Front walkway has a drift of about 30in/76cm , so it gets to act as an extra drink cooler, more chilly than our garage.
Front walkway has a drift of about 30in/76cm , so it gets to act as an extra drink cooler, more chilly than our garage.
Monitoring Our Local Mesh Network in Virginia
There is something quietly beautiful happening across Virginia, and most people never see it unless they know where to look.
Right now, our local mesh network covers roughly two thirds of the state using nothing but radio. No cell towers. No carriers. No contracts. Just small devices talking to one another across distance, hills, and neighborhoods. If you layer the internet on top of it, the reach becomes as wide as anyone who still has a connection. But the real magic is that it does not need the internet at all.
Radio only needs two things. Power to the devices, and enough range between them to pass a signal along.
That is it.
The red dots on the map are live nodes. Each one is a person or a place. Each one is actively communicating as simple text messages with the others. No central infrastructure. No single point of failure. Messages hop from node to node like neighbors passing notes down a long porch.
If you have internet, you can relay traffic out to the wider world. If you do not, the network still breathes and moves on its own.
What flows across it is even better.
There are independent channels that cannot be blocked. They are encrypted by default. They are used to report ICE activity in real time, to ask for help, to offer help, to check on someone when the weather turns ugly. One day it is a heads up about enforcement moving through a county. The next day it is someone asking if anyone has a shovel to clear a driveway for an older neighbor. Sometimes it is just people staying in touch, making sure they are not alone if phones go dark.
This is what resilience looks like when it is built by regular people.
No corporation decides who gets to speak. No platform decides what is acceptable. There is no algorithm boosting outrage or burying kindness. It is just text moving through the air, carried by trust and proximity.
In an age where so much communication depends on fragile systems and distant companies, radio feels almost radical. Old technology doing a new job. Quietly. Reliably. Human scale.
As long as there is power, and as long as there are neighbors willing to keep a node alive, the network stays up.
That is worth monitoring. That is worth protecting. And honestly, that is worth being proud of.
Random trip made good, had a little outing to Small Batch Liquidations @smallbatchvirginia , which already sounds like a place that should involve forklifts, shelves of loot, and a bell you ring when something unexpected comes in. That is not far off. The inventory shifts constantly, like a tide made of pallets and hope, and the folks working there know what is on the floor right now without having to disappear into the back and guess.
We were on a post-holiday cleanup mission. The season has ended, the glitter has migrated into corners, and I suppose it is time to put things away in a way that suggests we might be functional people. Storage bins. Wreath containers. The unglamorous architecture of keeping a house from slowly collapsing into eternal seasonal chaos. Everything we grabbed was in brand new condition, and the price was right.
There was also a fun detour item. A TI-84 CE Plus Python calculator. Rechargeable. Modern in that specific calculator way where it still feels like serious equipment even if you mostly want to poke at it and see what it can do. Something to tinker with, graph nonsense on, maybe write a tiny program or three someday when the mood hits. (You can also tweak it to play retro video games.)
The people there were friendly and genuinely helpful, not hovering, not rushed, clearly used to the fact that what is available today might be gone tomorrow. They were well aware of their own moving inventory, which feels increasingly rare in stores these days. The prices were excellent in that way that makes you briefly wonder if you misunderstood something, then realize no, this is just how they operate.
You leave with what you came for, a little extra curiosity in the cart, and the sense that you just participated in a small, functional local loop. Things move through. People get what they need. The house gets put back together after the holidays.
A solid stop on an ordinary day that ended up being better than it needed to be.
#roanoakeva #shopping #cleanup #smallbatchliquidations
https://education.ti.com/en/products/computer-software/ti-connect-ce-sw
TI connect CE
https://yvantt.github.io/arTIfiCE/
arTIfiCE jailbreak
https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/browse/84pce
Sweet calc download cemetech site
https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/1372/x3232
This program is a slim shell and launcher program that has support for running programs regardless of archive status, along with an organized and colorful GUI. Hide programs, lock BASIC programs from editing, rename files and more with Cesium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_CE_series#:~:text=The%20TI%2D84%20Plus%20CE%20can%20run%20a%20wide%20variety,operating%20through%20the%20link%20port).
Leave it charging for a few hours. If it still boot loops then press and hold 2nd and del (they’re the top full sized buttons on the keypad) then press the reset button on the back of the calculator with a pencil for at least two seconds. You should see a message that says “send OS now”. Do not press clear.
Leave it charging on this screen for another few hours. Afterwards, press and hold the reset button on the back of the calculator for at least two seconds again (but don’t hold 2nd and del this time). This might cause the calculator to boot normally.
If you get the same “send OS now” screen then press the clear button (rightmost column on the keypad) and proceed with an OS reinstall: TI-84 Plus CE Recovery Techniques.
If it still boot loops then you likely got a defective unit. I’d return it for a new one.
If returning isn’t an option, you can try buying a new battery and replace it. Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus CE Battery Replacement
Or: Why “Cautious Governance” Isn’t Enough
Carilion Clinic frames its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as innovative and carefully regulated. But beneath the polished language and promising pilot projects lies a host of unresolved risks – risks that extend beyond slick marketing into real harms for patients, clinicians, and communities.
Carilion promotes tools like AI scribes to reduce clinician documentation time. Yes, clinicians spend significant hours on notes instead of patients – but AI scribes aren’t a panacea.
Research shows that while ambient AI documentation tools can potentially ease workload, they also come with limitations such as hallucinations, inaccuracies, and variable quality that require sustained human oversight. This means the burden is transformed, not eliminated.
Source: Journal of Medical Systems – Limitations of Ambient Clinical Documentation
More importantly, the root causes of burnout – understaffing, productivity quotas, and billing-driven documentation – cannot be solved through software alone.
Carilion cites predictive analytics tools designed to identify patient deterioration earlier. But real-world evidence shows that hospitals often do not adequately validate these models using their own patient populations.
Less than half of hospitals rigorously test AI tools for bias, raising serious concerns about reliability and equity.
Source: Health Affairs / Healthcare Dive – Hospitals Rarely Test AI for Bias
When models are trained on biased or incomplete data, they do not eliminate disparities – they scale them.
Source: arXiv – Algorithmic Bias in Healthcare AI
AI-driven command centers promise smoother patient flow and optimized bed usage. But efficiency is not the same as quality care.
When algorithms influence transfer decisions, bed assignments, and discharge timing, patients risk becoming logistics problems rather than people. These systems optimize throughput – not dignity, continuity, or trust.
AI-assisted imaging and clinical research tools rely on massive amounts of patient data. Yet patients rarely have meaningful control over how their data is reused, repurposed, or commercialized.
Ethical analyses warn that existing consent models are inadequate for AI-driven secondary data use.
Source: BMC Medical Ethics – AI, Data Use, and Informed Consent
Carilion emphasizes strict governance and data safeguards. However, research shows that advanced AI systems can sometimes re-identify individuals from supposedly anonymized datasets.
Source: Journal of Medical Internet Research – Re-identification Risks in Health AI
Public trust is fragile, and once patient data is compromised, it cannot be reclaimed.
Many healthcare AI tools operate as opaque systems, offering little explanation for how they reach conclusions. This lack of transparency undermines clinician trust and complicates accountability.
Source: JMIR Formative Research – Explainability Challenges in Clinical AI
Researchers have raised concerns that reliance on AI tools – particularly large language models – could lead to deskilling, where clinicians increasingly defer to machine output rather than exercising independent judgment.
Source: arXiv – Deskilling Risks from Generative AI
The federal regulatory framework for healthcare AI remains incomplete. Hospitals are largely left to self-govern, creating uneven standards and weak accountability.
Source: Reuters – Calls for Equity-First AI Regulation in Medicine
Healthcare in Southwest Virginia does not suffer from a lack of algorithms. It suffers from staffing shortages, rural access barriers, poverty-driven health disparities, and burnout.
AI does not fix these problems. It distracts from them.
Carilion’s cautious rhetoric is better than blind adoption, but it still places patients and clinicians inside a live experiment.
Skepticism is not anti-technology. It is pro-patient, pro-clinician, and pro-trust.
Medicine should move at the speed of trust, not the speed of software.
Possible career paths in 2026:
Missing hiker
Vanished at sea
Weird thing in the woods
Forest goblin
Subject of local folklore
Libby’s AI feature, called “Inspire Me,” is a generative AI-driven, opt-in discovery tool designed to help users find books and audiobooks from their local library. It uses user-selected prompts (e.g., “fast-paced mystery”) or existing tags to suggest five titles, focusing on items that are available to borrow immediately.
Key features of the “Inspire Me” AI tool:
Contextual Recommendations: The AI analyzes your library’s digital collection to provide personalized suggestions, explaining why each title fits your chosen “inspiration”.
Instant Availability: The tool prioritizes titles that are ready to check out, helping users avoid long waitlists.
Privacy-Focused: The AI does not receive personal details, user data, or full tag descriptions; it only uses the titles within your tags to generate recommendations.
Optional Usage: The feature is optional, allowing users to choose whether to engage with the AI to find new reads.
This tool was introduced in late 2025 as a way to enhance discovery, aimed at supplementing, not replacing, the curated, human-selected collections of local libraries.
Tuesday morning. Car inspection. The sacred Virginia ritual where you hand over keys and wait to be judged by a man with a flashlight.
The waiting room is the usual. Burnt coffee. A rack of ancient magazines. Fox News murmuring from a TV mounted too high, like it isn’ttrying hard to be heard.
But it is part of the conversation.
What surprises me is not that Fox is on. It is that every Bubba in the shop is watching it. And not nodding. Not cheering. Not repeating the talking points like call and response at a tent revival.
They are talking about Greenland.
Greenland.
One guy says it is beyond stupid. Not “politically unwise” or “bad optics.” Just stupid. Another says Greenland is NATO. Says they helped us fight Nazis back in WWII by letting us put a base there. Says you do not threaten people who literally let you park planes on their island while the world was on fire.
Someone else laughs and says at least 47 could make up a drug excuse to go after Venezuela, but everyone knows that would be about oil anyway. They are not buying the right wing media story of righteous deposits and noble intentions. Not even a little.
One of them says this will not go unnoticed by China and Russia. Says it like he is talking about a cracked engine block that is about to grenade on the highway. Then another voice, from behind a rack of tires, says what the hell does that old idiot think he is doing?
A different guy, not quiet and not subtle, says he got caught diddling kids and now he is trying to get people talking about anything else. Anything else at all.
Nobody challenges him. Nobody cheers either. It just lands in the room like a dropped wrench.
These are white guys. Blue collar. Mechanics. Between 35 and 65. The kind of guys the news always talks about like they are a single organism. I have no idea who they voted for. I am not going to ask. That would be weird. Also rude.
But I do know this. They do not sound like men waiting for marching orders. They do not sound like people eager to vote for anyone carrying his endorsement next time around. They sound tired. Practical. Annoyed. Like people who can spot a bad idea because they fix the consequences of bad ideas for a living.
Fox keeps talking. The inspection continues. Somewhere, a printer spits out paperwork.
And in this little waiting room in Virginia, the narrative cracks just enough to let in some air.
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I heard that ICE was kicked out of Macado’s last night. If true, good on Macado’s!
Remember, Businesses generally have the right to refuse service to anyone to protect staff and patrons, such as for disruptive behavior or safety concerns.
I cannot think of a bigger disruption or safety concern right now than these thugs in our towns.
Please, refuse them any service. They do not deserve our food, drink, climate controlled rooms, bathrooms or any hospitality. Let them sit in the cold, outside, off of *any* private property.
#abolishice #iceout
Applies to everyone selling a service! No haircuts, no beer, no groceries, no time at the gun range.
Hour 499,305
The critters that visit our back yard make me happier.
The world hurts a lot right now. I’m glad I can find joy in some things.
Excavations in the Saltville Valley of southwestern Virginia have revealed rare, significant Late Pleistocene fossils of the giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus), dating to approximately \(14,500\)–\(14,800\) years ago.
As the first carnivoran recorded there, these remains, including teeth and bones, demonstrate that this massive, top-tier predator scavenged on mammoths in the region, offering crucial evidence for the area’s paleoecology.
Key Discovery: Researchers, including those from East Tennessee State University (ETSU), identified Arctodus simus remains in the Saltville Valley, a site known for its abundant Ice Age megafauna.
Evidence of Scavenging: The fossils, specifically dental and skeletal material, show that the short-faced bear fed on mammoth carcasses in the area. The find includes a mammoth heel bone, or calcaneus, with clear bite marks.
Significance: The Saltville Arctodus find is notable as one of the most eastern records for the species and provides a specific, direct radiocarbon date (approx. \(14,853\) BP) for their presence in the Appalachian Highlands.
The Predator: The giant short-faced bear was one of the largest terrestrial mammalian carnivores in North America, with a very powerful bite designed for bone-crushing and, likely, stealing carcasses from smaller predators.
Ongoing Research: The Saltville Valley continues to be a rich site for paleontological research, with the bear fossils contributing to a deeper understanding of the interactions between extinct species at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.
The giant short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) went extinct around 11,000-12,500 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, likely due to a combination of factors including climate change, the disappearance of large prey animals like mammoths, increased competition with other bears (like brown bears), and potentially pressure from early humans, leading to an ecological collapse that their massive bodies couldn’t adapt to.
Palindromic day.
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Virginia, it is our turn now. We are swearing in our new governor this weekend, a woman and a Democrat. These are both things that MAGA hates. As such, we have seen a rise in the number of ICE agents patrolling and seizing people. Document everything. Let your neighbors know if you see ICE. Be vigilant, be safe.
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499,206 total hours
Day 20,800