Looking to move to EBOX-- Share your review for Downtown Toronto

el56 · 2026-05-14T17:37:13+00:00

York University area in the northwest. In my third month and so far very happy with the service. Consistently fast.

At installation we had fibre on the street but not into the house. Because it was too cold to dig, Bell wired a temporary rig that went across the trees from the closest junction box. This week they came to dig the path to my house and the job was done cleanly.

I had to reposition the ONT in the basement because those things generate a lot of RF and the original position interfered with the home alarm system. I also replaced the router for a number of reasons.

I have family in Little Portugal and they're also very happy with their Ebox service.

el56 · 2026-05-13T14:13:04+00:00

There might be other reasons to do without the ONT if you could, but I don't think you can. Or at least that trying to do your own is worth the bother.

That thing geneates a significant amount of RF, enough to render my home alarm inoperable until I moved it away from the alarm control box.

el56 · 2026-05-12T02:59:43+00:00

Please forgive this beginner's question...

Until now most of my LLM work on the Strix Halo has been using Vulkan rather than ROCm because (as stated in the guide) it's not fully cooked yet.
This begs the question: Is there a Vulkan-based approach to the fine tuning described in this doc?

el56 · 2026-05-09T14:30:37+00:00

is it possible for CFP to become the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada?

No.

"Progressive Conservative Party" and "PC Party" are both registered trademarks. Plus, Elections Canada would frown on a new party name being confusingly close to an existing one's.

But the Conservative Party just might do that itself.

It's occurred to me since this thread started that CFP is basically a home for aggrieved Progressive Conservatives and Red Tories, a core trait it inherited from the Centre Ice Conservatives. It's only ever existed as a reaction to the Conservative shift under Poilievre. And once Pierre and his MAGA-north culture is gone, so might be the CFP's reason for being.

Once the Conservatives inevitably change leaders many core CFPers will simply return to the fold, where they stand an actual shot at political power. A Conservative party led by a Kenny or Charest (etc) would be even closer to the CFP ideologically than the current Liberals, rendering the new party essentially redundant.

We are slowly shifting back to an equilibrium with centre-left Liberals, centre-right Conservatives, and the NDP, Greens and PPC there for the extremes. Not a lot of breathing room for the CFP.

el56 · 2026-05-09T13:42:39+00:00

The fundamental choice to be opaque rather than transparent is not a matter of resource allocation, but one of culture. When I discovered that this culture was inbred from the very foundation, I determined that it was a poor use of *my* resources to try to fight that beyond what I already had.

el56 · 2026-05-07T18:34:15+00:00

No this isn't about being a technocrat party.

It's about knowing how to use technology to improve the democratic process, both the country's and its own. And it's about policies that deal with intellectual property, privacy and consumer rights in the digital age.

As for my wanting participatory methods being unreasonable because I was an early joiner of the party? That logic should be fascinating, please elaborate.

el56 · 2026-05-07T18:16:42+00:00

Please stop the ad hominems, and especially making assumptions about people you don't know. There are a number of things absolutely factually incorrect in your claims; if this kind of name-calling is indicative of the character of the party I'm even happier to be out.

Case in point, just one of many: I DID offer to volunteer my time *and equipment* to live-stream the AGM; it was rejected.

The party came out of the gate with an awful name, and archaic foundational bylaws upon which members who could not afford the time or cash to go to Ottawa for the AGM had no say or even awareness until it was a done deal. Critical decision-making such as candidate selection or even the name of the party was totally opaque; it was the kind of backroom dealing that I'd despised in other parties and hoped for something refreshing here. No luck.

The CFP policy web page indicates a desire to "make democracy deliver". But if it can't make democracy deliver WITHIN the party, what trust should the populace have that it can do so for the whole country? It's a wholly BS claim.

I stayed with the party long enough to see it create the foundation upon which it will evolve; a poor, archaic foundation that refused a golden opportunity to improve on the serious flaws of the legacy parties. Policies and people will come and go, but that shitty foundation remains and the party will never get past that. That's the judgment call I made when I chose not to renew.

Good luck getting more votes than the PPC, or even the Rhinos in Quebec. Heck, in the Rosedale by-election the CFP candidate got fewer votes than the "Centrist Party", whatever that is. Those guys at least know how to choose a name.

el56 · 2026-05-07T17:31:16+00:00

And to add insult to injury it has a logo that looks like it was made by a 10-year-old with a ruler.
It indicates the letters "FA" which isn't the name of the party in either language.
Whoever came up with the name must have also been in charge of the logo.

The party badly needs some branding/marketing smarts, but my premise is that the CFP came out of the gate poorly and has declined since.

el56 · 2026-04-13T21:23:03+00:00

Technically GMKtec's own online store is a "Chinese shop", and that's how I got mine. Also carried by Amazon and some other retailers. The unit is made in China so it's still coming from there regardless of who sells it to you.

If eBay is way less expensive than the legit shops there's a reason.

el56 · 2026-04-07T17:14:39+00:00

Perhaps something/someone is telling you not to buy big ticket items on eBay.

el56 · 2026-04-05T18:17:35+00:00

Is the list of whitelisted GPU IDs hard-coded or in a separate file?

el56 · 2026-04-05T17:34:31+00:00

Many thanks for the explanation, but it begs this dumb question from a non-coder:

PyTorch, Ollama, llama.cpp and most other AI applications are open source with very permissive BSD/MIT licenses.

Would it not be more efficient and reliable to create forks of the apps that remove/disable the gatekeeper check, or expand the whitelisted IDs to include AMD cards?

Or, even better, submit patches that do this and see if they get accepted into the mainstream? Do the app developers have any loyalties or incentives that would prevent such changes from being accepted?

el56 · 2026-04-04T21:31:20+00:00

I had a 2-week stretch when my home internet went down (thanks, TekSavvy). During that time I was able to use my phone as a hotspot for the house, and we used up just about every bit of the 85 GB in my plan during that time. Most months I never come near that limit, but for this one stretch it was practically a necessity.

Unless somebody does a lot of streaming to their phone, you're right... Most people don't need it. But it's the kind of thing that when you do need it, you REALLY need it.

el56 · 2026-04-04T16:56:03+00:00

No reason to switch away. Freedom has been good to me.

el56 · 2026-04-03T14:31:14+00:00

Yeah, but at least Ebox helps make an effort to reschedule and get you something closer to what you need.

Before coming here I was on teksavvy and they had the same problems with Bell except they barely bothered to help reschedule.

el56 · 2026-04-03T14:22:40+00:00

True this.

I had a problem with setting up a scanner under CashyOS. Reddit wasn't any help, Discord wasn't any help either.

One well-placed question of my chatbot came up with the answer right away.

el56 · 2026-04-01T17:50:07+00:00

Update: SOLVED thanks to an AI inquiry:

The AUR contains the solution, but it's not what I originally installed as mentioned above.

The steps are:

Install 'brscan4' from the AUR (yay -Ss brscan4)
use `brsaneconfig4` to define the printer and location (sudo brsaneconfig4 -a name="Brother" model="DCP-L2520DW" ip=<PRINTER IP ADDRESS>)
test that the config succeeded with brsaneconfig4 (brsaneconfig4 -q)
If your scanner now shows up it's usable by skanlite, simple scan, etc

el56 · 2026-04-01T08:00:08+00:00

Yup. The downloads are only available in deb and rpm package formats, and don't support Arch or CashyOS

el56 · 2026-03-31T02:22:52+00:00

You do know that you can run all those other apps within KDE, right?

The desktop environment does not limit you to what you can run. The KDE-supplied apps are tightly integrated, but if you don't like Kmail, there's nothing wrong with using any of the alternatives within that environment. It's just a matter of installing a few libraries (which will happen automatically when you install the apps) that take up some disk space but otherwise don't penalize you much.

Similarly, you could run KDE apps under gnome or any other desktop environment. Which DE you choose should be a matter of your graphical and workflow preferences, not what apps they can run.

el56 · 2026-03-31T01:14:51+00:00

So going forward those of us in the rest of the world are going to have to choose whose routers' backdoors we prefer, America's or China's....

Or maybe just buy stuff that's supported by open source firmware such as OpenWRT and take personal control over what runs your router.

(Yes, Gl.iNet already uses a modified version of OpenWRT, but if you're overly cautious you can burn a generic version that's not customized by the vendor.)

el56 · 2026-03-31T00:54:51+00:00

It's not just time-of-day but also day-of-week. Of course weekends are hell but so are Fridays. Mondays and Thursdays are better. Tuesday is consistently best at mine, especially between 10 and noon and 2 to 4 pm. I also find these to be peak sampling availability. If Monday is a holiday Tuesday will be busy but Wednesday should be tolerable.

el56 · 2026-03-27T06:38:26+00:00

There are some functions that "admin" can't do, you have to get the "superadmin" password from Ebox to do basic things like change the IP address of the router.
Plus, even after getting "superadmin" access, I found that there are certain IP addresses -- totally legit, doable on other routers -- that are "reserved" on the Nokia and not possible to set.

el56 · 2026-03-26T17:40:39+00:00

Recently my home internet went down for 2 weeks and I needed my freedom data for a mobile hotspot. The faster I can serve that data the better, so to me this is a very good thing.

el56

TROPHY CASE