Meshtastic Android app

I’ve started playing with Meshtastic. It works pretty well in Los Alamos because there seems to be an active community who have set up, and who maintain, repeaters in high places. There’s also a very active community in Albuquerque, but that’s not important for my purposes.

This is a quick intro on what I got and how I set it up. It is intended for area volunteers interested in using Meshtastic for emergency management, backcountry communications, and for events such as JMTR where ham radio coverage is spotty.

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My laptop is set up as btrfs on a LUKS-encrypted partition. I bought a new M.2 drive, installed it on the extra slot… then wasted most of a day trying to make it work. Here’s a synopsis of why and what I did to resolve the problems. Hope it helps.

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Monday morning I was unable to solve the NYT crossword. I stared at my laptop screen in disbelief and apprehension, unable to fill in a single square. On a Monday¹. Dementia already? Stroke? Should I start taking Lion’s Mane extract? After finding my breath and calming my fears, I resolved to put my hopes on podman.

Podman is a container virtualization tool created and developed by my software team at Red Hat. It is not what most neurologists would suggest in a consultation; the reason I turned to it first was that my symptoms did not actually match the usual ones of cognitive decline²: my problem wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the clues, or that I could understand them but not think of the answers, it was that I couldn’t see the clues at all—nor, for that matter, the grid or anything related to the crossword program I’ve been using for the last fifteen years. It just crashed immediately upon starting.

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I started writing this epilogue in June 2018; somehow ten months passed by without me finishing or posting it. Much has happened since then.

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The sole reason we wrangled an extra day in Lima was to visit the Larco Museum: it had figured prominently in our pre-trip learning, and my friend R. visited it last year and reinforced the recommendation. Was it worth the emotional drain of being in Lima?

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Confirmed: El Mercado offers the best breakfast of the tour. We ate with appreciation.

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The plan: 8:30 train to Ollantaytambo where we’d get picked up, taken to pick up our luggage, then driven back to Cusco where we’d have lunch and an afternoon tour of Sacsayhuamán.

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We’re going up that?

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No luggage on the train to Machu Picchu; only small carryons. We packed what we needed, left our bags at K’uychi Rumi, and boarded a van (just one, a big one) back to Ollantaytambo for a more leisurely but still rushed tour.

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Today’s options were:

1. Long drive, short easy hike, some time at Ollantaytambo, and a threat offer to visit a beer pub; or
2. All-day hike through another 14,000-foot pass.

No-brainer, right?

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