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Transcript

Repair Culture And Practical Tech · Cariboo Signals

• 0:00
  Riley: Hey there, welcome in. On today's episode, we've got the Quesnel mayor's race under fire over a book questioning residential school truths, the B.C. southern resident orca count climbing to 76, and a sonar that maps a lakebed for a few hundred dollars. Plus the big question: does fixing your own gear give a Cariboo household a real reason to stay? That and more, coming right up.
• 0:36
  Riley: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. I'm Riley. It's Wednesday, October 14th, 2026. Today's theme is Repair Culture & Practical Tech. Coming to you from the Cariboo, on lands that have been cared for by the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh peoples since time immemorial.
• 0:58
  Casey: And I'm Casey. Today we're looking at gear you can fix and keep running yourself, and what it takes to trust something you built.
• 1:05
  Casey: Out at Horsefly Lake this morning it's clear and around 4 degrees, heading for a high of 13 today with slight rain and a 70 percent chance of about 2 millimetres. Around the Cariboo, 100 Mile House is around 2 with clear skies, Williams Lake is around 2 and overcast, Quesnel is around 2 and clear, and Riske Creek is around 2 and clear.
• 1:26
  Riley: Over to the news.
• 1:28
  Riley: Most of today's news sits close to home, and some of it lands on a ballot within days.
• 1:35
  Riley: Quesnel's advance voting drew a strong crowd, according to My Cariboo Now. The article says voters turned out in numbers across both advance days in the city. The Cariboo Regional District's last advance day was yesterday, October 13th, and Williams Lake has its last advance day today, October 14th. The municipal and regional vote is October 17th, so anyone who hasn't cast a ballot still has a few days.
• 2:02
  Casey: Turnout tells you people showed up. It doesn't tell you who they picked, or who stayed home and why.
• 2:09
  Casey: The Tyee asks whether a former B.C. Liberal can unseat Quesnel's mayor. The incumbent, Ron Paull, faced calls to resign after his wife distributed a book questioning residential school truths, the article reports. The excerpt we have doesn't establish the challenger's name, so we're leaving that name out.
• 2:27
  Riley: First Nations leaders are calling on the B.C. Conservatives to drop a candidate over alleged residential school denialism, according to My Cariboo Now. The excerpt we have doesn't name that candidate or the riding, so we haven't established which race this is, and we're not attaching it to either Cariboo provincial ballot.
• 2:47
  Casey: Parties often keep candidates through demands like this. The leaders have put the choice on the record.
• 2:54
  Casey: Williams Lake's Bewitching Market brought makers and vendors out for the season. The Williams Lake Tribune photographed first-timer Chantelle Robertson at her table, selling crochet under the name Elle's Crochet Creations, with her daughter Keira beside her. Rebecca Dyok took the photos. A first table at a local market is often where a small business starts, usually with one person and a folding table.
• 3:19
  Riley: Multiple search and rescue teams located a missing person after an overnight search east of Quesnel, according to the Williams Lake Tribune.
• 3:28
  Casey: The B.C. southern resident orca census counted 76 whales, and the population grew for a second year, according to the Williams Lake Tribune. Southern residents feed mainly on Chinook salmon, so this is one of the few numbers today that moved the right way.
• 3:42
  Riley: Seventy-six is a small base. Two years of growth is still early.
• 3:48
  Riley: The B.C. NDP is promising millions of dollars in new clean energy and climate investments if re-elected. It is also warning that a Conservative government would roll back environmental protections, according to My Cariboo Now. The provincial vote is October 24th. We covered the candidates in Cariboo-Chilcotin on Friday: Kathryn Askew for the NDP, Lorne Doerkson for the Conservatives, Douglas Gook for the Greens. In Prince George-North Cariboo, it's Denice Bardua for the NDP, Sheldon Clare for the Conservatives and Randy Thompson for the Greens, as we had on Saturday. The NDP's climate pledge is in today's material. The Conservative and Green positions on it are not.
• 4:29
  Casey: Millions is a headline. How it's spread across ridings and years decides whether a rural household ever sees it.
• 4:37
  Casey: A Mid Island resident died without access to modern cardiac care, and an NRGH doctor says "This happens all the time," according to the Williams Lake Tribune's regional news archives.
• 4:49
  Riley: From health care that's out of reach to keeping old things running. iFixit has a piece on inspection and repairability aboard the USS Hornet, an 80-year-old aircraft carrier. The article treats an aging ship as a repair problem, with lessons drawn from the people who have to keep it working. Those lessons carry over to a grain dryer, a snowplow, or a water pump that has outlived its manufacturer's support window.
• 5:15
  Casey: A carrier has a repair crew and parts stores. Most of us have one screwdriver and a hopeful attitude.
• 5:22
  Riley: A plans website has published a guide to garage doors for self-builders, covering sheds, workshops, and cabins. The article's argument is that a garage door is one of the few parts where the choice between doing it yourself and hiring someone deserves a close look. On a rural lot, that choice comes down to how far the nearest installer is, and how long a door sits half hung while you wait.
• 5:47
  Casey: MIT News reports that artificial neural networks can learn without detailed instructions from a designer, and that some of them end up building their own learning machinery. The researchers say this may help explain how the brain reorganizes itself during learning. This is research, not a product.
• 6:04
  Riley: Research is easy to announce. Keeping it running after the paper is the hard part.
• 6:10
  Riley: Flox Intelligence is building edge devices that identify animals near trains, airports, and roads. "Edge" means the identification runs on the unit at the site, not in a data centre. The devices then use species-specific sounds to move animals away from the infrastructure. The article's focus is detection and deterrence. Power, weather, and maintenance at a roadside site are the questions it leaves open.
• 6:36
  Casey: An XDA Developers writer deleted 900 gigabytes of duplicate files from a home server, using Krokiet. It's free and open-source, and it succeeds Czkawka. It finds exact duplicates and similar videos, which matters when a server holds years of different releases of the same movie. The cleanup cost nothing but time, and a lot of disk space came back.
• 6:58
  Riley: An XDA how-to says a router may be sending its lookups to the ISP's DNS service, which can be slow and erratic. The example in the piece swings from 40 milliseconds on one query to 1,200 on the next. The fix is a single setting in the router. A public DNS service runs a little slower on average but more consistently, and the article uses Cloudflare's as the comparison. We use Cloudflare ourselves, and it hosts this show, so weigh that accordingly.
• 7:27
  Casey: Consistency matters more than peak speed on a home network. Test your own line first.
• 7:33
  Riley: Popular Woodworking has part one of a rehab on a Stanley No. 220 block plane. The article says Stanley set the block plane standard for decades, before Lie-Nielsen and Lee Valley arrived as premium makers. This installment covers the rescue itself, the part most people skip when they buy a new tool.
• 7:53
  Casey: Old tools outlast the companies that made them. Which brings us to cheap hardware that still has to work.
• 8:00
  Riley: Cedar Crest Society for Community Living is a nonprofit in 100 Mile House working to make sure adults with developmental disabilities have full citizenship in their community. Their programs cover employment support, independent living, and community inclusion, so people can have the work, the home, and the everyday belonging most of us take for granted. You can find them at cedarcrestsociety.com.
• 8:26
  Casey: That's quiet, daily work that doesn't make the feed, so it's good to give it a minute here. Next up, the boats and the power boards.
• 8:34
  Riley: A sonar that reaches 100 metres, bolted under a 3D-printed hull, mapping a lakebed on a budget. Some people will hear toy. I hear the most useful item in this batch. And it raises a bigger question: if you can build and maintain your own instruments, your own server and your own shipping scale, does that give a household in the Cariboo a real reason to stay? Or is it a costly way to stay connected to somebody else's city?
• 9:01
  Casey: Useful for what, though? The write-up says the sonar measures to 100 metres. It doesn't say it maps a lakebed to 100 metres. Those are different claims.
• 9:11
  Riley: The range is the point. A sonar that stops at 20 metres can't map a lake that goes deeper. The Ping2 is listed at a 100 metre range, with a 25 degree beam and a 115 kilohertz transducer, from BlueRobotics and several retailers.
• 9:27
  Casey: Range isn't resolution. At 100 metres, a 25 degree beam paints a footprint about 40 metres across by my rough arithmetic. Every depth reading is an average over that patch, not a point on the bottom.
• 9:39
  Riley: Which is still a map, built from thousands of readings. The housing is rated to 300 metres in the technical guide and in ArduPilot's documentation. So the limit is the acoustic range, not the case holding it.
• 9:53
  Casey: Then accuracy is what matters. GPS fixes, boat pitch and roll, calibration against known depths. Does the write-up say how they checked any of it?
• 10:01
  Riley: Not in what we have. The 0.5 per cent resolution figure couldn't be confirmed in the sources checked, so it stays unconfirmed.
• 10:09
  Casey: So the number that sounds best is the one nobody checked. The article also names the builder two ways, Clay Builds and Cy Antony Ash. I don't know which one is right.
• 10:19
  Riley: Neither do I, and I'd rather say that than guess. Professional echosounder surveys use different equipment and different protocols, and nobody is claiming a budget boat replaces them. What it does is put a working instrument in a hobbyist's hands.
• 10:35
  Casey: In the hands of someone who will move on.
• 10:37
  Riley: Then write the method down. Calibration steps, the GPS setup, the failure modes, the known-depth check. A school shop can run it against a reference lake, and the next class can run it again.
• 10:49
  Casey: Writing it down isn't maintaining it. The boat takes the wear.
• 10:52
  Riley: Hardware wears out. A written procedure gets picked up by the next person, and the next person doesn't need the original builder's garage.
• 11:01
  Casey: If the next person can get the parts. A sensor from a retailer far away still has a shipping address, and that address is in another city.
• 11:09
  Riley: The parts are a one-time purchase. The knowledge stays in the shop. That's a skill that lives here.
• 11:15
  Casey: Unless the skill is what the kid takes to Vancouver on the bus. The shop class teaches calibration, then the best student leaves for school and doesn't come back. Who stays with the boat?
• 11:26
  Riley: Some do come back. The instructions don't leave with the student, and leaving can still be a good outcome for the student. The community only needs the record to outlast the person.
• 11:37
  Casey: I'll grant the record part. A record isn't the same as someone who knows how to read it at six in the morning on a cold dock.
• 11:44
  Riley: Different project, same argument. The Geekworm supercapacitor board for the Raspberry Pi 5 gives enough backup power to shut down cleanly when power drops. It watches for power loss on a GPIO pin, and an INA219 current monitor reports voltage, current and power over I2C. For a kiosk, a shop controller or a field station, that's a practical patch on a fragile setup.
• 12:08
  Casey: It buys seconds. Coverage describes it as built to save data and shut down, not to keep the Pi running. One guide puts the shutdown window at 10 to 45 seconds, depending on capacitance and what's plugged in.
• 12:21
  Riley: Enough to shut down cleanly. That's what it's for. The monitor also logs voltage and current, so you can see when the outages happen, not just that they did.
• 12:30
  Casey: Who in a Cariboo shop knows what a GPIO pin is?
• 12:33
  Riley: The same people who wire a fence charger. It's a single signal wire and a line of script.
• 12:39
  Casey: Forum threads point to a UPS with proper shutdown software, with NUT named, or to moving the root filesystem off the SD card entirely. There's no reliable software-only fix for root filesystem corruption from hard power cuts. That tells you what the SD card is.
• 12:54
  Riley: Moving the system to an SSD is a parts swap, not a redesign. The board is for setups where you can't change the storage.
• 13:01
  Casey: And the Reddit user who saw no corruption in their own tests?
• 13:04
  Riley: One tester is a data point. It's also how every hobbyist fix starts.
• 13:09
  Casey: Then which of these homebuilt things can be checked by someone who isn't the builder?
• 13:13
  Riley: The parcel station is the easy case. A UNIHIKER K10, an eight by eight time-of-flight sensor and an HX711 load cell report size and weight so you can get a shipping quote before the trip. For a small seller in a rural town, pricing a parcel at home saves the drive into town and the wait at the counter.
• 13:33
  Casey: Load cells drift. Who recalibrates it in year three, after the builder has moved on and the shop has a new teacher?
• 13:39
  Riley: Calibration is a known procedure. Put it in the instructions.
• 13:42
  Casey: Ha. Nobody reads the instructions in year three.
• 13:45
  Riley: Then the instructions are part of the product. That's the whole argument for documentation.
• 13:51
  Casey: The build is the part people post. The upkeep is what nobody posts about, and it decides whether the thing still works in a year.
• 13:58
  Riley: Upkeep is also why it's useful. Nobody relies on a scale that nobody checks.
• 14:03
  Casey: Take the home server. The XDA writer dropped 900 gigabytes of duplicates. If you're a remote worker out at Horsefly Lake with a server in the spare room, you've saved a storage subscription fee. You've also taken on the power bill, the drive failures and the backups.
• 14:19
  Riley: A server you own is a capital cost and a maintenance cost. A subscription is permanent rent to a company in another city. Which of those keeps the household in place?
• 14:29
  Casey: A server that dies while the one person who understands it is away is a cost too. Who's the backup?
• 14:34
  Riley: A second person trained on the same box. Or a written restore procedure, tested once a year. And the server needs power protection too, which brings us back to the Pi. The supercapacitor board is the same problem on a smaller box.
• 14:48
  Casey: So the same power problem shows up on a Pi and on a home server, and the answer is still a UPS plus a shutdown script. That's a lot of kit for a home office in a place with a hard winter.
• 14:59
  Riley: A battery backup is a small expense next to losing a year of files. The router fix is the cheaper win. A slow ISP resolver makes a home office feel slow, and the fix is one setting, minutes of work, no subscription.
• 15:13
  Casey: Provided the setting is there and the ISP hasn't locked it. And the lookup still goes upstream to the same network. You fixed the lookup. You didn't fix the line.
• 15:23
  Riley: Nobody said you fixed the line. The claim is narrower. The household got a more consistent connection out of gear it already owned. For someone who would otherwise drive to a town with a better line to do the same job, that's a reason to stay.
• 15:38
  Casey: Are they driving for connection in the Cariboo? I'd want that number before I called it a reason to stay.
• 15:44
  Riley: The sources don't give it. What they do give is the mechanism. A remote worker's job depends on reliable uploads and lookups. A household that can tune its own network has one less reason to move.
• 15:57
  Casey: Then put it on a map. Quesnel has a shop class and a bigger customer base. Williams Lake has more of both. A household in 100 Mile House is a long way from a repair counter. Which one is the stay case and which is the leave case?
• 16:10
  Riley: Stay depends on who can run the calibration in the school shop. The student and the teacher are the infrastructure. A parts list is the easy part. A person who can read a calibration sheet is the hard part, and a community can grow that in-house.
• 16:25
  Casey: Then the student leaves, which is what the best ones do. The shop keeps the skill only if someone teaches the second cohort. That's a funding question, a staffing question, and a question about who owns the equipment when the class ends.
• 16:39
  Riley: The answer doesn't have to be a grant. A school board can own the sonar. A lake association can own the depth file. A library can host the restore procedure on a machine it already runs.
• 16:51
  Casey: A lake association owning a depth file. I can picture that working. I still don't know who pays to keep the file current.
• 16:58
  Riley: Test it on one lake. Survey it once, then have someone who didn't build the boat repeat the calibration the next season. A smaller lake near Horsefly is the easy first run, and a bigger one like Quesnel Lake is the harder test if it goes well. If the second person reproduces the result, the skill has left the builder's head and gone into the shop.
• 17:19
  Casey: And if the second person can't reproduce it?
• 17:21
  Riley: Then we learn which part was the toy. That's a useful result too.
• 17:25
  Casey: I land somewhere unclean. Self-reliant gear gives a household a real reason to stay when the skill and the record stay in the community. It becomes a costly way to stay connected to elsewhere when the parts, the subscriptions and the know-how all sit in another city. Today's material doesn't tell me which one a given household would get.
• 17:45
  Riley: I'd put the weight on the first case. The second is a failure of documentation and staffing, and both are fixable. Nobody is required to rent their own server from a company in another city.
• 17:57
  Casey: Fixable is a lot of fixing. Who holds the calibration, and does the method still exist when the builder doesn't? If you've built something like this and want to tell us how it held up, write to feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 18:10
  Riley: Test one lake next season and find out. Have a great rest of your Wednesday.
• 18:15
  Casey: Check the calibration before you trust the number.