Author: John Poole
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Verrus, LLC: But For The Grace of Google
Verrus and Google: The Publicly Documented Connections Salem, Oregon, recently revealed that Verrus, LLC, was pursuing a data center whose estimated value exceeds 5 billion dollars. Verrus projects an investment exceeding 5 billion dollars –an amount equal to approximately 30 percent of Salem’s entire existing 16.7 billion dollars tax base. It is also on the…
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Digesting the Salem City Council Hearing Record for July 27, 2026
Public testimony is often technically available but practically inaccessible. I downloaded the hearing record, removed duplicates, redacted contact information, summarized each submission, classified the testimony, and linked every entry back to its source page. The Salem City Council convened on July 27, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. The Agenda and supplemental packets can be obtained at…
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Why Join Mastodon?
Mastodon is not owned or controlled by a single company. It is a federation: a network of independently operated servers that communicate with one another. A person using one Mastodon server can follow and interact with people using many other Mastodon servers. Each server runs the free and open-source Mastodon software and sets its own…
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A City Account May Have Sent a Dangerous Email. Who Warns the Other Recipients?
<p>On Thursday, July 16, I received an email purportedly from Jennifer Kellar of the City of Salem, Oregon. Gmail isolated the message and warned me about it. I did not learn of the email until several days later when I reviewed my Spam folder.</p> <p>Jennifer is, or was, Parks and Recreation Division Manager for the…
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Equal Earth vs. Mercator Projections of 50% of the World’s Population
<p>A recent <a href="https://mastodon.online/@infobeautiful@vis.social/116959013106803416">posting</a> on Mastodon showed a map dividing the world’s population into two parts geographically. The map uses the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection">Mercator projection</a>. My wife wondered what the same population division would look like using the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection">Equal Earth</a> projection. I did not know about “Equal Earth” and thus learned about it. To fulfill…
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A Solar Radiation Study: Comparing Daily Light Integral Across Six Locations
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Growing orchids in Salem, OR, is not the same as growing in Pasadena, CA, where I started growing orchids in the 1960s. I had not given much thought about the difference in sunlight and now see that I should have. I specified my Salem greenhouse to have a 50% tinted polycarbonate roof thinking I…
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Using a Brother P-Touch Label Printer on Linux
<h2>Introduction</h2> <p>If you migrated from Windows to Linux and stopped using an otherwise serviceable Brother P-Touch printer because Brother supplies no current Linux software, there may be a solution.</p> <p>I have a Brother P-Touch label printer which makes excellent labels. The problem is that for this model (# 2700/2710 – 10+ years old), Brother does…
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An In-House Text-to-Speech Service for ESP32 Projects
Making your ESP32 Talk. YouTuber Dronebotworkshop published a video “Text to Speech on ESP32 – Wit.ai & OpenAI TTS“. “Text to Speech” is often referred to by the acronym TTS. His solution encompasses using third-party services, specifically Meta and OpenAI. For Meta, you have to have an account and you create an application within your…
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Reticulum 1.3.7 vs. My 1.3.5 Protocol Specification
Since no specification exists for the Reticulum protocol, I previously undertook to derive a specification from the Mark Qvist implementation. See A Reticulum Protocol Specification, Extracted from the Implementation (“Specification”). When I did so several weeks ago, I was working against Reticulum version 1.3.5. In source control parlance, that means the Specification I created is…
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Reticulum: Finding The Definitive Source
<h1>Where, oh where, is the current Reticulum source of truth?</h1> <p>Currently the Reticulum protocol is accepted as defined within the Python code implementation created by Mark Qvist. There is no formal specification for the Reticulum protocol. Hence the protocol is derived from Mark’s Python source tree. The question I faced: where can I obtain the current…