Know_not_Scotty_does

Yeah the docs are not good, I have been lucky to have a friend with lots of experience in their ecosystem who has been schooling me up on it. Once I got the basic configuration setup its been fine.

I may regret saying that in a bit when I go to add my other components, like my adguard/pi-hole, vpns, ip cameras, and other networked devices but the basic test setup I have now seems to be stable enough to deploy.

I have not seen the connection loss issues but I will keep an eye out for it.

You REALLY need to be explicit about the renewable requirement on that. In Texas they have been building basically unregulated and non-grid tied gas power plants to fuel this shit.

The op mentioned wanting open source. Just providing information and it got me curious.

They are not open source but I just started dipping my toes into the Mikrotik ecosystem and the hardware has been pretty nice from what I have seen. I am not a network guy, just a homegamer coming from normal asus routers though. They have a couple of options for adding cell service via sim cards but I have not looked too far into it.

Edit: it looks like there is an openwrt release for the rb5009ug I am using. I may need to check that out.

Yeah, every time I find a bunch in my grass I move them to the flowerbeds. I just thought they were neat.

Good to know!

Is that what the giant clover is called?

I don't think something of this risk should be left to individual, non-publicly maintained or controlled devices. This is specifically an area where the time to act is short and oftentimes the public is either in the river or river adjacent so they wouldn't have their phone.

That said, there should be better cell service for the reasons you listed, I just don't think it is the solution to the loss of life here.

By no means am I an expert so do some reading for your area. That said, here is how I set up my space.

I am a big fan of planting stuff that you can eat, that attracts polinators, and is low maintenance.

We have a couple varieties of basil that we let flower that brings bees in and are perennials and rosemary that flowers I have some really big mint plants that the bees love too. I basically do nothing to any of those and just let them ride. I have a couple of citrus plants that flower and bring in lots of insects. I planted grape vines that the birds love and have been really fun for my kids. They also loved the blackberry vines.

Any time I have the big clumps of clover in the lawn part of our yard, I move them to the flower beds. We also have several jasmine plants that crawl around.

I tend to do the local heirloom wildflower mixes in our side yard areas which was super great to cover up the utility boxes in our yard.

Heirloom stuff is great, I have several plants that I have re-grown from seeds inside fruit that the pests got to. 100% recommend.

I like to keep citronella and lemongrass around to help with the mosquitos. The lemongrass probably doesnt do anything unless you burn it but you can pick the citronella leaves and rub them between your hands then rub your hands on your skin and that seems to work.

Keep a fountain or bird bath around for the bugs/birds. If you can do it low to the ground, you can get frogs and other stuff too.

I tend to keep some brush in a pile for some of the other critters like salmanders, the little garden snakes, skinks, etc. You can get rats/mice though so ymmv. Rock piles are also good.

When the oak/ash trees drop leaves, I mulch them with the mower and collect them for use around the tree bases, that is supposed to be good for fireflys and stuff.

We have not watered our garden at all this year.

If you can find native plants, use them because they are already adapted to your area.

I tried to do microclover for our yard but since we had grass already it didn't really take off. I also tried using buffalo grass with the same result. I do tend to let our grass go longer, its better for water conservation and I refuse to use clean water for grass growth.

For compost, we do table scraps mixed with leaves and yard clippings. I didn't do it properly and ended up accidentally planting 10,000 papaya plants in our yard that the freeze killed off.

I have some blue salvia looking tree thing that is constantly covered in pollinators that grew super quick. They plant them on the highway medians around Houston and its been awesome. The flower smell great too.

Tangentially related question:

What is the latency in the soil for this stuff? I spent 8 years working on getting my yard back to a pollinator friendly environment but we are moving now and starting over with a basic grass yard. I am assuming the previous owners were spraying all kinds of shit as we are out in the burbs.

Yeah, I was trying to tell the poster above why a cell message or triangulated gps signal wouldn't work. This area is remote and needs proper infrastructure with dedicated alarms to function in a safety critical capacity.

There are already tornado sirens in the area around Seguin, so clearly they can afford some kind of warning, but then using budget as the reasons to avoid spending on this kind of thing has always been a bad faith argument.

A lot of that area is remote or in canyons so cell service is spotty at best.

Edit: that is to say, you need a dedicated system specifically for warnings like this with real power sources, physical alarm devices, and either hard wired data systems, or data systems that are on radio towers high enough up to actually function and function properly in bad weather.