> Fun fact: Jansson illustrated The Hobbit and drew Gollum as a giant. Tolkien realized he never described the size of Gollum and made adjustments to later editions.
For those curious like me, here are some low-res images:
This sounds like what RNode devices for Reticulum networks appear to be able to do. (I haven't tried it for myself yet.)
> RNodes can be made in many different configurations, and can use many different radio bands, but they will generally operate in the 433 MHz, 868 MHz, 915 MHZ and 2.4 GHz bands. They will usually offer configurable on-air data speeds between just a few hundred bits per second, up to a couple of megabits per second.
> [...]
> While speeds are lower than WiFi, typical communication ranges are many times higher. Several kilometers can be acheived with usable bitrates, even in urban areas, and over 100 kilometers can be achieved in line-of-sight conditions.
> Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.
> Once an announce has reached a node in the network, any other node in direct contact with that node will be able to reach the destination the announce originated from, simply by sending a packet addressed to that destination. Any node with knowledge of the announce will be able to direct the packet towards the destination by looking up the next node with the shortest amount of hops to the destination.
I like the way you’re thinking but it doesn’t necessarily work like that in practice.
Why?
Because of how announce queues work, each interface has its own queue, and announces are limited very specifically to 2% of a channel’s bandwidth.
This means that announces are much more likely to be transferred over the faster medium first, resulting in paths that are on average the most reasonable balance between speed and distance.
If that doesn’t make sense at first, I get it. I find trying to visualize how it works really helps. Reticulum is conceptually so different from anything else out there that it takes a while to understand.
That does make a lot of sense, at least in terms of latency: I imagine that when a one-hop announce comes back from outer space, the faster multi-hop path across town will have already been established.
For bandwidth, however, I don't see it yet. If all relevant nodes are idle at the time an announce comes in (so the 2% limit doesn't come into effect), a low-bandwith route might be established before one with a much higher bandwidth, no? (Prioritising latency over bandwidth can be the right thing to do, of course, depending on what the network is used for. But it might not.)
Sure, in some cases, when the network has fewer announces to deal with, the 2% limit has less effect, the best way Reticulum can deal with this is with a network made out of more specialized node types connecting the lower speed links (http://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html#interfaces-m...)
However when the network (and each node) is receiving enough announces to saturate that 2% chunk of most smaller links, those interfaces prioritize announces with less hops, and there is a queue, meaning it takes that interface longer to transport announces coming from further away. This makes it much more likely that nodes will form routes over a faster but longer path.
> Sure, in some cases, when the network has fewer announces to deal with, the 2% limit has less effect, the best way Reticulum can deal with this is with a network made out of more specialized node types connecting the lower speed links (http://reticulum.network/manual/interfaces.html#interfaces-m...)
I see. So it seems that optimizing a complex network can be a little more hands-on, not completely automatic (which would be a bit too much to ask, thinking about it). I guess my hypothetical path via outer space would have a "boundary" mode node somewhere on the way, although I am still fuzzy on how exactly this would affect things.
And your point about the announce queue with saturated 2% bandwidth is clear.
Thanks so far! This makes me want to read the rest of the manual and possibly start tinkering with Reticulum myself at some point.
To me that chapter ("Understanding Reticulum") was a very pleasant read a few weeks ago, and inspiring too. I would love to get some HN expert opinions on it, especially about routing, so I posted it separately:
> Once an announce has reached a node in the network, any other node in direct contact with that node will be able to reach the destination the announce originated from, simply by sending a packet addressed to that destination. Any node with knowledge of the announce will be able to direct the packet towards the destination by looking up the next node with the shortest amount of hops to the destination.
Do I understand correctly that routing always priorities the path with the fewest hops? With Reticulum being "medium agnostic", I imagine this would not always be fastest in terms of ping or throughput: A destination might be reachable via a single hop via Mars, even though three hops across town would be faster.
Thanks! I had thought it would make sense to post this chapter of the Reticulum manual separately, as the other post is about Nomad in particular. But since my post here didn't get traction, I repeated my question over there now.
It's a natural assumption but it's actually the opposite of how HN works since two threads about roughly the same thing on the front page leads to split discussion (and too much of the same thing) and typically the follow-up gets moderated away. So posting a followup/related thing of a front page ongoing topic makes it more likely the followup won't get traction.
I fully support the recommendation of Le Guin's short stories! Too bad they are easily forgotten over her novels. (I guess a novel, as a product, is easier to review and to advertise?)
My favourite collection is "The Birthday of the World", especially the stories "Solitude" and "Paradises Lost". (Maybe skip "Old Music and the Slave Women". It builds on other books and is incomprehensible without them; or at least it was to me.)
I've only read two works from her, both short stories: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", and "The Building" (in the "Redshift" anthology). Both were absolutely terrible, shockingly so. I really don't get why people like her work so much.
Back then I stopped using sc-im because it could not import/export XLSX, if I remember correctly. Apparently it can today!
vim-table-mode always felt a little fragile and I don't want to be bound to vim anymore. That said, it still feels like a small miracle to me to have functional spreadsheet formulas inside markdown documents – calculation and typesetting all in one place.
I didn't know about DMXIS and tried to look it up, and it seems that there is a software and a hardware component (the latter not being produced anymore), see here:
I don't know about the software, but as for a DIY hardware solution, you can just connect a USB-DMX interface (like the Enttec DMX USB Pro) and a USB-MIDI device to a laptop and "just" have to code something to translate MIDI input to DMX output. Or use an Arduino, an RS-485 module and a few other components, that's what I once did.
Ah yes I should've been more specific - the DMXIS box from Enttec is a small piece of hardware which takes MIDI input and has an output port for DMX fixtures. Accompanied by a software to create mappings from one to the other. Would be a fun project to design and code this but I was wondering if there is anything similar out there already :)
> To my knowledge, Gnomon* is the first font ever to respond to the user’s actual time. The shadow of Gnomon* changes location throughout the day in relation to the time. Come back and refresh this webpage every couple of hours and watch as, like magic, the shadow moves to the sun!
For those curious like me, here are some low-res images:
https://zepe.de/tjillu/hobbit/index.html
And here an article about the illustrations (haven't read) with a a few images in higher resolution (including Gollum):
https://tovejansson.com/hobbit-tolkien/