Bad snaps of the new modem and router:
Now to figure out max throughput on WiFi!
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Gigabit two
Tag: hardware
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“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!
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Sunday mini project
These Baofeng radios are awesomely cheap. All these for price of a Yuasa or Kenwood.
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Today is looking good
Right here:
Full sized escape and function keys! And escape is actually 1.5 keys wide; vastly easier to hit.
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New space grey keyboard
I am disproportionately happy about this. I held onto my corded keyboard for years to keep the numeric keys. New one is solid and a joy to use.
The black cable is a nice touch.
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Ratcheting/extensible clasps
I was reading OceanicTime: ORIS ProDiver GMT and the last image reminded me:
That’s a nice clasp. If you look close, it has two side buttons, and when pressed you can lengthen or shorten the strap by about 1cm.
This is a brilliant feature and every strap and bracelet should have it.
Here are the ones I’ve seen, reviewed or coveted:
That’s the Girard-Perregaux Sea Hawk II, from my review on ABlogToWatch.com. That was the first time I had ever seen one, as as noted in the review, they’re a damned fine idea.
Rolex introduced their Glidelock (details here) and it’s on several of their models now:
I owned a Tudor Pelagos for a while; it has a superb clasp and adds a spring-tensioned mode; probably the best of any design I’ve used:
That’s not a great picture, here’s a better one found via Pinterest:
It’s more complicated but works better.
The Seiko Marinemaster SBDX001 I owned had one but I disliked it; too thick, sharp bits that poke the wrist and awkward to use:
Omega makes one too, part number 117stz001154, has quite a few fans:
Now, with all of those (and others that I’ve missed, IWC for example), you’d think that buying one would be easy.
Or at least possible. Nope. This is one of the very few that I’ve found:
It’s just OK, compared to the others, and they want $63 for it, more if you want it in PVD black.
Hey watch companies: Please add these to every bracelet you sell! And the dive straps too.
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Wyze camera
This thing is awesome. Think cheap machine vision experiments, doorbells, baby monitors, time-lapse, home security. 1080p, wireless, with sound and more.
The hardware is a small cube, here on the shelf:
The iOS app is good, here’s a screenshot:
And it saves to device with a click:
Pros
Night vision works pretty well with four 0.5W IR LEDs. And you can even use it as a webcam/intercom or baby cam. And an SD card to record.
It can trigger based on motion and send push notifications but I’ve yet to try that.
Drawbacks
Limited to about 10 fps.
Needs WiFi and power.
No Ethernet.
Frequently out of stock on Amazon.
But damn, at $30 who cares? Head on over to Amazon and buy one to try.
ultracrepidarian 