NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

also i'm convinced I'm one of like nine people who 1. knows what a PAN is anymore and 2. calls it that.

but we really need to return to that particular tradition, where everyone thought all your devices on your person would be networked together, instead of reaching out across hundreds of thousands of kilometers of aether and copper and glass just to move some text 1/10th of a meter.



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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

i sorta know what bluetooth pan is when i spent ages researching how to do ssh over bluetooth and i dont think anything i owned even did bluetooth pan things? does anything even exist that uses it still

PAN is just an arbitrary chunk of hierarchy because networking people take the drugs that make you fucking love onion metaphors.

but it's a useful metric for distances, informally:

  • Body/BAN is on-body but distances greater than NFC
  • PAN is either 'everything that fits in my bag when I go somewhere' or room-scale not including IoT
  • Home Area Network is like, 3br apt / half of a 2-family home
  • building area network is, well.
  • campus area network is all of your buildings within a given site, think university or a company with multiple office buildings that need to be networked together, but only cross-town latency
  • town/city/county networks
  • WAN I guess??????? WAN means anything these days so who knows.

but it's completely arbitrary outside of replacing range with a metaphor that makes sense if you wear a long-sleeved button down shirt that's blue, pink, or white with optional pinstripes.

I remember what a PAN is, the thing is that devices don't use it anymore, they're all locked-down1 point-to-point between device pairs, and that's not a network in any sense. And I think what killed the idea is just how little bandwidth Bluetooth has (esp BLE) compared to every other wireless modem in your pants


  1. I mean, as much as bluetooth allows, which ain't much

yeah, though wifi was part of it and then got sad. but since no one who wears comfortable clothes uses the OSI model prescriptively I think I'd probably expand it to ad-hoc wifi that no one ever uses for some reason (especially now that afaict even phones are multi-antenna multi-band?)

but re: OP i'd honestly take BLE store and forward. i just need notification syncing

You're still thinking of notifications as between devices which could be routed in shorter paths, but they're really between app instances and you could probably have an app which requested all the necessary location and network perms, discovered any peers on the same subnet, and used a cloud rendezvous server to discover other peers on other (sub)nets. Syncthing does that, for example...but only over wifi, and not even constantly because it's a huge-ass power drain

I guess added context is i do not have unlimited data, so they're offline-from-the internet when between locations with useable wifi or cell hotspot enabled, but still need to sync to the one bluetooth audio stream im allowed without carrying around a mixer.

i know this is partially self inflicted but

oh, i guess i munged two thoughts in tiny textbox editing.

Right now theres the ideal of everything gets every notification, which isnt a reality.

You mentioned a central server, which would be easier to impliment if I wasnt limited to just my phone being able to be the primary endpoint.

tho I guess with full notif mirroring I could change what has my headphones.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

my old phone sits in my bag and runs a syncthing server so at least I don't need dropbox. Except it's not a LAN, because there don't exist pocket routers anymore. they stopped making them in 2014. And phone hotspot has weird interactions with networking. so it's still pulling it over data or a wifi AP somewhere. Absurd.