Let me tell you about the most wasteful US federal government spending I know about. It's a humdinger. You and everyone you know are mired in it for weeks, or perhaps months, every year. It will cost you, personally, thousands of dollars over your lifetime. I'm talking about filing your taxes.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/doubling-up-on-paperwork/#rip-freefile

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The CircuitPython Show returns! I chat with CircuitPython community member Aaron Pendley about his start with computers, discovering #CircuitPython, and a number of his projects.

Find the show wherever you get your podcasts or visit https://www.circuitpythonshow.com/@circuitpythonshow/episodes/aaron-pendley

Looks like #meshtastic 2.6 will have peering over UDP, which is very convenient: https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/pull/5779
This would allow meshing the 433 and 868 MHz networks together without MQTT and more.

I used to host a private MQTT server and mod the firmware a bit (janky). With this PR merged to my local version, two nodes can now communicate with each other over WiFi, no additional settings or servers required.
Yes, it eats an additional hop (2 if compared to a dummy repeater), but it's so much easier.