With all the CrowdStrike insanity, glad I’m off work today. But hoping my org didn’t get hit too hard!
Finally, alternatives to Lithium batteries are on the market.
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: Solid State Batteries Are REALLY Here: Yoshino Power Station
If you like Watch Duty, the free (!) iOS app Calamity goes beyond wildfires into major airport delays, bad weather, earthquakes, solar flares & more. A decently presented aggregation of publicly available information.https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calamity-disaster-monitor/id6477748950
SFGate has a good round-up of the latest at KSFO (San Francisco International Airport): "Why the pandemic was the best thing to happen to SFO's reputation” #AvGeek
Good morning from the westside of the North Sacramento Valley where, at 06:00, it was 79°F at 31% Relative Humidity. Today, highs could reach 118° but more likely 113-115°, depending on what the winds do.
It is 19:00 and the outdoor temperature is finally dropping. The high was 113°F at 7% relative humidity. I’ll take this dry heat any day.
Today I learned how to use BareBones Edit with Git. It is real easy. I’m such a nerd.
I’m watering the front yard plants tonight because knuckleheads gotta set off fireworks. I must say that the Rachio hose timer is pretty handy in these one-off situations.
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.