A follow-up to Monocultures Are Dumb by Design

Let me be direct about where I stand.

I work in technology. I have spent over two decades building open-source infrastructure, mesh networks, and digital tools designed to put capability into communities’ hands rather than extract it from them. I believe in technology that serves people. I have seen it do exactly that.

And in the contest between…

A follow-up to Monocultures Are Dumb by Design

Let me be direct about where I stand.

I work in technology. I have spent over two decades building open-source infrastructure, mesh networks, and digital tools designed to put capability into communities’ hands rather than extract it from them. I believe in technology that serves people. I have seen it do exactly that.

And in the contest between…

My father farmed in Carinthia, Austria, and I grew up working alongside him. He was not a man of many words. When he did speak, it was measured, the kind of thing worth sitting with rather than answering. I was not particularly good at sitting with things. Two generations of men on a farm: we had the stubbornness in common, not the patience.

One thought stayed with me: that we were not owners of…

A few months ago, I wrote about the growing graveyard of “smart” home devices, expensive bits of plastic and silicon that turned into bricks the moment a corporate server in Virginia or San Francisco was switched off. It’s a personal annoyance when your $300 security hub stops talking to your lightbulbs. Scale that logic up to national defence and critical infrastructure, and the stakes shift…

Six months ago I pulled a local language model onto my laptop. Took about 12 minutes with Ollama. No account, no API key, no data leaving the machine. It felt like a small act of sovereignty, exactly the kind of local-first approach I’d been arguing for.

Then I started using it. And I noticed something.

The model’s cultural centre of gravity was somewhere around San Francisco, circa 2022. Ask…

In 2020, journalists asked Australian police forces whether they were using Clearview AI, the American company that scraped three billion social media photos without consent to build a facial recognition database. The answer, from several state forces and the AFP, was no.

Then Clearview suffered a data breach. The stolen customer list included Australian law enforcement agencies. At that point,…

If you have spent any time in the off-grid radio scene over the last few years, you know the frequency divisions. You either ran on the sub-GHz bands (915 MHz in Australia and the Americas, 868 MHz in Europe) for long-range, bush-penetrating reliability, or you accepted the high-congestion limits of local Wi-Fi. It was a trade-off we took for granted. If you wanted to send a message across 10 km…

Every few months, Australia’s business press discovers a new emergency. Right now it’s the capital gains tax. According to the usual commentators, founders, VCs, and their aligned media, Labor’s move to replace the 50% CGT discount with inflation-adjusted indexation is an act of vandalism against Australian ingenuity. Entrepreneurs will flee. Talent will dry up. The unicorns won’t come.

I’ve…

There is nothing quite like the mild panic of joining a meeting only to be greeted by a void where your face should be. On the latest Ubuntu 26.04 and the 24.04 LTS (Wayland), this has become a recurring theme for anyone unfortunate enough to rely on the Zoom Snap package.

You check your settings. The camera is detected. It works perfectly in Firefox. It works in Cheese. You’ve even checked the…

A few days ago I was listening to an episode of It Could Happen Here, Cooper Quintin and Colonel Panic from the EFF walking through the American surveillance state. Flock cameras on every corner. Cell site simulators at protests. Facial recognition with no accountability, built on databases scraped from your social media without asking. PenLink buying location data harvested from your phone’s…

In an emergency, information is as vital as water. The official advice is clear: “leave early.” But how do you act on that advice when the power is out, the mobile network is congested to the point of failure, and the emergency broadcaster’s tower has been consumed by the very fire you’re trying to flee?

This isn’t a hypothetical. As Fiannuala Morgan chillingly documented in her article, “No…

The ClusterDuck Protocol (CDP) was where my mesh networking journey truly began. The story behind Project OWL (Organisation, Whereabouts, and Logistics)—students building emergency communication networks after Hurricane Maria—resonated deeply, highlighting a technology designed not for hobbyists or industry, but for saving lives when infrastructure fails. While I found its concepts “much better…

I’m tired. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep or a weekend off the grid can fix. It’s a deeper, more pervasive exhaustion, the fatigue of living in a culture of relentless, performative positivity. In the tech world, we’re told to “crush it,” to “move fast,” and to embrace every new “game-changer” with uncritical enthusiasm. If you’re not a believer, you’re a “naysayer” or, worse, a…

After years of experimenting with various LPWAN mesh networking technologies, I’ve settled on Reticulum as my primary LoRa mesh platform. It emerged as the clear frontrunner not because it’s simpler than the rudimentary Meshtastic (it isn’t), nor because it’s overtly more feature-rich than the structured MeshCore, but because its design philosophy fundamentally aligns with what matters most:…

While Meshtastic serves as a solid introduction to LPWAN mesh networking, MeshCore represents a move toward more structured networks, particularly when the limits of ad-hoc flooding become a bottleneck. It addresses the “airtime” congestion common in simpler protocols, offering a far more robust path for community-scale infrastructure where a “best effort” approach isn’t enough. MeshCore is built…

ASUS ExpertBooks are popular enterprise laptops with a well-priced combination of hardware and solid build quality. However, installing Ubuntu on these laptops can be challenging due to UEFI issues. In this blog post, I am documenting the challenges and the steps to overcome these issues and successfully install Ubuntu on ASUS ExpertBooks.

Whilst UEFI is arguably useful, the choices made by ASUS…

In the world of Internet of Things (IoT), the sub-GHz spectrum is a frontier of immense promise, offering the holy grail of long-range and low-power communication. Two fundamentally different philosophies are vying to define this frontier. On one side stands Wi-Fi HaLow (IEEE 802.11ah), a direct evolution of the familiar, IP-based Wi-Fi standard, engineered for higher bandwidth and seamless…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve pulled apart four different LPWAN mesh technologies. Now it’s time to bring those findings together and look at which tool fits which job on the property or in the community.

There is no “perfect” protocol. What we have is a set of tools with different trade-offs. I’ve evaluated all four across five parameters to help cut through the marketing noise and get to the…

In the first two parts of this series, we explored why community telecoms matter and how resilient mesh networks can save lives during emergencies. Now comes the question I’m asked most often: “That sounds great, but how do I actually build one?”

This is the knowledge I wish I’d had when I started.

If my journey from those early Austrian tele-working centres to deploying mesh networks across…

Long-range Sub-GHz wireless mesh networks have become essential for modern communication, particularly in remote areas where traditional infrastructure is impractical or impossible. By utilising lower frequencies (typically below 1 GHz), Sub-GHz networks can achieve remarkable range, low power consumption, and the ability to penetrate obstacles such as buildings and dense forests.

These…

For many new to LPWAN mesh networking, MeshTastic often appears as a starting point due to its affordability and active community. It can get you from zero to sending a basic mesh message relatively quickly. For some, it may seem like a convenient entry into mesh networking.

In this post, I’ll dive into what makes MeshTastic tick, where it excels, and where it falls short based on my own…

I’ve spent 30 years watching tech cycles come and go, from the first dial-up modems in rural Austria to the mesh networks I’m currently stringing across the Australian bush. Each time a “next big thing” arrives, we see the same pattern: a frantic rush to centralise, followed by a slow, painful enclosure of what should have been a common resource.

The current noise around AI in open source feels…