services. It is possible to easily capture those too using SDR, or to see a live dump of these messages in sites like this one: https://p2000-online.net/alleregiosf.html

> I’ve followed this stuff slightly as it’s interesting for the reasons you say, but I’d have to say it’s not really cost effective for most of us. POCSAG in particular only works in relatively localized areas like single countries. I know a guy who would want something like it, but only if it worked pretty much everywhere, since he travels a lot.

Yea, I can see that. So, that guy might like the satellite pager, but probably will not like the price tag.

Thanks for your reply!

========================================

Date: 2025-09-06T23:55:29.207197Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21814682
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

I do like Meshtastic a lot and I am still trying to get the most out of it. But  there are too many gaps around here. In the city there are more nodes, but also a lot of buildings. Outside of the city there is more line of sight but few nodes.



========================================

Date: 2025-09-06T23:48:26.702531Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21814577
Post ID: 111673
Community ID: 63

Yes, at least in the Netherlands. I was also surprised to discover this.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T20:46:10.843500Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21744983
Post ID: 101426
Community ID: 2742

Some of these terms I am not yet familiar with, so I will need to do some reading. I'll save this comment and come back during the week. It seems like you are very knowledgeable about display technologies! Very cool 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T19:39:32.905810Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21743648
Post ID: 101426
Community ID: 2742

> Why not RGBW with some interesting wavelength response of the white subpixel?

Hmm, I'm not really sure. A monochrome pixel would be much more sensitive, but without a neutral density filter it might saturate when the RGB pixels are well-exposed. With a neutral density filter I think it could resolve better the variation of light intensities of very small features. 

> Same with LCDs. It wouldn’t take much change in the manufacturing process much to create a WWW or YWB 1080p LCD that has less or no color but passes way more light, allowing less backlight or even a reflective mode, while still being driven with conventional electronics

So, would the WWW be a monochrome LCD? Wouldn't these be similar to the ones sometimes used in small electronic displays like this one:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/f42bf354-0672-4c24-b8a7-528462775dbe.png)

I am not sure of what the YWB would do.

> These could be used in public transport signage etc. In some cases, a monochrome LCD with RGB backlight could also come in handy.

I am also interested in the use of the 'E-Ink' displays for public signage in well-illuminated places. I found a few examples online:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/962211ac-f462-4d6e-ad12-328cbf07bb83.png)

> Also not really related but it infuriates me that Samsung turned the Bayer filter 45°, halved the pixel count and patented it as an OLED pattern so nobody can make similar displays.

I am not familiar with this... I looked it up and I think it is this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family

I'll look into it. Interesting!

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T18:34:24.862267Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21742367
Post ID: 101426
Community ID: 2742

> Interesting examples, we’re really splitting hairs here.

Haha, maybe  😜 I did some reflection about why the term 'artificial' in the context of photography made me want to jump into the conversation in the first place. I think that the reason is that the term 'artificial' implies that there is a boundary between what corresponds to a 'natural' photograph and an 'artificial' photograph. 

Thanks for responding to those examples and giving a definition, I think now I better understand what you mean when you say 'artificial'. I was interpreting it from a universal point of view of 'natural/artificial', but I see now that you meant it in the sense of the camera's nature.  So, if one simply takes a photo with the camera, it is 'natural' in the sense that the camera's nature was enough to capture that image. When a human uses a technique that creates an image cannot be captured by the camera itself, then it is 'artificial'.

No need to continue discussing the semantics of 'artificial', I think we both know what each other means now  😄 

Still, always to chat more about these things as I enjoy talking about techniques. I am actually considering getting a monochrome industrial camera to create some color images manually. I already have filters from UV to the near-IR. Like what I mentioned in example 4. I am curious about whether I can capture noticeably better luminances throughout by using the filters manually. I'm also keeping an eye for an affordable camera with this sensor type: https://www.sony-semicon.com/en/products/is/industry/multispectral.html ... 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T15:02:36.140539Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21738080
Post ID: 101426
Community ID: 2742

Ah, alright! My reason for describing the details of the process was primarily to emphasize the parallels along the processing chain between different techniques. 

I am curious about how you draw the line between 'artificial' and 'not artificial', hope you don't mind me asking. 

- Is a black-and-white image produced by a camera without the color filter artificial? 
- Is a landscape photograph generated by sticking multiple images together artificial? 
- Is a long exposure image artificial? 
- What about placing a monochromatic camera into a tripod, taking three different photos - one with a green, one with a blue, and one with a red filter, and then creating a color image using these three different images as an input? 


========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T12:17:18.400622Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21734774
Post ID: 101426
Community ID: 2742

It is not about colorspace conversion. Most color cameras today use a Bayer filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter . The camera captures 3 almost-overlapping images, one green, one blue, one red. Using data from these three images, it calculates the red,green,blue values for each pixel. This combines a physical technique (the Bayer filtering) with digital software algorithms to produce the final image.

In focus stacking, one generates a set of overlapping images while scanning the focal plane. Software is then used to combine the in-focus slices to produce an image that is in focus over a wider depth of field. So, again, we combine a physical process (movement of the focal plane) with a digital processing method. 

In the first case you have a technique that has been implemented at the hardware level by camera sensor engineers. The second is a technique that is implemented at the photographer level. I see both techniques as equally 'artificial'. In the first case the filters scan through colors. In the second case the focal plane is scanned. In the first case the people who developed the camera firmware did the work of automated processing, in the second case the photographer needs to do the processing themselves. 

I don't mean to debate your definition, I just wanted to jump in and share my perspective. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T10:57:07.833231Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21733520
Post ID: 101426
Community ID: 2742

I understand where you are coming from, but I think that - perhaps without realizing it - you are using a definition of 'artificial' that practically categorizes all photography as 'artificial'. 

For example: Camera sensors and also the older types of photographic film usually do not discriminate color directly. Techniques are used to combine multiple layers of color data together in order to replicate colors as we see them. Inside of modern a digital camera, for example, this is generally done my using a variable color filter grid on top of a monocromatic pixel array and then applying an algorithm to smooth out color data. Many camera users today may completely oblivious to this kind of processing, but the camera is making a lot of different choices for them and performing different kinds of processing. There are also other built-in features to removing aliasing, optical aberrations, color correction, etc... 

Old school photographers would also need to combine filters or different material films together to create color renditions. It is just that, today, the camera does it for us. But photography involves a lot of these 'artificial' methods to capture an image. 

Focus stacking is a technique in which one expands the range of an optical system by capturing multiple slices and combining them optically together to recreate a larger depth of field. This is technical photography. 

So, when you call this 'artificial', well... The act of projecting an image into some kind of film and then somehow preserving that image either directly on the film or as a digital representation is an artificial process. All photography is artificial. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T10:42:19.899553Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21733326
Post ID: 100528
Community ID: 204

AMSTERDAM TRIP: 52.37952717594758, 4.898731163397595 -> 52.373726213381254, 4.8991743688343785 -> 52.37307624236834, 4.892481840346751 -> 52.375235597713356, 4.883881824117286 -> 52.364346142549444, 4.882779439603186 -> 52.358151346039655, 4.868920785661565 -> 52.36032825423474, 4.885688072103288 -> 52.38899110197864, 4.8381014035210965 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T06:21:31.036926Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21730134
Post ID: 100746
Community ID: 63

This scanner is for 2-factor authentication in the case that one does not want to use a phone app. When you try to log in, or pay online, the browser displays a unique QR code that the scanner is able to decode.

You would enter your pin into the scanner, scan the code, and the scanner displays a number. You then type that decoded number into a field under the QR code and your are let through.

It can be ordered for free here in the NL: https://www.ing.nl/particulier/digitaal-bankieren/mijn-ing/scanner

So, with this scanner as a 2FA method, the app is not needed. One can pay offline with a card, online with a scanner, and check account balances through any browser using the scanner to log in.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-03T06:11:28.383911Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21730033
Post ID: 100746
Community ID: 63

Ahh, no no. We can pay with card with no need for an app. This code reader thing can be used for 2FA when making an online payment or logging into the banking site, so one does not need to use a phone app.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-02T22:17:00.843228Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21723551
Post ID: 100989
Community ID: 75

I don't know... [@Assassassin@lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/u/Assassassin) sounds rather confident.

========================================

Date: 2025-09-02T21:46:49.247855Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21723011
Post ID: 100746
Community ID: 63

In the Netherlands, at least with ING, you can request standalone code reader and pay through any browser, like this:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/4b1a1cdf-bd2e-4b33-ac2f-c3b4a86348b9.png)

========================================

Date: 2025-09-02T20:06:05.724323Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21721008
Post ID: 71287
Community ID: 2289

Wow, that's some real dedication to moderation. Nice job!  😄 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-02T20:03:05.045644Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21720956
Post ID: 99439
Community ID: 2689

Ahh, that sucks... I was hoping that the [recently developed nutritionally-enhanced yeast](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250822073807.htm) would help significantly with such colony collapse. But this article attributes the deaths not to malnutrition but to the parasitic mite *Varroa destructor*, so that's another problem that needs solving. Poor bees are really being attacked from all angles. 

========================================

Date: 2025-09-01T20:55:26.440864Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21699928
Post ID: 99089
Community ID: 2742

Wow! really really cool!! 

Near my place there is a spot where the 'Yellow Stainer' (*Agaricus xanthodermus*) fruits. The yellow stainer becomes yellow when you cut it, and what makes it especially interesting is that the yellow pigment is an azobenzene derivative (4,4'-dihydroxy-azobenzene). Azobenzene is very well known in the field of photochemistry because it is a light-driven switch. But, in nature, it is extremely rare. I actually only know of this specific example....

So I am very curious about what the bright yellow is in this fungus....

According to this review on fungal pigments: [Pigments of Higher Fungi: A Review](https://cjfs.agriculturejournals.cz/pdfs/cjf/2011/02/01.pdf)

It appears that the main component of the yellow pigment could be a compound called 'gomphidic acid'

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/99232846-51bf-4445-96f6-de0368014937.png)

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/33b34b14-8173-46ce-a91a-01cb0536fab4.png)

This molecule is very similar to the molecule from the lichen that you posted a few months ago, vulpinic acid, except that one of the phenyls has 1 hydroxide group and the other contains 3 hydroxides. 

This is the structure of vulpinic acid, for comparison:

![](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/45e5e5ec-fca3-428c-ae3b-9e377c118d0c.png)

I still don't understand why Gomphidius has a yellow base, what about the metabolism of fungi makes them choose vulpinic acid-like molecules as pigments, and whether there is a functional reason why the yellow stainer uses an azobenzene derivative and this one a vulpinic acid... My current guess is that the metabolism to produce vulpinic acid evolved and is often recycled for pigment production, and that the yellow's stainer is using the azobenzene as some form of defense mechanism (it would be very cool if it turns out to be a phototoxic one) and the yellow color is merely accidental in that case. 



========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T21:58:29.639249Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21681260
Post ID: 91551
Community ID: 1881

Wow. This is really magnificent work!! I just had a look through the Wikipedia article of *Platynereis dumerilii* and I can see from the citation list that you have quite a story with these guys 😁 It is very neat to see how you were figuring out this worm's phototaxis in 2008 and by now you have figured out a map of the whole thing.

Looking at the movie and the paper I am very intrigued and also a bit intimidated by the complexity! I would really like to get five minutes to experience this worm through your eyes. I will set some time to go through this paper carefully and try to benefit a little bit from your insight. 

Thanks a lot for sharing this here, it really is a privilege! Very very cool stuff. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T20:03:21.836288Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21679122
Post ID: 96824
Community ID: 2742

This may also be of interest to you, even though they do not use this specific mushroom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4TjnxFO3yw

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T20:00:50.395991Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21679077
Post ID: 96824
Community ID: 2742

From: https://www.fungusfactfriday.com/119-pisolithus-arrhizus/

>The Dyeball, as its common name implies, can also be used for dyeing wool. P. arrhizus is counted among the best mushrooms for dyeing and imparts wool with a deep brown to reddish-brown to blackish color. The pigments come from the tar-like gel between the peridioles, so younger Dyeballs work better.

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T19:08:26.042521Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21678121
Post ID: 96977
Community ID: 63

OK, fine... I'll be honest...

I have had good experiences with it. I have not had problems with apps. Most of my apps I get via Obtaininum. As for the UI, I think it is fine. 

I don't think Google will be able to lock my Pixel's bootloader, and, if they do, well it is already running the OS. So it shouldn't be a problem for a while. If at some time GrapheneOS stops being supported I will find something else. I don't need a guarantee of permanence to find it useful today. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T17:26:04.472852Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21676300
Post ID: 96824
Community ID: 2742

Hmm, I'm not so sure, I think that for *Scleroderma* the inside is a lot denser.

To me, these larger granules look more like a dyeball, *Pisolithus arhizus*: https://www.jungledragon.com/specie/8966/dyeball.html

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T15:12:45.579194Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21673942
Post ID: 96590
Community ID: 2181

I'm so sorry you went through that. It sounds terrible

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T13:16:21.106685Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21672081
Post ID: 96334
Community ID: 2654

Yeah! When I read the abstract I actually remembered your bees and Chernobyl projects  😁 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-31T12:14:56.379666Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21671163
Post ID: 96334
Community ID: 2654

Right?! Sensors capable of discriminating animal species present within an area is such a fun concept. 

Perhaps in some years we will have the tech to easily build a system similar to flightradar24.com that tracks local birds or other species rather than planes. There are already websites where people manually contribute their observations to build maps of species distributions over time, but a live view would be so cool.  

========================================

Date: 2025-08-30T19:03:07.263006Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21659552
Post ID: 94540
Community ID: 1190

I do take your feedback and other's seriously. I have looked into it and I also have my concerns about the fit, so I will talk to them. 

If there is an example of mod abuse, a user report can lead to me taking direct action without contacting anyone. But a bad fit is not an emergency, we can talk and resolve it that way.  

> Following that same logic I suppose it’s okay for anti-vaxxers, fruitians, naturopaths, chiropractors, acupuncturists and conspiracy theorists to also join the team if they dedicate enough effort towards it.

If they have positive/valuable interactions with members of the community, enforce the rules fairly, follow the rules, etc... Yes, I don't mind. 

In this case, the moderator thinking that eating exclusively meat is healthy is not the reason why I think they might not be a good fit to mod that community. 

> The user should be a commentator not a moderator,

I think so too

> backgrounds are important to consider in predicting how they will shape the community

I do not disagree with you on this. When I said:

*I am quite receptive to specific reports of specific actions, but I am not going to micro-manage users or mods and make assumptions/predictions about potential future behavior.*

I am not saying that the background is not important. I am talking about delegation. The people who create communities and moderate them own them, not me. I (admin level) am not micro-managing the decisions of the community builders and running background checks on users. I respond to reports. In this case, I was responding to the user that tagged me, letting them know that I am alert and ready to respond to reports of mod abuse.

> This is a disappointing response that will cause a schism in the community as I don’t want people like RFK Jr. anywhere near positions of power when it comes to health.

Why would it be disappointing? This is the drama community! Schism in the community is what we live for!! 

No, but, really. Sorry to disappoint you, and I do appreciate you being attentive to the community and bringing this up.

========================================

Date: 2025-08-30T10:20:38.003294Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21651808
Post ID: 94540
Community ID: 1190

Sure. I do not mind if people hold views that I disagree with, and I am very appreciative of anyone who chooses to donate some of their time and effort to moderation. 

If someone abuses moderation powers to disrupt a local community, let me know and I'll try to understand the situation, have a chat with them, or possibly remove them if the situation does get out of hand. I am quite receptive to specific reports of specific actions, but I am not going to micro-manage users or mods and make assumptions/predictions about potential future behavior. 

To be specific, in the context of moderating a "public health" community...

Acceptable: Mod or user posts often scientific articles discussing some positive relationship between the health in communities and eating meat. The user/mod may be biased to post articles that conform to their belief/opinion. If the content they post is high-quality  and relevant to public health, and they do not overload the community with this single topic, then it is not a problem. Users are free to contribute on-topic however they'd like.

Unacceptable: Moderator removes posts about peer-reviewed scientific articles about public health benefits of vegan diets, a reasonable paper pointing out a risk in meat-eating diets, or bans users who make comments arguing against the conclusions or validity of a paper simply because the paper conforms to the mod's beliefs.

I think this is reasonable. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-30T08:02:09.082653Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21650337
Post ID: 94680
Community ID: 1874

I would also be shy if people called me stink bug. Nice photo!

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Date: 2025-08-30T08:00:36.406860Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21650318
Post ID: 94611
Community ID: 2742

Cool! That is quite pointy. 

Is the spotty pattern on the Suillus normal? Or is it showing signs of being parasitized?

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Date: 2025-08-24T23:39:59.589102Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21532018
Post ID: 60437
Community ID: 75

A few years ago I decided I wanted to improve my hand flute skills and began consciously practicing daily. Since then, I have developed the habit of playing the hand flute automatically when my hands are not busy. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-24T12:44:30.406722Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21520887
Post ID: 60825
Community ID: 1321

That's awesome! And the [paper is open access](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09431-y) :) 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-23T22:21:38.280162Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21511133
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Haha, yeah, trusting ChatGPT with how to manipulate the database and change config files is a risky move 😆 I did use it myself to remind me of the postgresql syntax to find and alter the field.

========================================

Date: 2025-08-23T14:16:56.482460Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21502461
Post ID: 33015
Community ID: 1342

That's awesome, great work! Thanks for sharing

========================================

Date: 2025-08-23T14:15:01.422079Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21502429
Post ID: 33015
Community ID: 1342

Interesting! I've ordered it 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-23T12:21:33.656191Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21500400
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Sorry, I went to sleep. Glad you were able to sort it out 😄 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T23:04:54.896113Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21487632
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

  😁 👍   

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T22:47:36.504644Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21484197
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

So, ultimately my problem was that I was trying to set all of the limits to what I thought were "reasonable" values simultaneously, and misunderstood what 'Message' meant, and so I ended up breaking things with my changes without the reason being obvious to me. I looked into the source code and I can see now that indeed 'Messages' refer to API calls and not direct messages, and that there is no 'Direct Message' rate limit. 

If I let 'Messages' stay high I can adjust the other values to reasonable values and everything works fine. 

Thanks a lot for your help!! I am surprised and happy it actually worked out and I understand a little more  😁 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T22:30:34.175953Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21480584
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Thanks! 

I was able to crash the instance for a few minutes, but I think I have a better idea of where the problem is. Ths $emote_addr variable seems to work just the same.

In the rate limit options there is a limit for ''Message''. Common sense tells me that this means 'direct message', but setting this to a low number is quite bad. While testing I eventually set it to '1 per minute' and the instance became unresponsive until I modified the settings in the database manually. If I give a high number to this setting then I can adjust the other settings without problem. 



========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T21:51:07.604046Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21475867
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Yes, I see this there. Most of the nginx config is from the 'default' nginx config in the Lemmy repo from a few years ago. My understanding is somewhat superficial - I don't actually know where the variable '$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for' gets populated, for example. I did not know that this contained the client's IP. 

```
    # backend
    location ~ ^/(api|pictrs|feeds|nodeinfo|.well-known) {
      proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:8536/;
      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";

      # Rate limit
      limit_req zone=mander_ratelimit burst=30000 nodelay;

      # Add IP forwarding headers
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }

```

I need to do some reading 😁 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T21:36:48.169822Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21475613
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Thanks! Yes, I saw both messages and I am now going through the NGINX config and trying to understand what could be going on. To be honest, Lemmy is the hobby that taught me what a 'reverse proxy' and a 'vps' are. Answering a question such as 'Are you sending the client IP in the X-Forwarded-For header?' is probably straight forward for a professional but for me it involves quite a bit of learning 😅 

At location /, my nginx config includes:

```
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
``` 

So, I think that the answer to your question is probably 'yes'. If you did have these rate limits and they were stable, the more likely explanation is that something about my configuration is sub-optimal. I will look into it and continue learning, but I will need to keep my limits a bit high for the time being and stay alert. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T21:18:02.791190Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21475295
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

> I don’t recall any of them being from mander (unless they were dealt with before I started testing?), but thanks for taking preventative measures :)
> 
>     I don’t know what ‘Antiyanks’ is
> 
> It’s the codename for a particular long-term troll and is based off of their original username pattern (which they still use sometimes). I have reason to believe it’s also the same troll that used to spam the racist stuff in Science Memes.
> 
> These are most of today’s batch (minus the JON333 which was just a garden-variety spammer that made it into the last screenshot).

No, they were not in mander.xyz. But I am generally quite relaxed when it comes to accepting applications. I mostly reject an applicant if it is very clear it is not an actual user, and then actively follow up on recent accounts for a short time. So the possibility of silent spammer accounts accumulating over time is always a concern. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T21:07:27.378509Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21475121
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

>So, a ‘Comments’ Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct?
>
>>Correct, per client IP.

Setting the limits to more reasonable values, like '20 posts per minute', causes the server to stop serving posts. My front page goes blank.

So, I am starting to think that '20 pots per minute' means 'requesting 20 posts per minute' and not 'creating 20 posts per minute'. 

I am still having doubts about what these limits mean, but setting reasonable numbers seems to break things, unfortunately. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T20:53:50.321153Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21474051
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Hmmm - after changing these settings to what I think are reasonable settings, the server crashed and I am now getting 'Too many requests' messages.... So, perhaps there is something not working so well with these rate limits, or I am still misunderstanding their meaning. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-22T20:48:46.859129Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21472852
Post ID: 58852
Community ID: 114

Thanks for the heads up. I don't know what 'Antiyanks' is, but I already had to ban one comment spammer.

The rate limits are indeed a bit confusing. The settings are:

Rate Limit: X
Per Second: Y

I understand this to be 'X for every Y seconds'

So, a 'Comments' Rate limit: 10, Per second: 60, means a maximum of 10 comments per minute, correct? 

Maybe the reason you see 99999999 is due to troubleshooting. I have increased my instance's limits multiple times while troubleshooting server issues, because the meaning of the settings was not clear to me. These limits are usually not the reason for the sever issue, but I put some high number and did not bring them back down after the issues were resolved. 

I have lowered them now to more reasonable numbers. I will also be more strict with new applications for the time being. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-20T22:05:26.810090Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21401498
Post ID: 19902
Community ID: 1363

Of course, no worries at all! I also was not active. Thank you for pointing it out. I will pay attention. 

========================================

Date: 2025-08-20T19:27:31.944318Z
Comment ID: https://mander.xyz/comment/21398244
Post ID: 19902
Community ID: 1363

Did you continue to notice these performance issues? I am accessing the site via Firefox again, and I have not yet experienced these issues. But I did notice RAM usage was approaching the 16 GB limit. Rebooting the server brought this back down to ~5 GB, so it is possible that some process is locking RAM over time. I will keep an eye on this and I am looking into upgrading the server infrastructure. 

========================================

