Other Miscellania: Internet Freedom for McHenry County and Althea Mesh Networks

As you may know, I am a member of Internet Freedom for McHenry County and am also organizing an Althea Mesh Network here in McHenry County.  The former is an organization, specifically a focus and action group, desiring Fiber-Optic connections to every home or premises in McHenry County and beyond, the latter is an effort to build an encrypted mesh network to serve the communities of McHenry County, especially Woodstock.  Both have similar goals in mind, but different methods and timescales.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3: CPUs and Power Supplies

This is a work in progress.  The Central Processing Unit, or CPU, is key to a computer, without it, nothing would function.  CPUs are what programs are ultimately run on, and having a powerful enough CPU with enough threads and enough Hz to run programs without slowing down to a crawl is important. Intel is somewhat notorious for having many CPU sockets and changing them every time a new generation of CPUs is launched.  AMD, conversely, tends to have fewer sockets and maintains compatibility between CPU generations for a little while, making upgrades more practical. In desktop systems, power supplies play a bit larger of a role in that someone designing a build needs to choose a power supply that is reliable (I hope!; some PC system builders cheaped out on power supplies in the past leading to an excess of warranty claims) along with having adequate power and efficiency while remaining on budget (unless you have an outrageous budget and can go all-in on every component...
Read more

Week 5: Operating Systems

An operating system is what needs to be installed/run on a computer to make it generally useful for an end user. One thing that pretty much all operating systems need is a file system.  This allows the OS to store and organize data on a storage medium.  Even the most rudimentary file system has ways to identify the location of a file. These days, there can be many types of files (images, videos, wireframe models, etc.) not just encoded text.  File systems need a way to organize files into folders or directories to make it easier for the end user and for programs to find the files they need. It is worth noting that in addition to Microsoft Windows, there are actually quite a few other operating systems out there.  Windows is a DOS-based operating system, whereas modern Apple macOS (also iOS) and other BSD-based operating systems are directly descended from UNIX.  (Originally, Apple Macintosh computers ran a completely unique operating system, but it ultimat...
Read more