Analog and digital. Doing bike maintenance.
Trying the Sunlit app to post.
PSA: Don’t buy Synology with Atom CPUs
Expensive mistake that their site encourages: only the models (typically the ‘plus’ ones) with Intel CPUs can run Docker and the much-improved btrfs. My DS1817, despite having 10gigabit Ethernet and eight drive slots, cannot and that’s an expensive and frustrating mistake.
Their site ellides this when shopping so, caveat emptor, and save yourself money.
Internet speed tests
So you’re online and you wonder how your network is doing. How do you measure it? I’m here for you.
- (Updated 11/2021) Ubiquiti’s oddly named http://wifiman.com is my new standby – cleanest UI, most consistent at measuring up to gigabit.
- Fast.com is my go-to for quick checks. It measures using only Netflix connections so bypasses some ISP fuckery with DPI and slowdowns. Elegant UI.
- Speed.cloudflare.com is excellent. Detailed and capable of saturating my 1 gigabit downlink. Lots of details.
- Testmy.net is decent but uglier.
- Speedtest.net is ad laden.
- Sourceforge.net/speedtest is ok and used to be my favorite. Lots of ads now.
As explained in my series of gigabit posts, making a fast, reliable network takes time and effort, and these sites don’t magically make it happen. However, having a way to measure your changes is super helpful, and I probably use these weekly.
I got an email 11/28/2021 – if you’re having WiFi speed issues, sometimes you need to change the frequency or band used by your access point/router, and Bill Hess wrote this nice how-to here, for both Mac and Windows.
130 Degrees | by Bill McKibben | The New York Review of Books
In places like Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, peak temperatures each year will be hotter than the 120s one now finds in Death Valley, and three quarters of the globe’s population will be “exposed to deadly heat more than 20 days per year.” In New York, the number will be fifty days; in Jakarta, 365. A “belt of uninhabitability” will run through the Middle East, most of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and eastern China; expanding deserts will consume whole countries “from Iraq to Botswana.”
130 Degrees, Bill McKibbin, NYMag
Via the excellent Adventure Journal, McKibbin’s essay is gripping, terrifying and must-read. Please. There is very little time.
Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California : Weather West
I expect sustained extreme temperatures of this magnitude to produce widespread human health, wildfire, and electrical power supply impacts. Some of these impacts will undoubtedly be amplified by the ongoing pandemic. This will be an event to take quite seriously.
Dangerously intense, prolonged, and humid heatwave for most of California : Weather West
My most-trusted forecast / climate source. It’s going to be really, really bad. I really wish I had bought a couple of Powerwall batteries, so we could keep our food from spoiling if we lose power.
The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives – In These Times
This political choice is also a moral choice. It is a choice of whether or not to value fairness. Either the incentives of everyone in society are aligned, or they are not. In America, they are not. In fact, they are the opposite: the incentives of the rich, who live through stocks and the accumulation of corporate power, are in fact opposed to the incentives of the vast majority of people, whose existence is reduced to nothing more than labor income to be minimized as much as possible. An economy devised to prop up stock prices is an economy devised not to encourage widespread public wealth, but rather the concentration of private wealth. That is a choice. That is the incentive structure we have built in this country. The mystifying government response that allows a crisis of unemployment and sudden poverty to happen and then refuses to solve it even while doling out trillions of dollars to business is in fact just American capitalism working as we have designed it to.
The Disconnect Between the Stock Market and the Real Economy Is Destroying Our Lives – In These Times
Brilliant post, start to finish. Highly recommended. Found via the reliably-excellent Eschaton.
First ebike ride
My neighbor is in our COVID-19 pod and kindly let me try out his Specialized Turbo Vado. It’s his commute bike.
I just finished a 16.4 mile ride with 1,300 feet of vertical and I feel great. This would have left me mostly dead if not for the motor.
I’ve been wanting the Luna bikes Enduro X-1, mostly based on this review as well as this one by a man who’s nearly my height at 6’9”. Sold out now but I am feeling the want. It’s magical to blast up hills again. At 3 to 5 thousand for a nice one, they’re expensive but as I said, I’m a convert.
iPhone or iPad on Ethernet
This falls between stupid party trick or total clutch move. Two apple dongles plus a lightning cable and your iDevice is online at 100megabits.
Part numbers are A1277 (usb Ethernet) and A1619 (lightning to usb). I’ve heard of sysadmin uses for this, you could combine with the Prompt app for ssh for example.
Five days of Mondays…
And two Sundays. Poetic, isn’t it?
ultracrepidarian 