UPDATE: We should be all clear! Remember to listen to the pre-upgrade checks instead of assuming you know best.

It's been a minute! More on that in a bit. For now, we've missed a couple important SMF updates. I'll run them tonight at 1am UTC (6pm PDT, 9pm EDT).

Expect some downtime during then, but hopefully we'll be back up within a few minutes!

Past couple weeks ive been taking on the task of picking up french. So far my strategy has been to stuff my head with basic vocabulary via flash cards, and slowly work my way through a pdf of a beginner textbook and that's been working actually kinda well?

Plan is to try to get the basics down and then immerse myself via media. I actually managed to make my way through a playthrough of Metroid Fusion in french while understanding most of it (thank goodness I already know another romance language). Also watched a french streamer the other day and understood nearly nothing except for when he angrily told link "Ouvre la porte!!" after bonking into a door. Also I think scarecrow video has a lot of french films we could check out...

Anyone else trying to pick up another language?

forgot to post my arrangement of the Look Around You intro theme itself when i finished it oops

Symphonic "Jeremy A. Smith" Games is a master of Megadrive-type music. this track is the first thing that plays when I queue up his folder in my library and it always gets me so pumped

https://symphonicgames.bandcamp.com/track/fire-run

Quote from: lifning on Mar 27, 2025, 11:07 PM

Quote from: snow on Mar 27, 2025, 01:17 AMhttps://diversesystem.bandcamp.com/track/4-00-am

The whole AD:Garage album is pretty good, but this one's a jam imo. Which also reminds me M3-2025 Spring is coming up in a month :eyes:

no kidding about that album being a jam! into the pending-bandcamp-friday cart it goes

been poking around the rest of Diverse System's releases, the AD:Piano series of albums make for great focus music and also remind me of Sonic Frontiers

iirc LoRa has much Lo-er Ra when its line-of-sight isn't obstructed, but wiki says even in urban areas the range is about 3 miles, which certainly beats wifi..

would a T9-esque keyboard system be a decent compromise?

i love how much the theme matches the wallpaper

happy pride month from madeline—it's supposed to be 2/3 of the trans pride flag—and also happy pride month from hyfetch if you run hyfetch rn

Imagine, if you will, a pager. The old devices that go bleep blop and would give you a short message from someone, and that was it. Sometimes you could give an acknowledgement, and some of the fancier ones would even let you respond, but mostly it was a way for someone to remotely poke you on the shoulder.

Nowadays, with our newfangled "cellular telephones" and "3G", communication is instant and two-way, five-way, maybe even twenty-way??? The possibilities are endless, and I will have no part in it!

But acquiring one of these elusive "pagers" is not as easy as one might believe. The remaining few carriers such as Spok primarily cater to the health care industry, where reliably receiving critical information is treated as more important than a confetti effect when someone writes "birthday". Even with resellers available, POCSAG is notoriously insecure, and from what I've heard, has far spottier coverage than modern cellular bands.

Enter: LoRa. It's not always better in terms of coverage, but it's at least a much more open standard with encryption built-in. Modules are readily available, and there are multiple development kits that come with an RP2040 already wired up.

This is very early days, and I have nothing to show for it yet. I'm not even particularly versed in electrical engineering! But I figure if I'm going to learn, I should start with something actually interesting to me.

So far, the sub-tasks:

• How advanced should it be? A full keyboard would be too difficult, but acknowledgements or even simple responses (suggested by @iliana) would be nice.
• I'd rather avoid a piezoelectric speaker, as they can be pretty harsh. While this is probably ideal for a pager, I'd rather not annoy everyone around me in the process. I'm thinking of a monophonic synth a la Nokia phones, but that'll involve learning how those actually... work.
• I've been playing with a 16x2 LCD Character display, and it has definitely revealed to me that at least 3 rows are necessary. I'm guessing the driving of the display be the easiest part of the process.