Hacker News: bergie

New comment by bergie in "I think WebRTC is better than SSH-ing for connecting to Mac terminal from iPhone"

bergie — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:17:51 +0000

Reticulum shell is also an option, and would also work over LoRa

New comment by bergie in "Elon Musk Wants to Build an A.I. Satellite Factory on the Moon"

bergie — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:13:26 +0000

Somebody gave him a synopsis of Moon is a Hard Mistress that went something like "AI organises a libertarian polygamous utopia on moon after seceding from earth using mass driver as the threat"

New comment by bergie in "Android’s desktop interface leaks"

bergie — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 02:43:47 +0000

They rebuilt DeX on Google's desktop codebase. So obviously a lot of features were lost. Hopefully what we'll gain is wider app support.

New comment by bergie in "Apple, What Have You Done?"

bergie — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:10:49 +0000

It is kind of funny how most of them scapegoat that Dye guy (who was poached by Meta). As if a single person was responsible for all that bad design, and it isn't a failure of the whole organisation.

New comment by bergie in "Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?"

bergie — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:43:47 +0000

This thread is going to be very contextual. I'm currently sailing on a small sailboat, and hence the items will be quite different than what would be useful ashore:

* Wacaco Nanopresso - manual espresso pump. Great coffee anywhere off-the-grid. We also have their grinder but that's not listed as it is above the $100 threshold

* Klean Kanteen insulated water bottle - fill up from watermaker water, stays nice and cool

* Seeed T1000-e: waterproof Meshtastic radio that allows me to communicate with our boat and crew also when out of cell coverage

* Shelly 1: WiFi/Thread relay that makes it easy to automate navigation lights and other circuits

* Ruuvi Tag: waterproof battery-powered Bluetooth temperature/humidity/pressure sensor. Battery lasts arpund two years. We have a few of these around the boat, including one in the fridge

New comment by bergie in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

bergie — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:19:58 +0000

https://bergie.iki.fi - my tech stuff https://lille-oe.de - sailing stuff

Off-grid boat telemetry with Meshtastic

bergie — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:14:45 +0000

Article URL: https://signalk.org/2025/signalk-meshtastic/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436202

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by bergie in "EU to build no-fee payments service like Visa/Mastercard and Apple/Google Pay"

bergie — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 03:26:10 +0000

For travelers, this Balkanization of payment mechanisms is quite a hassle. You can't have Swish (the Swedish payment system) without a Swedish bank account. You can't have Yappy (the payment system used in Panama) without a Panamanian phone number. So as a foreigner you simply can't pay. Especially in Sweden where cash isn't a thing.

New comment by bergie in "My First Meshtastic Network"

bergie — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 03:18:03 +0000

We can turn on the deck lights on our boat remotely via Meshtastic. Works great when dinghying back in the dark.

New comment by bergie in "Meshtastic"

bergie — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:26:48 +0000

I think the primary problem is that the polygons for regions would take quite a bit of space in the limited microcontroller.

Though bigger reason likely is that very few people actually travel between different regions

New comment by bergie in "Meshtastic"

bergie — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:55:25 +0000

For a single hop you can expect close to similar ranges as a VHF set. We saw 30NM distances on open sea when leaving Curaçao. Could be a lot more with antenna situated high up.

Where the magic potentially kicks in is the mesh hops. With those you can reach much further by jumping from one node to another.

It's not even close to satellite comms in reach or reliability, but it also requires no infrastructure, no licensing, and no subscriptions.

New comment by bergie in "Meshtastic"

bergie — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:32:40 +0000

No, you need to switch the region manually. Not a big deal to do for a couple of nodes.

The trickier part is to figure out the correct preset for more exotic locations. I've had to ask a couple of times from the local Meshtastic community group.

New comment by bergie in "Meshtastic"

bergie — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:23:14 +0000

We're using Meshtastic quite extensively for communication on our boat. Each crew member carries a mobile waterproof node (Seeed T1000e), the boat itself has a node, and we also have a Meshtastic tracker for the dinghy.

We often sail in places where there's no communication infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive. With Meshtastic we can talk when somebody goes ashore, and the boat can send telemetry and alerts to the remote crew.

Some of our buddy boats also have Meshtastic on board so we can text chat with them instead of using VHF.

Here's a story describing this: https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...

New comment by bergie in "Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing"

bergie — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 03:55:23 +0000

These trips happened all the way to late 1940s. Here's a good book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Grain_Race

If you get the chance, the Pommern is a beautifully preserved ship from that era in Mariehamn's excellent maritime museum.

New comment by bergie in "Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing"

bergie — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 03:49:54 +0000

That's true only in constrained waters. But obviously they need to see you from afar to be able to make that course change. That's where AIS transponders help a lot.

We've crossed some of the busier shipping lanes of the world, and have had to call the bridge of a freighter on radio just a couple of times. And usually the watchstander immediately confirmed seeing us and clarified their intentions.

New comment by bergie in "Largest cargo sailboat completes first Atlantic crossing"

bergie — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 03:47:34 +0000

> that your choice of sailboat should entitle you to having something that is literally hundreds of times larger and less nimble than you have to make the effort to go around you.

That's how the rules of the road work. See: COLREGs.

We also travel by a small sailboat, and it is always reassuring to see huge tankers make small course changes tens of nautical miles away. That way everybody stays safe and nobody is majorly inconvenienced.

New comment by bergie in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

bergie — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 01:10:15 +0000

Here in Colombia we noticed that a lot of bars and such have awnings built out of solar panels. Cheap, durable, and makes power.

New comment by bergie in "U.S. Army confirms Tesla Cybertruck can't be imported in Europe"

bergie — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 22:35:31 +0000

In many East European countries you can likely still get a license plate by bribing the right people

New comment by bergie in "Meta Ray-Ban Display"

bergie — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:39:50 +0000

I was able to avoid WhatsApp until we started our current multi-year sailboat cruise. All the local cruiser communities are on WhatsApp. So when we got to the Canaries, I created an account.

But I'm making sure WhatsApp will not be used for anything outside this context. That way I can nuke it when we're back home.

New comment by bergie in "Ask HN: What are you using your Raspberry Pi for?"

bergie — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 01:27:33 +0000

We're running three right now:

One runs our boat's primary navigation system with Signal K and connects to the instruments via an NMEA2000 hat.

The second one is the boat NAS.

The third one powers an info display on the nav table.