In my part of the N. Sacramento Valley, 85 degrees F this morning. The humidity is 20% and it’ll drop. Temperatures may rise up to 113 today. Winds are still strong. Across the valley, at Oroville, is the Thompson Fire, which doesn’t seem to be letting up. #ThompsonFire #CaWx
Internet has been great all morning. Condition Green. Thanks for being good sports over my rants!
I connected my RaspberryPi ADSB receiver to Ethernet and turned off WiFi. It gained an impressive 10-20 mile range increase after the WiFi radio stopped screaming at the Software Defined Radio dongle. My FlightRadar24 box was always connected to Ethernet but also shows a significant range increase.
Maybe my getting stormy today over a few week’s of progressively worse internet speeds dislodged an electron somewhere because suddenly non-VPN internet is behaving as expected. Time will tell! 🤞
I sure hope my streaming services don’t use IP addresses alone to determine a household. ‘Cuz my IP address may be traveling the continent to avoid Comcast’s flawed internet routing/throttling. I swear I am not password sharing! Device IDs and wifi SSID should prove it.
Comcast/Xfinity Internet Woes
Comcast/Xfinity internet at my home has some kind of network issue that sure feels like throttling. For customer service, it’s literally impossible to get more than a chatbot and a chat-based live support agent. The live support agents are 100% scripted and they do the same troubleshooting flows as a chatbot.
The issue is that my internet is operating at 0-5 Mbps unless I’m on VPN. I’m supposed to get ~1 Gbps and usually get 700 Mbps on Wifi 6E. On VPN, most of the time, our internet is screaming fast. Off VPN, my Sonos cannot stream from Tidal and my Apple TVs cannot stream without repeat buffering. So I’m now quite thankful that Apple TV recently gained VPN support. Meanwhile, speed tests shows full speed when the VPN is off. So I guess I’m being gaslit with some kind of priority network path to speed test servers that avoid the problematic routing. So there must be a routing and/or equipment issue on Comcast’s side, but it’s impossible to talk to anyone that knows anything beyond checking your modem’s signal and rebooting it.
Chat support agents invariably say the signal is fine, and so blame the router. I’ve replaced the modem and router and cables between: same issue! LAN and Wifi exhibit the same issues and as far as I can tell there’s no device spamming the network (which would also cause issues while on VPN). Anyway, I managed to convince the Comcast's chatbot to let me schedule a technician… a week out. So I’ve got as many devices connected to Express VPN as I can to have full speed internet. For now?
Unfortunately, today one of the Express VPN locations and my work VPN started to act like off-VPN speeds.
If this doesn’t get resolved, the only option with barely reasonable speeds, but far better than this experience, would be T-Mobile Home Internet. And that will not be great.
U.S. land management agencies losing Chevron deference will be madness. Generally judges accept that agencies know what they’re doing as they do it day in and day out and have skillful people with the latest science. This will be a disaster. #SCOTUS #ChevronDeference
How about some American White Pelicans doing some formation flying last weekend. They were real far so was glad to be present enough to enjoy their presence. Always surprised to find them in deep in California #SacramentoWildlifeRefuge #AmericanWhitePelicans 
Fujifilm just released firmware updates that include, for some models, the Reala Ace film simulation. Looking forward to trying it out on my X-T5 this weekend. #Fujifilm #StraightOutOfCamera
A different kind of common bird one can see from the nearby refuge. An Air Tractor. The heat shimmer was super bad though. #AvGeek #AirTractor 
Here’s that Northern Harrier, a bit distant & blurred in the center of this photo, that I mentioned Friday. Was lovely to see it on the hunt, swooping low to find prey. #SacramentoWildlifeRefuge #NorthernHarrier 🪶 
We saw a Double Crested Cormorant at the wildlife refuge today. Not shown here, but there was also a Northern Harrier patrolling the seasonally drained artificial marshes with long, low and slow swoops. Really cool. #DoubleCrestedCormorant #SacramentoWildlifeRefuge 
A helicopter has been flying a lot over my town so I looked up their previous flights. Okay… guess I shouldn’t be surprised they drew a phallus in the air with their seemingly purposeless flying 🫢 
Windows 11’s File Explorer’s Forward and Back buttons randomly not working is quite the treat. The insane part is that after moving the window, they then work. Did not realize how much I use those those
Stories on California ghost towns are always entertaining. The latest one is from SF Gate: It was supposed to be a California utopia. It turned into a ghost town
I received a new kind of spam text message today: “Hey, is this Ryan?” Guess spammers/scammers are now personalizing their phishing expeditions with the data dumps they buy. I can see how that can be very effective. Yuck. Report As Junk!
Our resident scrub jays didn’t have much of a green thumb this year. Or they did a great job eating their cache. This is the only sunflower they grew 
Our avocado tree seems to be producing now. But I won’t bet on any of the fruit making it to maturity sometime between this November and next March. Brutal heat is inbound though we’ve got our shade cloth up to protect the small trees 
Just as most non-native plants stop flowering in time for summer, the California Fuchsias have just begun adding a splash of red. Currently the native toyon, elderberry, and roses are flowering. California Buckwheat is on its way. We have flowers nearly year-round. Native plants are awesome. 