Bad snaps of the new modem and router:
Now to figure out max throughput on WiFi!
Your Chicken’s Salmonella Problem Is Worse Than You Think – Mother Jones
But cooking chicken to the well-done stage doesn’t necessarily protect consumers from salmonella poisoning. Cross-contamination—say, using the same knife and board to cut carrots for a raw salad that you just used to slice chicken—is probably a more common cause of salmonella poisoning than undercooking, according to a 2009 study from a researcher at Germany’s Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety. And Americans are awful at taking proper steps in the kitchen to protect themselves from bacterial pathogens. A recent FSIS observational study found that people performing tasks like cutting poultry “failed to successfully wash their hands 97 percent of the times they should have.”
If, like us, you buy your chicken precut, take the time to read this and change how you cook.
via Your Chicken’s Salmonella Problem Is Worse Than You Think – Mother Jones
“Gigabit” home Internet
In San Diego, we have decent ISP options, and for a while we even had the possibility of Google Fiber. (That would have been awesome.) I’ve been on Spectrum, FKA Time Warner, for a few years at 300/25Mbit, and today a technician came by, swapped out our cable modem and upgraded us to “up to 940Mbit.” The Spectrum page with availability check is here.
Upload speed unspecified, and the ‘up to’ is never good. The price is 125/month, but there’s a $20 discount for a total of $105 a month with taxes, which is the same price I’m paying now. You do have to pay $200 for a technician visit, but I can get over that.
The other local ISP of interest is AT&T, who in some areas has full, symmetric gigabit. Not our area yet, though.
Anyway, it looks like the money I saved on my EdgeRouter X has bitten me. It was a $50 replacement when my ER-3 Lite died, and I knew when I bought it that it maxed out under 400Mbits. Sure enough, today I ran some speed tests, and also a BitTorrent download of the Ubuntu ISO and even on wired gigabit I’m “only” seeing around 350Mbit by 45Mbit:
During the test, the CPU on the router hit 100% – there’s the problem!
Meh, I say, meh. This MUST BE FIXED IMMEDIATELY. Off I went to the Ubiquiti router comparison page:
The ER-4 is new, and looks great – still silent and fan-less, more power (13W vs 5) but not too bad, and much faster. Amazon has them for $166. I’ve ordered one, and if that helps then it’ll be money well spent. I think I made the right call with the ER-X, as the ER-4 wasn’t out yet. If not, well, hmm. That’d require more work and research.
More info for the curious: I tried disabling DPI in the ER-X, but it made under 10% difference, and the other thing I’ll try is doing the speed tests directly from the laptop to the modem. The tests that I used are HTML5 speedtest and Speedtest.net.
Update 8/2/18
I enabled hardware offload and re-ran the tests. A tiny bit faster, and now no CPU problems, but where’s my speed?
And when I plugged my laptop directly into the modem, voila:
Still not full gigabit, but much better. Uploads peaked over 100Mbit too:
So I think I’ll try the ER-4 and see how it does. Odd that others on the net had better luck with the ER-X, though.
Update 8/3/18: Yay new router! Peaking at 958Mbits:
Mind you, this is testing at peak Internet time, Friday evening, so I suspect I’m limited elsewhere. So far it looks great as far as speed. I wasn’t able to restore my old configuration onto the new router, so I’m in for a couple of hours of tedium tomorrow recreating the dynamic DNS setup, but that’s not terrible.
Gigabit!
My EV is full of charge
Said in the same tone as “my hoverboard is full of eels” for the full effect.
That’s my first month of EV charging, almost all at work. I’m still delighted with the Bolt EV and the new commute routine.
White threat in a browning America – Vox
White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority — usually an overwhelming majority — of the white vote. Though this changed before Obama (Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers), the election of an African-American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening.
This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were.
“Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,“ Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”
via Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and the war over change – Vox
Can liberals please work out how to win back the working class? | Thomas Frank | Opinion | The Guardian
For all their cunning, Republicans are a known quantity. Their motives are simple: they will do anything, say anything, profess faith in anything to get tax cuts, deregulation and a little help keeping workers in line. Nothing else is sacred to them. Rules, norms, traditions, deficits, the Bible, the constitution, whatever. They don’t care, and in this they have proven utterly predictable.
That sinking feeling – Charlie’s Diary
Most likely the crisis will end with the UK crashing back into the EU, or at least into Customs Union and statutory convergence—but on EU maximalist terms with none of the opt-outs negotiated by previous British governments from Thatcher onwards. The negotiating position will most likely resemble that of Greece in 2011-2015, i.e. a vastly weaker supplicant in a state of crisis and near-collapse, and the British economy will take a generation to recover—if it ever manages to.
(This is, by the way, not the worst scenario I can envisage. The worst case is that the catastrophic collapse of the world’s sixth largest trading economy, combined with a POTUS whose understanding of economics is approximately as deep as that of Louis XVI, will lead to a global financial crisis on the scale of 2007-08—but without leadership as credible as, say, George W. Bush and/or Gordon Brown to pull our collective nuts out of the fire. In which case we’re looking at a global banking collapse, widespread famine due to those crop shortages, and a wave of revolutions the like of which the planet hasn’t seen since 1917-18. But hopefully that won’t happen, right? Because only a maniac would want to burn everything down in order to provide elbow room for a new white supremacist ethnostate world order. Oops, that would be Steve Bannon.)
I really, really hope that this grim take is wrong, but NC’s take is pretty similar. Theresa May really does seem like a simpering dolt, and the human cost will be enormous.
Brutalist Web Design
A website’s materials aren’t HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code. Rather, they are its content and the context in which it’s consumed. A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor.
A name that I dislike, but a set of ideas that I find compelling and worth pursuing. Well worth your time to read and contemplate.
Power and energy consumption
I built a system that uses a ‘Raven’ Zigbee USB radio and Raspberry Pi to monitor our SDG&E electric meter, and layered Flask and D3.js on top to display usage.
Sometimes it looks quite cool:
The baseline for the house is 225 to 250W, and the plateaus are the (high efficiency energy star) refrigerator. You can see where I got up, turned on lights and cooked breakfast, too. (Electric range and kettle.)
I’m pretty pleased with our usage and have put quite a bit of effort into reducing our consumption. LED bulbs, of course, but also low power servers and networking (61 watts total!), timer switches on idling electronics and measuring what things use. In-wall insulation is also a huge win year-round.
The code is at this GitHub repo if you want to roll your own.
It’s a weekend or two, but if you’re willing to puzzle it out, the data is nice and it’s purely local – no internet connection needed, no holes in your firewall, no sharing of the data. A few minutes reading should be convincing on why that’s worthwhile.
ultracrepidarian 