Wardriving blog

Since, because reasons, I can't put the new dish together, or work on any other aircraft stuff, I've been slowly wardriving the area, mostly at 3am...
Figured I may as well since once winter hits, I don't fancy driving around in snow for funnsies.
I've been super happy with the Androids on the roof, but have persistently been hearing rave reviews on the wardriver.uk and its 5GHz offspring, the Signal Sleuth.
So I ordered an SS kit and built it up. (It was nice to spend some time soldering again).
Out of the box, it was pretty deaf. So I turned the volume up to 11 and it's meh at best.
Still not quite up to the level of the Androids and a lot more 'care and feeding' to run the thing vs the droids, which pretty much just consists of keeping them charged and tap a button at the end of the drive.

Anyway, the point is, I ended up writing my longest blog ever on the topic.
https://k6thebaldgeek.blogspot.com/2025/09/wardriving.html

I've no idea how, but a non-descript Tweet in the middle of all that somehow went viral (for me) and ended up with 30k views. About, if not, the most popular tweet in my stream... I'm frustrated as it did not have a link to that blog, and I really wanted eyes on the blog, not some random tweet!

I have not lost any sleep over trying to game the X post algorithm. I'm not in it for the money or fame, I just wanna help people do stuff they might think has a higher barrier to entry than it actually does. i.e. make complex or geeky things approachable.
It was just an interesting blip in a typical thread.

The point is, I had a geeky distraction for a day or two. Not as exciting an outcome as I was hoping, but that's the way the tech stack goes sometimes. I learned some stuff and shared a bunch of that, so it's a win-win.

I was a little mindful of how I was taking an existing functional unit and doubling its wifi beacon count, all from experience. AI could not suggest any upgrades as it did not know what the unit really was. It knew its name, but not its constraints or what its shortfalls may be (poor sensitivity on the ESP32 RF frontends). No AI knew how to quantify it (a repeatable benchmark drive), or what changes to make to it that would improve its performance toward a clear goal (beat the Android count for the same drive).
I read an interesting short article about how older programmers are not worried about (or using) AI. They've seen these 'mind-blowing' changes come and go over the years. The next big new thing. They still have jobs, as stuff still needs to get done.
It's a poor analogy, but it's somewhat like the US school system, where you must attend university and obtain a degree for a job that has little to do with your degree, versus the Australian model of transitioning directly from high school into a trade. You become an apprentice and learn how to build and fix, and thus actually help people.
AI vs reality. Talk vs action. It reminds me of one of my all-time favorite sayings:
When all is said and done, more is usually said than done
AI is all talk. If it does not know what it's talking about, it just knows it must talk still more, so you have hallucinations.
It was sort of sad that many people in that X thread made comments about how amazing and innovative my changes to the unit were.

The basement is about done (as am I), just carpet and moving in, which involves buying a bed, our first ever new bed - not as exciting as it sounds.
The current bedroom (future guest room once we move into the basement) roof got sanded and painted. Just Lee's roof to scrap and paint. The scraping makes a massive mess!

The weather is getting cold and wet. In the space of just under a week, we went from warm to hot to wet and cold. Still not sure about the whole snow/winter thing that is due to fall out of the sky in a month or so.

Yes, the blog cadence has and will continue to taper off. Until I can work on stuff I find compelling, I'd rather not blog about what is actually going on in my head.