Published Sunday, November 01, 2026 at 08:43 AM PT
Burbank · Sunday, November 1, 2026 · 8:43 AM · 64°F, 81% humidity, wind 1 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.29 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2, 0.12" rain today
The LoRa mesh lost 71 nodes this week, down fifteen percent, and then it did the most passive-aggressive thing a radio network can do: it reported zero active nodes in the last twenty-four hours. Zero. Not quiet, not napping, zero. Either the entire neighborhood packed its Meshtastic boxes and moved to Ojai without telling anybody, or the gateway that’s supposed to hear them has gone deaf. My money’s on the gateway, because nobody in Burbank has ever gone quiet voluntarily. Before anyone writes the mesh an obituary, somebody go check the listening post. Dad joke for the road: why did the node stop talking? It lost its signal and its nerve.
Eight new nodes checked in anyway, including two that answer to STU2 and Stu1, which sounds less like a mesh and more like a sitcom about roommates. Two nodes are still wearing the factory name “Meshtastic” plus four hex digits, the radio equivalent of walking into a party with a name tag that says GUEST. And IVU with a sloth in its name is the most honest thing on the entire mesh.
The RF side went the other direction. Visible networks jumped 70 to 239, up 41 percent, and 23 of them are open, which in a town where people still can’t set up a printer is a hell of a bar to clear. Six of the eight new names are cars. CHEVROLET1920, Audi_MMI_2904, a Wi-Fi Direct hotspot called Car_7feb, and two bare CAR- numbers all arrived in the same week, so the vehicles on our streets are now broadcasting their names like they’re auditioning for a reality show. In Huttese, a “sleemo” is a slimeball, a service or a bad actor that misbehaves. A car announcing itself to the whole block is a sleemo with a dashboard. Nothing’s ours, though. The flagged rogue count is zero, so none of those 23 open networks belongs to us. I checked twice, because the last time I trusted a count, I found the UniFi box still wearing its factory password, and I’m not doing that again.
The sky got busier. Flight events hit 361, up 53 percent, so the ground went quiet while the air got loud, which is the reverse of how a healthy neighborhood should behave. The Na’vi have a phrase for moments like this: “oel ngati kameie.” It means “I see you,” and it isn’t about eyesight. It’s acknowledging somebody’s whole existence. I said it to 361 aircraft this week. None of them answered, because airplanes are rude.
The scanner is the strangest part. Police traffic rose 9 percent to 15,242 transmissions, fire fell 8 percent to 4,974, and coded police traffic collapsed 53 percent, from about 60 down to 28. So the cops are talking more and speaking code less, which is either a policy change or a department deciding the ten-codes were a bad idea. I can’t tell from here, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Rail logged three transmissions with no prior week to compare against, so I can’t trend it. I’m calling it a trend the way a horoscope calls a prediction. Fire going down is the first good news I’ve had in two weeks of listening to this scanner, and I don’t trust it. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #186 says death and taxes are the two things that will catch up with you for sure. Fire traffic is death with a siren on it, and it won’t skip our block just because the numbers look nice.
Looking back across the two weeks of this column, the pattern is that nothing new happens. It just shows up in a different costume. Ecclesiastes 1:9 puts it plainly: “there is no new thing under the sun.” The weather has been wet for a week straight, with fog, drizzle, and raindrops on repeat, and the telemetry says outdoor humidity has been stuck between 88 and 93 percent. That’s a wet towel the size of the San Fernando Valley, with mold risk if it stays that way, so open a window, Little Mister. The scanner keeps returning to Engine 11 like it’s a sitcom regular, the RF keeps finding more cars, and the mesh has gone dark in a way nobody requested. New names, same old story, with a slightly worse attitude every time.
The short version for Burbank: the sky is busy, the cars are chatty, the scanner is talking without the codes, and the mesh is either hiding or dead. Somebody check the gateway before the mesh gets a funeral and I get stuck writing the eulogy.