Weeknotes 141

My Swift UI learning has continued steadily. I will probably need a project to work on soon or I might lose interest. The issue is that I find made-up learning projects difficult to commit to. I know that the learning is in and of itself the valuable part, but my brain still isn’t convinced. On the other hand I’m not experienced enough to take on any real work.

Xcode Releases – a handy website if you want to keep up with the latest Xcode releases via various feed formats.

We got over one of the two remaining hurdles with the new house this week, which was a relief. Another one to go 🤞 I’m starting to become disillusioned with our solicitor though.

When my new broadband was installed last week I immediately ran a speed test to see what I was actually achieving in speed vs what was advertised. And I was getting slightly below or above 500Mbps – good times.

The engineer stressed that leaving the ISP-supplied router plugged in until the next day (Friday) would be a good idea for the “line to settle”, whatever that means. I dutifully did so until Sunday when I had time to transition back to my usual over-the-top UniFi networking gear.

This meant setting up my UniFi router to connect to EE’s network using PPPoE. I expected a hassle, but I was pleasantly surprised upon plugging in my own equipment that everything just sprung into action. No username or password changes. No configuration change at all. It just worked!

However the speedtest told a different story this time. Now I was only getting about half of what I should ~250Mbps. Strange. I initially assumed that my UniFi gateway couldn’t handle the faster Internet speed so I turned off traffic inspection which I’d read can slow things down, and Googled other software fixes to no avail.

Then it dawned on me that I should try a speedtest using an Ethernet connection to rule out Wi-Fi being the issue (I used the Speedtest tvOS app on my Apple TV for this!). This confirmed Wi-Fi was the issue as I got my full Internet allowance via Ethernet.

So the ISP router, supplied for free, can achieve better Wi-Fi performance that my fancy UniFi gear, which shouldn’t be that surprising given that the UniFi AP is nearly 6 years old.

There are two ways to go about fixing this: 1) Look at tweaking the existing AP configuration whilst having no idea what I’m doing, or 2) Buy a faster UniFi AP and hope. The new AP arrives next week.

If it doesn’t fix the issue in a plug-and-play fashion I might return it and go back to step 1.

I saw Dune 2 last Sunday. Better pacing, and things happen. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next film. I also found out that a TV series, Dune: Prophecy, is currently being made!

How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking

Back in the Middle Ages, spices were really expensive, which meant that only the upper class could afford them. But things started to change as Europeans began colonizing parts of India and the Americas.

What I took away from this is that snobbery has robbed me of eating Chicken Tikka Masala for dinner every day.

As I mentioned last week we were going away for a long weekend. The surprise location was Porto, Portugal. Porto must have the most changeable weather I’ve ever experienced which has made experiencing it a bit more difficult than we would have liked. We’ve enjoyed our visit though.