A bad hair day

A soggy male splendid fairywren (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendid_fairywren) at Banyowla Regional Park near Perth, Australia

Photograph Vikrant Deshpande

I know how he feels, but without the plumage.

#BirdsOfMastodon #Australia #BadHairDay

Australia, the first ever country to roll out a national HPV vaccination programme, is now seeing zero cervical cancer in women under 25. Together, vaccination and screening in Australia have pushed incidence down to 6.3 cases per 100,000 women and increased five-year survival to 76.8%

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6w15vgp7lo

🟢 That green light glowing in the dark is a mesh radio, GPS receiver, AI assistant, and emergency communications terminal — all running on battery inside a weatherproof aluminum box I built from scratch.

Meet the Cochrane Device — S/N 001.

After Hurricane Maria knocked out communications across Puerto Rico for months, I wanted a way to keep my family connected when everything fails. No cell towers. No internet. No power grid.

So I built one.

📦 Inside the IP66 aluminum enclosure:
→ Meshtastic LoRa mesh radio — encrypted, 15km range per hop
→ GPS with 3D fix in 18 seconds
→ WiFi hotspot so your phone becomes a node
→ Linux computer running full service stack
→ AI assistant that writes scripts on demand in the field
→ Remote access via Tailscale from anywhere on earth
→ 6-8 hours battery, solar chargeable

This is S/N 001 — the prototype. Every lesson learned here makes the next one better.

🖖

#Meshtastic #LoRa #EmergencyComms #PuertoRico #OffGrid #Linux #Maker #DIY #HamRadio #OpenSource

The remains of Tigh nan Saighdearan, or the "Soldiers' House", the tiny Jacobite-era barracks in a seriously remote but strategically important location west of Loch Arkaig, controlling a significant route across the western Highlands. More pics and info: https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/speanbridge/barracks/index.html

#Scotland #Lochaber