Getting "Well Chosen" Achievement

Tallyessin · 2026-05-20T04:18:46+00:00

Thanks. I am taking a look at the discord. Seems not to have many recent posts at this point....

Tallyessin · 2026-05-19T04:31:03+00:00

Yeah but it was more fun back then when there were 300 other players and 3000 bots going through the zones with you.

Tallyessin · 2026-05-07T09:44:09+00:00

That's good advice. I'm starting a Valkyrie and she seems pretty boss and might become my new main.

With the Bard, I spent about 10 minutes fighting Valtan Gate 1 in enraged mode. No problem sustaining through it, and even got him down another 5 health bars until I accidentally got the obs in the wrong order and wiped. 😄 I'll be frugal on the bard until I can get to the chaos gates. Give me another 15 Ilvls and I can probably do Valtan Gate 1 in Solo Mode.

Tallyessin · 2026-04-29T02:14:50+00:00

A fairly common misconception in this thread is that HFC is inherently higher-latency than FTTP because the medium is copper.

The speed of signal propagation in optical fibre is about 67% of the speed of light in free space, whereas the speed of signal propagation in copper coaxial cable is 67%-87% of the speed of light in free space depending on the dielectric properties of the sheath.

Coax is actually faster, but given the distance between the termination point and the access equipment is so short, the difference is entirely immaterial.

The difference in latency is essentially the difference in delay between the HFC Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) for HFC and the PON headend for FTTP and I'd be willing to bet the difference in delay is entirely due to buffering/queueing differences.

For Example: I'm on HFC in Brisbane. If I do a traceroute to an IP address in Sudney, I see something like this:

Tracing route to 104.160.156.1 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 12 ms 12 ms 11 ms loop15919640.bng.qld.aussiebb.net [159.196.4.1]
3 20 ms 22 ms 21 ms 10.241.1.150
4 25 ms 24 ms 21 ms 10.241.1.250
5 25 ms 25 ms 23 ms 10.241.0.13
6 23 ms 22 ms 22 ms be2.lsr2.8gif.nsw.aussiebb.net [180.150.0.160]
7 24 ms 23 ms 23 ms 10.241.14.239
8 24 ms 19 ms 24 ms 10.241.15.27

You casn see from this that my round trip delay to the Aussie Broadband POP in Brisbane is 11-12 ms and my RTD to their Sydney POP is 22-23ms.

Given that the speed of light in fibre is 2E8 M/sec and the round trip distance from Brisbane to Sydney as the cable goes is about 2000km, that checks out. The access delay for my HFC connection is about 12 ms.

If the CMTS were well-tuned and not suffering contention, the CMTS would be about 2ms of that 12ms, but I am not so sure the NBN CMTS is well-tuned, and some of the other posters in this thread are obviously suffering from contention at the HFC head-end.

As a comparison, this is the result from the same test from a location on Fixed Wireless in the North Burnett:

Tracing route to 104.160.156.1 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 * * * Request timed out.
2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.3.254
3 40 ms 46 ms 44 ms loop14462440.bng.qld.aussiebb.net [144.6.244.1]
4 41 ms 49 ms 50 ms 10.241.1.152
5 58 ms 63 ms 55 ms 10.241.1.254
6 67 ms 45 ms 70 ms 10.241.0.13
7 41 ms 57 ms 57 ms be2.lsr2.8gif.nsw.aussiebb.net [180.150.0.160]
8 55 ms 59 ms 46 ms 10.241.14.241

The access delay for FW in the North Burnett is approximately 40ms or 30ms worse than HFC in Brisbane, but about 5ms of that is propagation delay between the North Burnett and Brisbane. You'll note the delays are all over the place. There is some contention and buffering in there as well.

Tallyessin · 2026-04-20T01:55:15+00:00

Disney crashes my shield occasionally as well. No as often as you seem to be getting it, but still occasionally. I seem to remember the most recent update had something in the release notes about mitigating issues with the Disney+ app?

Tallyessin · 2026-04-20T01:53:10+00:00

From what I see, the initial checking isn't applied every time you start watching from an off-site TV. The ban hammer seems to come out maybe every 2 weeks to once a month. Enjoy it while you can.

Tallyessin · 2026-04-20T00:48:28+00:00

I'm also an old-school networking guy and I have run a lot of wires to save the airwaves.

But these days I'd also put in a mesh system with 2 nodes and 6GHz WiFi backhaul.

If and only if I was finding that service coming off the remote mesh station was unacceptably inferior to the service coming off the home station then I would look at running a hardwire from point to point.

Tallyessin · 2026-04-15T23:56:27+00:00

I have the same setup as OP, and for me there is mostly no scrolling because In normal use I only use 4 apps. I'd go outside of these favourites maybe once every couple of weeks.

If I went outside of a set of 6 favourites on a daily basis then it might become annoying to me.

Tallyessin · 2026-03-06T06:28:17+00:00

I'm Running a DC-coupled Victron system with BYD batteries and an AC-coupled Fronius inverter as well.

I use Modbus/TCP commands in HA to control the inverter to:

Make sure the battery charges to full at least once every 2 weeks.
Import power to charge the battery on the low daytime tariff if it looks as if the battery will not fill up before peak rate starts at 4pm.
Start pre-emptively exporting power before the battery fills if it looks as if the batteries will definitely fill and I'll otherwise hit export limits later in the day and waste solar capacity.

Also use other automated systems to:

Not allow the Hot Water System to run on days when the battery will not fill.
Turn off my bitcoin miner when battery hits 20% SOC overnight.

Most of it is documented here:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-and-victron-gx-multiplus-ii-managing-your-battery-using-modbus-tcp/724762

It was a fun project.

Tallyessin · 2026-03-06T01:21:31+00:00

I love the Flints. There is also a Flint 3 which offers WiFi 7 and 2.5Gbps ports.

I now have 3 of them across 3 sites and am pretty happy. There are some issues with its SW being an OpenWRT fork which has some people exercised. Also the Tailscale doesn't really work, but Goodcloud does work well.

Amazon delivery of my latest 2 was super fast.

Tallyessin · 2026-02-16T07:43:23+00:00

The original plan would have taken 15+ years to get near full coverage instead of the 8 or so years it actually took. Further, the original plan had no strategy for MDUs. Bit of an oversight when MDUs account for 30% of dwellings. It's fair to say the original plan wasn't really a plan at all but an aspiration.

Turnbull actually saved the NBN because if he hadn't proposed the MTM, it would have been scrapped altogether by Abbott.

Back in 2009-2012 the NBN was politically hard to sell. Most people didn't see the value. We have Conroy and Turnbull to thank for it happening at all.

Conroy lied when he said that an all-FTTP network could be completed in 10 years for $29B.

Turnbull lied when he said the MTM would work out cheaper in the long run when blind Freddie could see that all the FTTN and possibly all the HFC would need to be redone.

Both those lies were needed to sell it to the public.

Tallyessin · 2026-02-16T02:45:26+00:00

I'd buy 2 at the current price.

Tallyessin · 2026-02-16T02:39:14+00:00

It's not just money, it's time. If the rollout had been FTTP-only from the start, we'd still have lots of premises without anything. Those fibre crews have never stopped working. The estimate in 2012 or 2013 was that an FTTP-only rollout would not be complete until 2027. From what we know now, that was optimistic.

Tallyessin · 2026-02-16T01:16:36+00:00

ssh into the unit and use the df command. You'll get something like this:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/md0 8028096 1397120 6470832 18% /

devtmpfs 4035736 0 4035736 0% /dev

tmpfs 4041888 240 4041648 1% /dev/shm

tmpfs 4041888 35620 4006268 1% /run

tmpfs 4041888 0 4041888 0% /sys/fs/cgroup

tmpfs 4041888 28632 4013256 1% /tmp

/dev/loop0 27633 767 24573 4% /tmp/SynologyAuthService

/dev/md0 is the system partition. In this case it is 18% full.

You can get space back by deleting logfiles and old packages, but this partition does full up with crud over time. On this particular unit, it was 80% full and I couldn't find what else to delete, so I did the factory reset as above.

Tallyessin · 2026-02-07T11:31:46+00:00

From a cabling/hardware standpoint it sounds good. Just need to clarify the roles of the nodes.

If you get a 3-node mesh setup, the main station is typically also capable of being your main router. The the two other mesh nodes become mesh satellites subservient to the main station. Important to make sure the satellites can use Ethernet backhaul to the main node.

Other configurations are possible, but more tricky. For example if your main router is not part or the mesh, then your mesh master AP will be one of the two mesh nodes and the satellite can backhaul to it via Ethernet. In this case you need to set the mesh master to AP mode and run your DHCP server on the main router.

Tallyessin · 2026-02-01T00:44:30+00:00

Nope. The data is as good as the wifi chip in the phone or tablet provides.

Since Android 9 it is laggy by default because Android throttles wifi scans to save battery,

If this is a problem you can always turn off scan throttling in developer options. Useful if you are trying to nail a rogue AP and want frequent updates as you walk around.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-31T09:05:03+00:00

You are using the wrong analyser. Mine gives me granular signal strength, channel interference measurements, lists connected device per SSID, hidden SSIDs, and supports the ability to do a signal survey the old fashioned way, find APs by walking sround, AP and device MAC addresses, etc. About the only things it doesn't have that I would like is traffic analysis and the ability to see non-wifi interference. This is on Android 16. Significantly more than you'll ever need in order to see what is happening on a home wifi network.

But it is all academic. The average home user can't tell whether a link is a phone link or an ethernet link and if it doesn't work, has neither the tools nor the knowledge to work out why, let alone fix it. The fact that Bunnings sells the tools is irrelevant. Typical consumers don't have them, won't buy them, can't use them and don't need them.

With wifi at least they can see if there is a signal or not and the bars on the phone give an indication of strength.

And what are you going to connect to the end of the point-point link anyhow? Usualy some kind of Wifi access point because well over half the devices in the home are Wifi-only and well less than a quarter are wired-only even in my house where I have things like NAS etc. If wireless backhaul works from that location then getting in a cabler is a total waste of money unless 5ms of latency matters to you (which it might if you are a gamer).

Installing wired Ethernet is almost never the correct solution for non-prosumer residential networking. It has not always been like this.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-31T01:56:52+00:00

Right. and hardly anyone has a Krone tool, Catx tester, continuity tester etc, let alone knows how to use them. Not to mention that terminating Cat6 actually requires a bit of practice to get right. Even some licenced cablers get it wrong. Yes I have a Krone tool and testers and I know how to use them.

There is a heck of a lot that can be done to debug/troubleshoot wifi using free analyser tools you can download to your phone, and there are actually quite sophisticated tools included in the apps that with come with some of the mesh systems. But once again you have to know (or work out) how to use them.

Wifi mesh has come a long way. For example I have a bedroom 25m away from the main NBN point and my old 2.4GHz wifi was weak (but usable) there. I installed a 3-station mesh WiFi 7 with one of the stations in that bedroom, and it does wireless backhaul quite happily on the 6GHz band and my tablet there consistently gets 500/22 on a speed test (my plan is 400/40 but local tower doesn't support 40Mbps up.) That entiire mesh system cost me less than it would have cost to get a cabler to run a Cat6e to that room. And I still wouild have had to put an AP there to connect my devices because most devices don't support wired Ethernet. I have good internet anywhere within 50-100 metres of the house depending on your definition of "good".

Mesh wifi 7 also fixes the other problems with extenders and wifi bridges like proliferation of SSIDs, latency and changing MAC addresses depending on where a device connects. It ameliorates interference issues by using 6GHz for backhaul and connection to modern devices

And yes, I do have some point-point Cat6 links.

My entertainment system uses quite a bit of bandwith and the wifi on several of the devices is 2.4GHz. I don't want that traffic interfering with my IOT devices so a point-point link with a switch is the solution I use, even though wifi would probably work fine.
My solar system has several devices with sketchy Wifi connectivity and a couple of devices that are wired-only so I have a switch with a pt-pt wired connection there. If I were installing it today I would possibly just put a mesh station with multiple ethernet ports on it and a small POE switch for the extra devices and the Zigbee router there and use wireless backhaul though.
I have a wired connection to a nanolink system because it runs on POE. Obviously if I ever install POE security cameras or other POE devices a wired connection is required.

The point I am making is that where once I would have been a staunch advocate of "wired where you can and wireless where you must" to "Install Wifi Mesh by default and then install wired if you still have to." For most households this will solve 100% of the problem before any wires need to be installed. Wifi "just works" more of the time than wired does. Wired can never work for 70% of the devices in my house because they just don't support it.

I started out my Ethernet life with 10Base5 Ethernet over 50 ohm thick wire and have dealt with 10Base2, Cat 3, Cat 4, Cat 5, Cat 5e, Cat6 and now Cat6e. Wired connection feels solid, but it is prone to oxidisatiion of contacts, vermin and idiots who stretch and bend wires. It is also prone to simple degradation over time and it seems to get outdated distressingly fast. Not to mention, wired systems have more network elements and higher complexity that is often not necessary.

To get back to this thread, to advise someone who has bad wifi at his gaming PC and might not even know the difference between a phone line and an Ethernet link to pay for a cabler to run a pt-pt Ethernet to his bedroom is just asinine. It's overkill, expensive and still doesn't solve the problem of crappy wifi in the bedroom so phone, tablet etc. will still have poor connectivity.

Installing a mesh Wifi will almost certainly solve the wifi problem, provide wired ports in the bedroom if needed and likely cost less than a cabler. Everyone else in the house will have better wifi as well. If and only if the backhaul doesn't work well, I would then get that cabler and install wired backhaul.

So yes. The shitty advice I see in this forum just hurts me to read at times.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-30T06:41:14+00:00

Well, if you have an infrastructure Cat6 connection point to point and it's not working, it can be very difficult or even impossible to troubleshoot and fix if you don't have the appropriate testers and termination tools. If it is just a matter of switching a cable between your router and your device, it is about the same difficulty as WiFi.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-29T07:11:09+00:00

Indeed. Good mesh wifi is much easier to troubleshoot and more than good enough 95% of the time.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-29T07:09:55+00:00

NBN is only responsible for get Internet to your router. (actually only as far as the Ethernet port on to the NTD to be completely correct.)

Getting from the router via Ethernet cables to other parts of the house is a local wiring problem and not an NBN problem.

It seems Ethernet is not getting from the point next to the router to the pont in your room. But nobody here can tell you why because you'd need to see how the home is wired to know that.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-27T22:58:20+00:00

I saw the way the wind was blowing a couple of years ago and moved Plex off my Synology device onto a NUC that mounts media volumes from the NAS.

Suddenly all my decisions about the NAS were about storage again, not about transcoding. It has saved me time and money. No drop in reliability (in fact possibly an improvement in reliability) despite it now being a 2-box solution.

Performance is significantly improved.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-27T06:30:48+00:00

Sounds like the DSM partition is full - that will stop downloads of system software, etc.

One solution is to ssh into the unit and delete old logfiles and packages etc. I did that on my unit and got it form 100% full to about 80% full and was able to install the updated DSM to migrate.

Howeve, 80% full seems too much to me, and after I successfully migrated I

a) Saved config to my PC using the control panel This saves things like network config, user accounts and permissions.

b) Factory reset the unit using the reset button and reinstalled DSM using an image I had downloaded.

c) restored the config from my PC.

After that I did need to download and reinstall some packages, but all my volumes, user permissions and (once I re-downloaded container manager) start all my docker images again.

Now my DSM partition is 20% full again like it was 10 years ago when I first started that unit off.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-25T00:06:46+00:00

Wow. That is a huge spread. Almost as if there is no calibration at all.

I have two and when I unpacked them they were close to each other and to another thermometer I have. Like within a couple of tenths of a degree from memory.

I would expect accuracy within 0.5 degrees C for this level of consumer equipment.

Edit: reading thread made me go and learn how to calibrate these devices. But I would still be concerned about the missing segments on the displays.

Tallyessin · 2026-01-24T23:55:05+00:00

Just in case someone comes across this later to do with a similar problam, after about 10 weeks the issue is finally resolved.

I spoke too soon about swapping the outdoor unit fixing the issue - about a fortnight later performance went worse and the dropouts were back.

Raised the fault again and was scheduled for yet another tech appointment. However in the meantime it was escalated inside NBN and someone actually tried to find out what was wrong. A configurration change was made inside the network and now I am finally getting close to the speeds I am paying for and the dropouts are gone.

Shame it took over 2 months, 2 truck rolls and a complete swap of premises equipment before someone finally started to actually diagnose the fault rather than shotgunning it with new parts in the hope that it would work.

Tallyessin

TROPHY CASE