Weeknotes 142

The house: One step forward. One step backward.

Apparently I’ve reached the age where I’m being randomly asked by the local GP to go in for annual blood tests 🤷‍♂️

The new U6 Pro AP I ordered last week to try and boost my Wi-Fi speeds arrived as scheduled on Monday. I ordered the U6 Pro because it was the fastest AP available that still worked on standard PoE. I haven’t been keeping up with the latest developments in PoE technology, but a new standard, PoE+, now exists which can supply more power. I am not in the mood for upgrading switches, so the choice was made.

It was impressively easy to setup, of which I was very glad. I plugged it into a PoE capable Ethernet cable and it sprung to life. After a brief booting up period I started getting notifications on my watch that it was ready to adopt (because I have the UniFi iOS installed on my phone). It updated itself to the latest firmware and became available in the UniFi controller, and once I clicked “Adopt”, it was working. Slick.

So did I achieve my goals of improving Wi-Fi speeds? Yes, but I did end up having to make some small configuration changes to do so. I changed the channel width on the 5GHz network to 80MHz.

I ran some speed tests and I achieved 503.98Mbps in the front room around 2 metres from the AP, and 447.80Mbps in my office around 5/6 metres from the AP with walls in the way.

OpenSSL error installing Ruby

I am having a persistent problem installing Ruby. It is OpenSSL problem, one that a lot of other people in the Ruby community also seem to be banging their heads against.

I’ve experienced this and it can be extremely stressful.

Julia Evans on git merges.

a bunch of people have said that they feel embarrassed that they’re still confused about which side of a merge conflict is which, even after many years using git.

I want to say that I have a hard time with it too (and I am uh EXTREMELY confident in my git skills at this point).

Of the many things I like about Julia Evans, it’s her willingness to say she doesn’t know something. This is very comforting in this you-must-know-everything industry.

You know what really gets my goat? (I might have ranted about this before). Those of us who work on the web, know, and use URLs. The Uniform Resource Locator. The way we find our way to websites. So why, do so many of us insist on sending cropped screenshots around when a URL is so much better? WHY?!

JavaScript Bloat in 2024 – the sizes of websites today. Web developers everywhere hang your heads in shame.

Compare it to people who really care about performance — Pornhub, 1.4 MB

Nice one, Pornhub.

My smart lock kept notifying me that it had lost it’s Wi-Fi connection this week. My heart sank. I really don’t need to be trying to fix Wi-Fi connectivity issues whilst 4 hours drive away, especially when that Wi-Fi controls access to the building.

Almost all the notifications happened on the same day, with a couple trickling in the day after. I know I’ve just changed my Access Point, but the sporadic nature of the notifications was the strangest thing.

All quiet since then, so hopefully we can blame sunspots and move on.

As part of my new broadband, EE offer a discount on mobile contracts. I’ve flirted with the idea of moving to the EE network before, but this move meant full unadulterated access to EE’s coverage and speed.

I have little doubt that Three remains the best for raw speed (I once tested 970Mbps in Sheffield City centre) but the speed means nothing if you don’t have a signal. And I was not having a signal quite a lot.

I was with SMARTY before which cost £10 a month for 60GB of data (which I never used, but was a promotional offer). I’m now paying £16 a month with EE for unlimited data (which I also won’t use).

The number porting was a thankfully smooth process. Time will tell if the coverage is overall better.

Speaking of which, the broadband also comes with 6 months of Apple Music (So. Much. Value!) so I’m also trialling that. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that moving away from Spotify is difficult.

I discovered that my toilet seat has a button that allows it to simply unclip from the main bowl. What a revelation.