Making, thinking (and still some coding). Life long learner. Interested in distributed, local and small-scale regenerative food & tech, coops and distributed business models.
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2026-05-21T11:58:30Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Rowing Solo npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Austrian Beach npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Standing at an ancestor's old house, or a gravesite you've been trying to find for years, someone with you says "this is where your great-grandmother used to stand and wave us off." If that sentence doesn't get captured alongside the photo in the next five minutes, it's gone. "Properly later, at a desk" is exactly where the actual content of it evaporates. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl The Lake Between Mountains npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Grinding down the mountains npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A protocol with exactly one implementation isn't decentralised. It's a single point of failure with good branding, and for most of its life that's what Reticulum had: Mark Qvist's Python reference stack, and everything downstream of it. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Renovator's Delight npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Modern granny flat npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Ask who owns the data a sensor network produces, and the architecture answers before the marketing does. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Blooming Orchard npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Almond pollination npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Part one of this series covered sensor telemetry over Reticulum: cryptographic primitives and a general-purpose message format, the shape of a deployment left up to you. Part two covers MeshCore, which takes the opposite approach. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl The Veggie Patch npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Compost lines npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Reticulum is best known as an off-grid, cryptographically addressed stack for private chat. Every destination is a cryptographic identity derived from a public key, with no central registry, no DNS, and no telco in the middle. But moving a sensor reading across a mesh runs on a completely different set of traffic physics than a human conversation. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Every "smart" camera comes with an unstated second customer: the company renting you the hardware. Wyze's shared-cache bugs put strangers into each other's live feeds this year. Ring's warrantless police-access arrangements keep blurring home security into public surveillance infrastructure. Flock Safety's automated numberplate cameras turned suburban streets into a movement ledger nobody voted for. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Yunfi Wetlands Reflections npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Free-range Coop and Chickens npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Mirror Lake npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Cows under the gum trees npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl 🌱 Important read for anyone interested in food, farming & ag. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Sunset Serenity npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Spring Bloom in South Australia npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A popup village of builders, programmers and ecological economists is settling into the Austrian mountains south of Vienna for a month, starting 24 August. They're running the Valley of the Commons in the Höllental, literally Hell Valley. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A commons doesn't usually die in one blow. It dies through a few thousand small administrative decisions that each look reasonable on their own. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl "Snaps are great" and "Flatpaks suck" is most of what you get when you ask why Canonical keeps pushing Snap. Neither helps. So after upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04 and hitting the usual confinement friction, I went and checked the actual history instead of arguing it out in a thread. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A three-part series on digital commons and licensing was supposed to be done. Then Martin Owens, an Inkscape developer, replied to part one on Mastodon and named the gap the whole series had missed: free software protected the artefact but never built a claim on being paid for making it. Not an oversight. Ideological. Eric Raymond's 1998 "Homesteading the Noosphere" framed hacker culture as a reputation economy precisely because it wrote wage labour out of the picture, and "must code, for free, in your spare time" quietly filtered out everyone whose contribution wasn't a pull request. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A vocabulary has crept into environmental policy without ever really being argued for: make nature investable. Biodiversity credits, green bonds, nature-based financial instruments, all resting on the premise that public funds are scarce so private capital should fund conservation instead. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Two frames dominate who governs AI: the market (ownership decides, contracts settle disputes) and the state (regulators impose rules from above, the EU AI Act being the most developed version). Both are partial. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl €264 billion a year leaves European organisations for foreign digital vendors, growing roughly 10% annually, not because the products improve at that rate, but because switching costs are engineered to make leaving expensive. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter calling hobbyists thieves for sharing software they'd written for each other. It wasn't a philosophical dispute, it was a property claim, backed by lawyers and eventually the WTO. It's happening again, faster and at far larger scale. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A mesh network has no centre to fail because it was never built with one. Every node, a device on a shed roof running LoRa, is relay, subscriber, and infrastructure at once. No map of the whole network, no central server, no authorisation hierarchy. That's just how the routing works. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl New piece on the dark money architecture behind Australia's renewable energy opposition. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl The home automation industry figured something out about fifteen years ago: hardware margins are thin, but subscription revenue is reliable. The most effective way to convert a one-time sale into recurring revenue is to make the device dependent on a service you control. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Follow-up to the Monsanto playbook post. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Something in AgTech investment land this week celebrated the "Monsanto playbook" as a model worth replicating. Seed IP, chemical lock-in, data extraction, switching costs engineered so deep the farmer can never leave. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Australia's F-35s arrived in 2018. When the logistics software failed, Australian engineers couldn't inspect or fix it — they waited for a Lockheed Martin patch. Scale that up to AUKUS submarines and $9.9 billion of classified AI in REDSPICE, and "sovereign capability" starts to sound like a terms-of-service agreement you didn't read. Estonia built its entire e-government stack on open standards — no single vendor holds the keys. We're assembling the world's most expensive collection of potential bricks. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl I pulled a local language model onto my laptop. No account, no API key, no data leaving the machine. Then I started using it — and noticed it thought about food systems, governance, and land management from somewhere around San Francisco, circa 2022. The model was running locally. My data was sovereign. And the thing was still, at some fundamental level, not mine. New post on what AI transparency actually requires — and why open weights and genuine openness are not the same thing. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A corporation is not a person. It has no soul, no body, and no conscience. Yet we've allowed this legal ghost to become a super-citizen. It’s time to name the lie and reclaim our sovereignty from the extractive machines of the old world. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl The fix is accounting, not ideology. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl The Australian agricultural ledger, unabridged: npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Austria. An alpine meadow above Salzburg. 50+ plant species per hectare. The farmer managing it — by hand, late cut, after the wildflowers set seed — has been paid for that stewardship since 1993. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Tuesday at 6am. Eight minutes. Every week, regardless of what the previous week looked like. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl During the 2022 Lismore floods, official warnings didn't reach the people who needed them. During the Central Victorian fires, power failed and the mobile network collapsed with it. Centralised communications infrastructure fails exactly when you need it most — and we keep building more of it. New post on how LoRa mesh networks and Reticulum can build community comms that survive when everything else doesn't. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl In 2020, Australian police forces denied using Clearview AI. Then Clearview suffered a data breach. The stolen customer list included Australian law enforcement agencies. The denials stopped. That pattern — quiet adoption, public denial, disclosure only under external pressure — repeats across every layer of Australia's surveillance infrastructure. New post: the inventory, layer by layer, and what you can actually do about it. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl 2026: The year we declare digital independence. No more cloud "tenancy" or corporate surveillance. Reticulum proves that we can build communication stacks with no centre to kill. Sovereignty isn't a gift; it's a protocol. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Yes - I am also more experimenting in regional areas and need the reach of 915MHz, but I can see the benefits (localised sensors for example). npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Off-grid comms has always forced a choice: sub-GHz for range, or something else for throughput. 2.4 GHz LoRa is rewriting that. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl There's a metric that determines whether a plant is actively growing, conserving water, or quietly stressed. It drives transpiration, nutrient uptake, stomatal behaviour. Commercial greenhouse operators have used it as their primary climate indicator for decades. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Rural Australia's digital divide isn't a force of nature — it's the result of a model that treats connectivity as a profit opportunity rather than essential infrastructure. But there's another way. Community-owned networks, cooperatives, and social enterprises are building better alternatives from the ground up. New post on reclaiming our digital lifelines from corporate gatekeepers. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Nature doesn't use central servers. A forest floor is a P2P network of autonomous peers. We're building technological mycelium that routes around censorship and hierarchy. The revolution will be fermented. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl The startup lobby is screeching that the CGT changes will kill Australian innovation. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl A less technical and more systems-level look at #Reticulum npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl "Free and open source" doesn't mean free to create. Building the software you rely on — Home Assistant, Reticulum, ESPHome — takes hundreds of hours of unpaid work by people who can burn out and walk away. Mark, the creator of Reticulum, nearly did exactly that in late 2025. New post on the sustainability crisis in open-source development, and what you can actually do about it. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Thanks for taking the time to read through the whole series — that means a lot! npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl Listening to a podcast about the American surveillance state — Flock cameras, fake cell towers, warrant-less location data - and feeling quietly relieved not to live in the US. Then I started looking at what Australia has actually built. The relief evaporated. npub1gaggl775xmqt4k4dm4t6ur6sveppjknnjpn7xyntftnmz4mv086sjpjkva leogaggl After years of hands-on testing — from early Meshtastic nodes to running Reticulum across remote South Australian properties — I've learned that choosing off-grid mesh networking technology isn't purely technical. It's philosophical. LPWAN series: a detailed, honest comparison of Meshtastic, MeshCore, Reticulum, and ClusterDuck Protocol, born from failed experiments and the occasional moment of genuine excitement when a packet hops across several kilometres of Australian bush.
