I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

  • 22 Posts
  • 241 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • 130GB for the entire thing? And the pi doesn’t choke on indexing / searching it?

    That was my thought. I knew it couldn’t hold it in RAM but thought it would be doing crazy IO and limited by being on SD, but it seems to not be a problem. Like I said, I don’t know how ZIM does it, but it does it well. Must have some kind of index that lets it fast travel to the correct blocks or something. I dunno lol.

    how capable is the search engine (I assume it has one?)

    Yep, it has search. It’s…okay but kind of primitive. It’s not slow, and if you’re searching for something that’s fairly unique (as far as keywords go), it does well. But if you’re searching something like an acronym where it shows up as a regular word in other entries, it’s a lot more hit or miss.



  • Yep, and I love it.

    I’ve got a little Banana Pi M4 Zero (PiZero form factor but much more powerful and with 4 GB RAM) loaded up with, among other useful tools, Kiwix and the full Wikipedia dump. I just refreshed it with the 2026-02 full dump, so I’m caught up for the year. I’ve also got a lot of other offline docs loaded up (React, Bun, and the devdocs for several libraries I use) and it’s nice to have local copies of those instead of googling every time.

    Surprisingly, the full ~130 GB Wikipedia dump works fine on a regular Pi Zero 2 with 512 MB RAM. I don’t know how ZIM works but it does work very very well.



  • Back in the day, I worked in the corporate office for a retail clothing chain (IT department, so not down in the weeds), and I can’t speak for H&M like you gave as an example, but for the one I worked for we didn’t design anything.

    We had a department of people called “buyers” who would work with various clothing vendors directly and wholesale bulk-purchase items for the stores. Their job was to basically figure out what was in style, what would sell, in which of our markets it would sell, and order them to stock in the stores. Not all stores carried the same styles/designs/whatever. e.g. We stocked college sports apparel only in markets near those colleges, our stores in warmer regions rarely carried winter apparel that we normally stocked in colder regions, etc.


  • I get that it isn’t the same but when all you have is a garbage version of a memory, I’m not sure or really matters whether the representation is the original garbage or something that makes you feel less regret over not having something better.

    In my experience, the worse the photograph the better my memory of it. Probably because my mind is already used to filling in the blanks in the garbage version, so it’s constantly refreshing the memory in my mind to keep it vivid. YMMV obviously. I’m also not much of a shutterbug and prefer to commit moments to memory than try to fight with my phone to snap a photo I’ll probably never look at.








  • I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

    Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

    Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.



  • I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

    Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

    Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.



  • I don’t use MQTT currently, but there’s several things you can do with it:

    • Pass some messages as plaintext for use in, say, HomeAssistant
    • Bridge meshes over the internet
    • Send/receive ProtoBuf messages from an MQTT client to the Meshtastic node and the mesh
    • Plugging in some of the mesh mapping programs to visualize the mesh

    I tried setting up MQTT with HomeAssistant but couldn’t get messages to come in correctly. Most likely my own fault but I just never got back to it as I didn’t have a specific need in mind when I was setting it up.