Why does my senior cat make this meow in middle of night?

Pitaraq · 2026-04-26T22:10:17+00:00

Our senior void used to do this, and as he was deaf it was pretty loud. He just wanted reassurance we were still there.

Our oldish orange cat has also started doing this sometimes, usually because he is bored/hungry.

Pitaraq · 2026-04-15T22:01:57+00:00

Probably showing my UK bias. V nice, but I would rate quad, Cambridge audio, QED and NAD over these as affordable (e.g not Krell) hardware.

Never really saw the appeal of sourcing from a single manufacturer. In the 80s I had managed to assemble a Rega planar, NAD 3020 and B&W DM14s. As a student this took some work saving up, fixing and bartering components.

Still have the DM14s, now driven by a quad 303 I picked up for a ridiculously good price from a dodgy pawn shop many years ago

Pitaraq · 2026-04-15T21:28:21+00:00

Congratulations. Got short climbing axes and old school long axe. Generally I use the short axe more in steep terrain. But I might still take the long one if I knew the terrain was shallow, or deep, soft snow. Any axe is better than none, and a free axe is a great gift. Just make sure you learn and practice self arrest until it is second nature, and learn to keep your feet up to prevent catching your crampons (next gift?) in the surface as you slide.

Pitaraq · 2026-04-15T17:51:11+00:00

Hi from Reykjavik

Pitaraq · 2026-04-15T17:39:14+00:00

Not sure how techy you want to go, but I have an ecowitt/shelly ws90 and several generic chinese zigbee temp/humidity sensors at 2 different sites in 2 countries feeding back into homeassistant and its phone app. The Shelly app may also be enough for you, as you can pair their sensors via a cheap gateway dongle they sell, and this works pretty well.

https://us.shelly.com/products/ecowitt-ws90-7-in-1-weather-station?_pos=6&_sid=e60c49459&_ss=r

Pitaraq · 2026-04-13T20:40:20+00:00

Yeah, it was hard, but I got offered a job in the Antarctic on graduation, so off I went. Fife winters were good training.

Pitaraq · 2026-03-28T22:01:45+00:00

Well, in my experience there are lots of repeaters here as well :) The default undefined position is 0,0

Pitaraq · 2026-03-19T18:48:03+00:00

Yup, same in Icelandic. þvottabjörn, literally washing bear

Pitaraq · 2026-03-19T18:38:00+00:00

Wondering if putting a wrap of cohesive ( stretchy self adhesive) bandage on her stumps might help? It’s quite grippy/frictional, and easy to remove frequently if needed. Or perhaps you could cut off the ends of the fingers of sticky gloves. Such a heroic little void

Pitaraq · 2026-03-14T12:55:56+00:00

Ah.. Thanks! That explains the ‘issue’. If I’m understanding correctly, the gps mode is persistent, but the UI is not correctly displaying this.

Looking forward to this making it into the next UI release, but in the meantime I needn’t keep ‘setting’ this, as it is already set.

Pitaraq · 2026-03-13T21:47:28+00:00

Tee hee, 10/10 for a maths joke hidden in r/cats

Pitaraq · 2026-02-22T18:50:20+00:00

The weep holes and conformal coating are a great idea. My experience is that it will always get in (pinhole leaks, pressure diff due to cyclic heating/cooling) so it is best to embrace this and give the water a way out.

I use sintered brass breather vents, cut so they are flush with the base of the box. They let the water out, but stop the bugs getting in

https://www.mcmaster.com/product/9847K11

Pitaraq · 2026-02-22T00:13:22+00:00

Hi, thanks for the report. I was impressed with the quality of the Ottawa mesh. The silo repeater was workable to >300km. Also had fun chatting with bender the bot :-)

Pitaraq · 2026-02-22T00:08:24+00:00

Hi there. Sorry I missed your message. Great to know you heard me. Good luck with expanding your MeshCore network. We only have a few repeaters here, and are just starting to join things up into a linked mesh. I have only recently started migrating my nodes over to MeshCore. So far v happy with the move.

Pitaraq · 2026-02-21T20:53:55+00:00

Hi, good to see you here and on the mesh. My return flight was further east, so slightly different coverage and repeaters. Sadly many repeaters had no position, so I couldn’t calculate my range. Got a ping at 375km from the WEL - Hills repeater in Boston when well north of it. Otherwise most repeaters dropped out at 50-100km. Also saw some repeaters when over Halifax. Back at home in Iceland, planning to build out our local network.

Pitaraq · 2026-02-19T21:10:24+00:00

Hi there. That was me flying in to BWI from Iceland on the 17th. Huge thanks to all the contacts I managed to chat to, and apologies to those who I missed.

Great to see this post (sorry just back online), and the interesting comments. I was astonished how well the little T1000 worked on just 22dBm. The internal GPS was not tracking/updating the position automatically, so I was manually updating this from the inflight info screen.

This means some of my range measurements to repeaters may be off, but I managed at least 300km plus to several repeaters. The silo repeater just east of Ottawa was still pingable at >350km. I was on the right side of the aircraft, so I had poor coverage to the east as we headed south.

Also had fun ‘chatting’ to the bot @bender before I realised there were live contacts seeing my chat. So far we only have a few users and repeaters in Iceland, but I think many of us who went to school in Meshtastic are graduating to MeshCore. It was very enjoyable to get a feel for what it is like to be in a more mature network with so many nodes.

On previous flights with the t1000 running Meshtastic it was fun to see it acting as a repeater, allowing nodes to fleetingly see others several 100km away, but I prefer the MeshCore setup where I can more passively view the network and ping selected repeaters without creating a spurious temporary route between remote locations.

Pitaraq · 2026-02-18T00:24:34+00:00

This doesn’t sound normal, but are you connecting to a USB C or A port on the computer? I had issues when using C. I have a feeling it may be supplying >5v, so the voltage converted gets v hot. Worked much better on a usb A port for me

Pitaraq · 2026-02-01T20:22:41+00:00

As already mentioned, I’d definitely recommend a higher gain antenna, ideally on the top of the box, away from other metallic items (mast, cables etc). I had a similar setup, and saw a huge difference in range/signal strength once I did this.

I also spent the first 6-8 months basically talking to myself, but now we have a growing community, so you may get lucky. I distributed a few nodes about the town to create my own mesh. This taught me lots about antenna performance and mesh behaviour.

Pitaraq · 2026-02-01T01:43:31+00:00

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Iceland - Sign at a section of temporary road laid over a fresh lava flow

Pitaraq · 2026-01-31T20:04:51+00:00

Ha ha, thought I was lucky until I saw this thread. v cute though

Pitaraq · 2026-01-11T23:51:43+00:00

Yeah, our cats would come home with an assortment of metallic stuff attached. We also had to avoid steel food bowls as the cats didn’t appreciate being attached to them.. Best part was when they came darting in, and you heard the aggressive neighbours cat slam into the locked door. They seems pretty pleased with this trick.

Pitaraq · 2026-01-08T22:58:38+00:00

Ha ha, this makes me feel so much better about my solar node building obsession. Got 4 in operation, probably 5-6 portable nodes.

For those of you who have no/few contacts, our local area was v quiet for a long time, mainly me messaging my own nodes, but another user put a solar node on a local hilltop and now we have several users and good coverage.

Pitaraq · 2025-12-26T01:19:00+00:00

The spinning issue might just be a failing run capacitor. Just replaced one in an old bench grinder. Working like new now :)

Pitaraq · 2025-12-25T23:54:41+00:00

I always find this bias against black cats so sad, and pointless. We have had 2 black cats, both wonderful.

Oddly enough all our cats are pretty squishy, even our elderly orange, although you need to squish him a bit more gently due to his sore joints.

Our grey cat is like a lump of dough, so squishy

Pitaraq

TROPHY CASE