Your comment was true, but not exactly relevant since we were talking about airtag-like devices that don’t have connectivity besides Bluetooth, saying that a device like them exists that has GPS built-in is kind of moot since they don’t have any additional ways to send that location info.
The thing you linked would fall under the walkie-talkie-like device I described.
Depending on where you are and where you hike, you may have a very different idea of what a large forest looks like than some people. Unless you’ve really traveled to go camping and hiking, or just happen to live in a very heavily forested area, what you think of as a large forest patch and what others think of may be in entirely different leagues. And just being in the woods is only part of the issue, geography has a bigger effect than all of the trees.
I’m from the Philly area, we have a pretty big wooded park, something like 2000 acres, that is entirely within the city. It’s also in a valley, so when you’re in the park there’s usually steep hills or even cliffs all around you. Cell service gets spotty in a lot of the park, even though there is probably no place in the park where you’re more than about a mile or so from major roads and cell towers and all the other stuff you expect to find in a major city, the signal just can’t get through all the dirt and rock surrounding you.
It gets even worse when you get up into the mountains, driving along a winding mountain road you can see your signal going bonkers bouncing between full bars and no bars based on what mountain is in the way of a tower at any given moment. And towers and everything else are just more spread out in general, one area I go pretty regularly to you’re often driving a good half hour or so between anything you’d really recognize as being a town, without much but woods and mountains in-between.
By contrast, I’ve also done some hiking in the NJ pine barrens, some of the sections I’ve been to absolutely dwarf that park in Philly I mentioned, and are generally more remote, but they’re mostly pretty flat, trees aren’t great for cell signals but they’re a hell of a lot better than mountains, so I can usually get pretty deep into the woods before my signal starts failing me.
I’ve also been to Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, which dwarfs pretty much any other forest I’ve personally ever been to, just an absolutely massive tract of natural area, and relatively flat at that, but it’s just so big and remote that there is really no cell service to speak of.
GPS is one-way though, your device isn’t sending anything up to the satellites, it’s just looking for where they are.
You still need a way to get a signal from the collar to your phone or computer or whatever device you’re using to track it. Things like airtags and tiles use Bluetooth to talk to nearby phones that relay it onto the Internet. If no one is close enough with a phone they’re basically useless, and if the cell service is spotty, the location can’t be updated until the phone has a signal, and depending on the area, that could be a while which means your dog could be miles from where they were when a phone last picked up the signal from their collar.
If the collar itself is hooked up to the cell network, then you don’t have to rely on someone being nearby with a phone to pick up the location, but it is still reliant on having cell service, which may not be a given if you’re out hiking in the mountains for example.
Other than that, you would have to use other satellite services, or rely on having a direct radio connection to the collar, sort of like a walkie talkie except carrying the GPS data instead of voice.
I don’t know the ins and outs of how they work, and I’m sure there’s some catch and they overall skeeve me out a bit, but I have seen a few companies that offer very limited free service, something like 25 mb/month. I don’t know how much data a gps tracker would use but that might be doable
I’m sure those companies do everything in their power to get you to pay more than nothing, automatically change your plan if you go over, deceptive emails, etc. so definitely something to be careful about. I also wouldn’t have a whole lot of confidence in those companies sticking around for very long.
And while not free, there are some pretty affordable prepaid plans and such that may be competitive or slightly cheaper than what a regular subscription might cost.
Depending on where you live, it may be possible to forego the call plan entirely, in a dense urban area with lots of open public WiFi networks, you may be able to work it entirely off of WiFi.
If you wanted to get real weird with it and jump through the loopholes to get licensed, there might also be some options using ham radio stuff like APRS, though that’s probably going to leave your dogs location exposed to any ham who happens to be playing with their radios in your area.
Now I’m not saying that any of that is necessarily a good idea or worth the hassle of setting any of that up, I’m just spitballing some ideas for what someone could potentially do if they did want to homebrew such a thing.
D&D is a tabletop role-playing game system.
Each of the players is playing a role, you’re basically pretending to be your character.
Then there’s the game master/dungeon master (different systems use different terminology.) Their job is basically to make up the world your characters live in and tell you what’s around you.
Then it’s up to you how you interact with that world.
So your DM makes up a world, let’s say for the purposes of illustrating things it’s a generic high fantasy medieval setting, and the kingdom you all live in is being tormented by a dragon. In the game, the DM will play the role of everyone else in the world, the king, the dragon, all of the townsfolk, etc. The players just play their own character.
For convenience sake, DM will usually start off by bringing the party together somehow. Maybe you’re all drinking in the same tavern when the dragon attacks, maybe the king has summoned you all to the castle because he’s putting together a team to slay the dragon, maybe you’re already an established adventuring party and you’re just walking into town after your last adventure.
And from there, what the players do is their own choice. Maybe you agree to go hunt down the dragon, either because it’s the right thing to do, or because you want the reward money. Maybe you decide to ignore the dragon plot entirely, hop on a ship and start a new life in another kingdom (although nothing is stopping the DM from saying that all the ships were destroyed in the last dragon attack, or the dragon attacks your ship as you’re leaving port)
Every character, whether they’re a player character or one the DM controls has a list of stats- strength, dexterity, charisma, intelligence, etc. That represent how good they are at different things. A fighter is usually going to be strongstrong, a wizard is smart, a bard is charismatic, etc.
To do an action, you roll dice to see if you succeed. You also add or subtract to that dice roll based on what your stats are. So if you’re trying to break down a door, you would add your strength modifier to your roll. So say you roll a 10, if you’re a strong character you would probably add on to that, making it an 11 or even higher depending on exactly how strong you are. If your character is very week, you may actually subtract from your roll. Then your DM tells you if your roll with the modifiers added/subtracted was high enough to break down the door.
Same basic idea goes for making an attack against an oponent, trying to be stealthy, just looking around to see if you notice anything, trying to lie to someone, doing first aid after you or a party member has been hurt, etc. Roll dice, add modifiers, and see if it beats whatever number the DM decides it needs to beat.
And using those mechanics you go off on an adventure.
That’s of course very simplified, but hopefully that gives you the basic idea.
You may often see tabletop RPG players using minis, maps, model buildings and terrain on the table. This is actually optional. You can do it all in your imagination and by talking it out, but a lot of people find it useful when visualizing combat, or navigating a dungeon, etc. to have little physical pieces they can move around. Many groups will do a mix of both, a lot of stuff happens in the “theater of the mind” without any minis or maps, but bust them out when the situation calls for it. All you need is something to write with to make your character sheets, the rulebooks, and some dice.
You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)
I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds
It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.