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WiFi HaLow on Phones


In a recent post I was getting excited about HaLow and I mentioned that I had some HT-HD01 units on order from Heltec. Those have now arrived and my excitement continues. These units are very cool for three main reasons.
 

 
 It’s affordable. They cost 69 USD each. Nice.
 

 
 Versatile deployment modes. Out of the box you can build a standard AP/client…

Using local DeepSeek v4 Flash in Xcode


I’m rather pleased. I’ve been able to bolt together enough pieces of software that I can now run DeepSeek v4 Flash with native MXFP4 routed-expert weights on my MacBook Pro, not only via a CLI harness like OpenCode, but also through Xcode’s native “intelligence” integration.
 

 
Before you get too excited please realise that I’m running this on a ludicrously expensive M5 Max…

Automatic JavaVM and Context detection using Rust on Android


When you’re running Rust code in the context of an Android app, if you want to work with Android-specific functionality over JNI you tend to need three things:
 

 
 A reference to the running Java virtual machine.
 A reference to a suitable Context , often the ApplicationContext .
 Some helper code on the Java side to provide APIs with required callbacks, and so…

Hold on to your hats, HaLow is here


I’ve been waiting a long time for WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) to show up. For the unaware, this is a standardised variant of WiFi using the 900 MHz ISM band to provide range over 1 km with a corresponding lower throughput—up to tens of Mbps.
 

 
The standard was published in 2017 but for a long time the only available hardware was pretty specialised and I stopped paying attention.…

The banal failure of 5G home internet


Hot take: the viability of home 5G internet in Australia has been destroyed by telcos deploying cheap, inferior modems that will cause most customers to blame cellular connectivity rather than the garbage piece of equipment that Telstra or Vodafone sent them.
 

 
Back in 2013 Australia had an election and replaced its Labor government with the Liberals. Labor had started…