Inter-node mesh with raw Wireguard is an exercise in patience to say the least; I have a few different colo sites, my house, my phone, LTE/5G hotspots, raspberry pi projects in the field, etc that I want to fully connect together.
Raw Wireguard is fine for a road warrior or site-to-site VPN setup as is common, but when you want multipoint peer-to-peer connections without routing through what might be a geographically distant point, magic DNS, etc, Tailscale really shines through.
Although at that point I'm sure you, and any similar user, would not actually rely on ad-hoc advice like in this thread, and instead just evaluate what is needed.
As an aside, personally speaking, headscale solves basically none of my concerns associated with introducing more software, complexity and third parties (the maintainers) into my network setup.
Less so because of paranoia towards the software/product itself, and more so because of the increased surface area to attack.
But I also think that anyone actually bothering to set headscale up probably falls into the aforementioned group of people that actually thinks about their requirements.
"Rarity" is a distinction without merit in this particular case; the important thing to note is that (most) clouds don't guarantee _any_ availability of a single zone. A system which stashes all of its infrastructure in one zone only is expected to be impacted by issues with that cloud, while a multi-zone setup spanning a region is generally "soft-guaranteed" to be resilient to normal operations / failures.
Seeing this, I had the initial idea of using AdGuard logs to trigger a power-down of your device if you try and visit brainrot content. I think I like it that way more.
$200 is enough to get you a pair of Keen boots, which will last a year or two. Truly "good" in the boot world is hand welted hand made leather boots, which are a rarity these days. There are functionally only a few bootmakers that still manufacture this way these days, and about half of them are all in the same Washington State region :)
Expect ~$400, and it's easy to spend $600 without much effort.
That said, look at my comment above in this thread; they do really last 10 years or more, so the investment is well worth it.
You can get goodyear welted boots which are decent and will likely last on the order of 10 years for 200$ if you're willing to let the person hand stitching it for you be brown and overseas (i.e. buy from Thursday who will make them in Mexico or Portugal)
Hell, Schott will sell you a pair of made in the USA goodyear welted boots for 300$.
Yes, I have an 8 year old pair of boots that have been through all sorts of conditions, all over the world. And I don't even do anything to maintain them. You can get very good boots for $200.
Oh hey I'm uniquely positioned to answer this; though I'm in tech (and at this point frankly speaking well-compensated) my family have been bootmakers for decades.
I'm sitting at a tech office right now wearing a pair of boots that my father made for me in 2015 - regardless, they're absolutely spotless and I'd wear them to a formal event without hesitation. Every 6 months or so when I'm by his store I shine them up and put in a fresh pair of leather laces. Every 3 or so years, he re-soles them when the soles eventually wear out and lose traction. Eventually they'll require a rebuild, but they've got probably another 5-10 years of daily wear in them before that. I've got a few more pairs I swap between every so often, like a pair with OD green canvas that looks nice with khakis, but these solid black ones are my daily wear.
While 10 years sounds like a good run for boots, my father has a pair at ~35 years old now that he still wears frequently. IIRC they've been through one or two rebuilds and few re-soles in that time.
Were these commodity sneakers, I'd be purchasing a new pair every few months. Even nice running or trail shoes only tend to last a few hundred miles in my experience, but I've put tens of thousands on these and will get ten thousand more easily. Re-soles and rebuilds aren't free, but they're less than a replacement and put years of lifetime back on the boot. They're also comfortable as hell and fit me like a glove.
So in short: yeah, rich men do wear the same pair of boots for 10 years, or even far longer.
Not all boots are made the same though. I had some bad luck with a pair of veldtschoen welted boots from the English firm Crockett and Jones in a custom leather. The commando sole split twice at the toe, which they repaired, but after less than five years of wear the lining at the heel had worn through.
I took them in to be rebuilt, but after inspection they said the stiffener had come loose, and nothing could be done. Here have your expensive and now broken boots back.
I'd assumed when I got them I'd be wearing them for decades, and at least a few rebuilds. Maybe there was something wrong with that specific pair, but I did have a goodyear welted sole randomly detach from a pair of six month old city shoes from the same firm. And yes I had been looking after my shoes (frequent cleaning and polishing, always using shoe trees, skipping days between wears, etc).
When I had a pair of Church's fall apart I put that down to them no-longer being a quality brand, but now I don't think you can guarantee a long life just as the shoe was expensive and from a reputable brand. I have many shoes that have lasted better (and now since covid I don't wear polished shoes daily), but that does sometimes feel like luck of the draw.
Yes, that's my family's business, I'm glad to hear you've had such great experiences. Similar to you, I've never looked back; every time I put on trail shoes I yearn for my boots again.
Purely anecdotal, but I know friends have used Nicks without issue. The basic advice I got was to buy jackets and leatherware from places in Washington and Oregon.
It wasn't a 30dBi antenna for the control link, but a light moxon with 5.98dBi according to its datasheet. Standard 5.8GHz analog video, on the other hand, did require a ton of gain.
LoRa is just a protocol, there are no rules inherent to the protocol itself. Certain LoRaWAN networks have rules around how often you can send messages through them, but RC links don't use LoRaWAN.
Notably, Wez's flight was done with 2.4GHz LoRa (this was one of his main points, to address naysayers who claimed a 2.4GHz link could never achieve >100km) while Charles is using 900MHz - the same setup that achieved 100km (100mW with a lightly directional antenna on one end, ExpressLRS 50Hz RF mode) would have a theoretical range of >500km on 900MHz. LoRa at longer wavelengths can achieve some incredible feats - like microwatts or nanowatts of power to >1 mile as we saw here. :)
In particular, people used to plain FSK RC protocols like Spektrum DSM, FrSky D8, Futaba FASST, and similar which tend to failsafe around <1km even with 100mW of power believed that a 2.4GHz link could never do 100km regardless of interference or noise issues.
Also notably, LoRa does tremendously well with real-world noise and interference. Of course any receiver is susceptible to frontend overload, but in "normal" situations I never worry about flying 2.4GHz even in crowded cities, and have never had a failsafe even in some ridiculous situations. As someone above mentions, LTE on the 800MHz band with 900MHz control links are much more of a problem - I've had a failsafe for that exact reason at <200m total distance from takeoff.
> Were the naysayers saying 2.4GHz was impossible at all, or were they saying in a normal setting?
The naysayers, even if they aren't strawmen, weren't "saying" anything of note. There aren't any mysteries or questions here: what can be achieved is predetermined by the factors involved. The key figures of merit are power, gain, path loss, noise and receiver sensitivity. Whatever those factors are determines feasible range, and they are all well understood.
Should we be looking for evidence of LoRA style transmissions for SETI? The energy required to get a loud conventional signal to go dozens or hundreds of light years is insane. But it seems like this kind of modulation might allow interstellar range with “only” gigawatt scale power levels.
It’d be an ideal way to create a signal with the potential to reach, say, a large fraction of the galaxy without requiring a Dyson swarm to power the transmitter.
Of course there are so many modulations this might be combinatorially impossible unless we can make some rational guesses about what a rational intelligence would use for interstellar communication if they wanted others to notice.
You get added again out of a spread spectrum signal and it helps with interference too but the main issue is that with the power spread out, it's much harder to detect at long distances. It becomes even harder to detect when you don't know the spreading sequence. You may "see" some RF power in the spectrum but without knowing the chip sequence, it might as well be noise. LoRa uses a type of spread spectrum method that is even harder to detect if you aren't expecting it. There's an example of someone using it for a 100km data link for an RC plane but you know what works at an even longer range? CW, aka Morse code, at low frequencies (1-30MHz). They can wrap around the earth even at relatively low power. LoRa is nice because it's modern and you can get nice data rates that are appropriate for machine-to-machine communications but spread spectrum waveforms will never be useful when you just want any signal to go as far as possible.
Yeah.. but with 900Mhz won't there be a lot more interference from 4G towers though?
I remember there were a bunch of "Crossfire failsafed near a 4G tower because i chose the wrong region" videos.
Raw Wireguard is fine for a road warrior or site-to-site VPN setup as is common, but when you want multipoint peer-to-peer connections without routing through what might be a geographically distant point, magic DNS, etc, Tailscale really shines through.
If you're paranoid, enable https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock or run https://headscale.net/ on your own as a control server.