Prophet Zarquon

I’m very lactose tolerant. I tolerate the gas, I tolerate the cramps, I tolerate the bloating…

Oooh, cheesecake!

“STOP”

Since they said they have “5g home internet (about 10 times faster than the best wired option and 3 times cheaper)”, with “shit ping”, I assumed they meant 5th Gen cellular as their internet service at home.

Only a couple years ago, did we finally get a cable drop in our neighborhood, to actually give faster service than 4G LTE. (There’s still no fiber here, at our location in central Denver.) Because the cable company (Comcast) doesn’t offer a reasonable rate, we use line-of-sight wireless to a local mesh operator. Until then, we used 4G & 5G cellular, as our home internet. It was shit for reliability, but when it worked, the peak speeds beat any residential service available, by a pretty wide margin. Of course, those peak speeds turn to timeouts whenever the highway fills up (& our 5Ghz WiFi still flakes out too, as does the 2.4 Ghz wireless camera, & pretty much anything else that isn’t shielded).

There was no point in running ethernet, with that setup; it was never going to be stable. I still had to run 2 hardwires though: one to the Sony PS2, & the other to an ancient beige switch by the IBM PS/2.

Some people in the mountains & such, are on “5 Gigabit” wireless internet, but most seem to be on even lower speed plans than that. I’m really curious which @[email protected] has, because 5th Gen cellular is literally the best internet a lot of US residents can get, despite the abysmal terms & throttling that so many providers employ.

Total Annihilation.

ARM vs Core

My last several multicore multithreaded “smartphones” each sucked at multitasking; why should I hold myself to a higher standard than the entire telecom industry?

I remember running out of those at work, & intentionally crushing the cheap-ass crimp-tool in my hand, just so I could finish up the next day with pass-through connectors & my Klein tool, rather than spend the next two hours re-terminating connectors that I ‘should have’ gotten exactly right the first time.

15 wired devices, kthx. Once & done.

No more “why’s it down now”; no deauth attacks; no weird outages when highway traffic spikes from nav\music-streaming users getting tower timeouts that cause their WiFi to aggressively cry out for every known SSID.

With wired connections, I set it up once & it keeps working. With WiFi, it’s a constant shouting match version of the Telephone game, with openly malicious actors literally headquartered a few blocks away.

Yes, it seems painfully obvious that the primary driver of new WiFi router sales, is WiFi overcrowding.

Hmmm, that reminds me; I need to separate out all the old ones that say “10BaseT”

802.15.4a/ab/ac, seems even weirder, given what we’ve become used to with AM/FM signaling modes.

After the usual “Huh, that seems like a clever way to send signals” reaction, a closer perusal of the tech & its established industrial capabilities, reveals Surface penetrating radar for machine vision & medical imaging, P2P, P2MP, local file-exchange, low-power low-latency streaming, greater range than bluetooth, greater interference resistance than WiFi, & reduced airtime per Mb, at lower emission power than a hair dryer or cellphone.

Gee, I wonder why it got forcibly channeled into exclusively device-to-device location pings, with no direct radio access or firmware, available to devs?

Seriously, go look at what the military, industrial, security, & medical sectors have already been doing with UWB, then look at the specs for the compact chipsets & SOCs released since 2017, & then look at what BMW, Apple, Google, & Samsung are doing with it. Oh yay, Airtags. I mean, they do work, but they’re about 1/1000th of what the U1 could do, if app devs had access to the radio instead of being gatekept behind the FindMy device-to-device services.

Them: “The WiFi is down.”
Me: ‘… No, I still see the TV & the laptop & Pi, on the network.’
Them: “I can’t connect to Flipboard.”
Me: ‘Ohhh, the internet is down. It’s probably at the cable modem. Wait a moment for it to failover to wireless, then try again.’
Them: “Yep, now the WiFi is back.”

I’m just waiting to hear about someone trying to charge their escooter via POE.

Wireless has a lower minimum latency than wired, that’s why trading houses set up relay towers from Chicago to NYC, in order to achieve the lowest possible latency for their trades between the two markets.

Wired gives better stability, due to almost zero interference noise. The primary cause of sucky WiFi speeds/stability, is having too many other people’s routers nearby.

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I’m just glad when I see media with a plot that I don’t immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but yes, mine is.

I’ve never had Prime though. The reason my life is boring and empty, is (I think) because I avoid participating in things I don’t wholeheartedly approve of.

Viewing media, is an insidiously passive form of participation, so I do intently watch plenty of TV\movies (recently figured out it’s about 6-8 things a week).

The rest of my life is just household chores, bicycling, & traveling when I get the chance.
Doing Things makes me feel like Ged.

Yeah, where my Mom lives, the food options are:

• Walmart
• An erratically pricey local grocery, that rents its building (which has a leaky roof, requiring them to move product when it rains)
• Dollar General
• A farmer’s market that’s open once a week for a few hours before the afternoon heat, a few months a year, if no events have pre-empted it, having an inventory of which about 30% is bulk-bought supermarket produce with the labels (sometimes) removed
• A 90 minute drive; no trains, no buses (literally, no buses) to the next largest town

And she lives in a town people drive to, to get food, clothes, medicine, etc.

She gets as much as she can from the local grocer, for whatever that’s worth; the inventory is frequently poor, & about on-par with Dollar General so far as brand-representation, goes. When tourists ask if the store has something, they get pointed to Walmart.

Cable internet? I agree. Nowhere near using all its last-mile capacity, yet.

Well, not just because a company, did…

The Kademlia network (eMule, Kazaalite, etc), did indeed use a global P2P Distributed Hash Table, to resolve which IPs hosted which content, which the torrent protocol also does … some of:

Unlike the mainline torrent protocol, Kademlia’s DHT (like the modern-day Tribler DHT), also resolved filenames to content, allowing in-app search.

With torrents, one needs to consult a DHT crawler, or an index site (which sucks; centrally operated sites are fragile, compared to DHTs), whereas eMule & more contemporarily Tribler, have two layers of DHT, enabling decentralized search without relyiance on someone having created a listing at some particular site & that site being online to search its index.

They’re still happy to accept food-stamp revenue though, if you get Amazon Prime, of course…