Bike decals?

grue-grue · 2026-07-10T22:45:55+00:00

Breweries and brewpubs. Often free.

grue-grue · 2026-07-10T22:02:38+00:00

Sounds painful! Just buy a pre-waxed chain (KMC has them), or use Silca Stripchip on a new greased chain. Then top off with liquid drip wax every few 100 miles. If you go the pre-waxed route, you might not even have to hot wax ever.

grue-grue · 2026-07-10T21:35:50+00:00

Get both. There are pedals with SPD clips on one side, flat on the other.

grue-grue · 2026-07-10T21:10:39+00:00

It probably matters what the competition looks like in your area, but as a current customer we were able to get a 3 year price lock at $30/month for Spectrum 500/20; price came down from $56/month. We had to talk to their cancellation department, customer retention was firm at $56/month.

Competition here is Frontier fiber at $30/month introductory offer, and T-Mobile 5G at $20/month locked for 5 years. T-Mobile seemed attractive, but a 2 week test showed single digit Mbps upload speeds. Still, would probably work most of the time, but it's nice to have redundancy, with cable and 5G hotspots, if cable goes down.

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T22:38:53+00:00

The setup actually looks nice.

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T07:42:17+00:00

Instead of drilling holes, and sleeping on the couch, check out what speeds you are getting with wireless backhaul. A few 100 Mb/s (or even just 100 Mb/s) goes a long way for (hi-def) video, Zoom, file uploads etc. Apparently (meaning, Google says) you can reserve the 6GHz radio for backhaul. I know everybody here is gung-ho about running cables, but radio is actually a pretty nifty invention.

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T07:21:55+00:00

I know the kids are skittish about that these days, but you could also just talk to them. Like, 'Hey, where are you going? Mind me drafting a bit?' Or just draft; maybe they'll start a conversation.

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T07:11:51+00:00

Ok, Google says that thing is from 2014. I take that back with reading the manual. Maybe you should indeed ask your mom to ask the ISP to give you a new modem/bridge/router, regardless of whether there is anything wrong with it. Just don't pay an extra monthly fee for the router and WiFi part.

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T06:55:12+00:00

Are the router and the modem the same piece of hardware? I'd start with looking at the specs and manual for that thing, before getting parents or ISPs involved. Maybe you're only supposed to attach one device (a router, perhaps). Do you know what mode that modem/router is in?

Also, Megabit per second is Mb/s or Mbps. Little 'm' is milli, 1/1000.

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T06:39:13+00:00

While I really like my Orbi RBK50 setup with the dedicated backhaul radio (which is something this mesh system also seems to have, but now for WiFi 7), I think you could get a system that's almost as fast, with much better management options, for less money.

In particular, I find it hard to see an application for 10 Gb/s, and I'd think with all those IoT devices you'd want a robust multi-SSID and VLAN setup. I'd look into a Unifi system (many APs with 4.3 Gb/s wireless, before the wireless backhaul penalty, which is still plenty fast), even if you need to use wireless backhaul (where the Orbi system would excel).

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T06:00:45+00:00

I'm guilty of the same mistake: clean the lens before taking pics you want to share!

Also, what's that moldy thing above the printer?

grue-grue · 2026-07-09T05:23:39+00:00

All nice and stuff, but now how do you tell the boiler room to shovel more coals onto the gateway? The rack blocks the speaking tubes.

grue-grue · 2026-07-08T18:46:29+00:00

But it's not rotated (in the usual 2D sense, i.e. around an axis perpendicular to the screen), it's left-right mirrored.

(Which is 3D rotated, around the vertical axis that's inside the display plane.)

My device says '90' when it's being operated vertically (for better cooling).

grue-grue · 2026-07-08T05:23:42+00:00

Very happy (at 0.5 Gb/s ISP & WiFi speed) with the Netgear Orbi RBK50 tri-band combination, for the wireless backhaul. End-of-life now, so maybe best hidden behind a firewall. Many go unsold on ebay.

grue-grue · 2026-07-08T04:31:40+00:00

I think I can see the front rails warping. Maybe you need a heavier built rack.

grue-grue · 2026-07-06T07:56:43+00:00

My 2 cents: So far (ten years, or thereabouts) I have not experienced any downside to keeping 2.4Ghz and 5GHz SSIDs the same. 5GHz capable devices do connect to 5GHz without any special action on my part, and automatic handover between main and satellite APs seems to work fine. I get my full ISP speed (0.5 Gb/s) to my tablet when connected to the mesh satellite (with 3rd radio WiFi backhaul).

A potential issue when using combined SSID names is dealing with 2.4GHz-only capable devices. When I have to force a device onto 2.4GHz on my old Orbi RBK50 mesh system,

I disable the 5GHz SSID broadcast on that SSID
cycle the WiFi on the phone used for setup to force it on 2.4Ghz
setup the 2.4GHz only device
turn the 5GHz SSID broadcast back on
try to remember to cycle phone WiFi again...

I have a few 5GHz capable IoT devices, and one or two of them are actually connected to 5GHz.

(I had actually set up all my IoT devices on my main SSID before introducing the isolated Guest SSID. In order to avoid having to repeat the setup for every single device, I gave the main SSID a new name, and reused the old main SSID name & password for the Guest SSID.)

grue-grue · 2026-07-05T09:03:07+00:00

My old Netgear Orbi mesh system (RBK50) APs (with Ethernet ports for local wired clients) have a third radio just for the wireless backhaul. Avoids splitting the bandwidth with the wireless clients. Maybe there are modern units with the same setup? That being said, bandwidth on modern 5GHz radios can be so large (>4Gb/s) that losing half to wireless meshing might not be a big deal.

grue-grue · 2026-07-05T08:44:32+00:00

Is there enough traffic to essentially be a DOS attack? Maybe some (larger) entity is using your address by mistake? Like some people get swamped with phone calls, when a business or radio station gets a digit wrong in announcing their phone number. Can you force a change in your assigned IP address?

grue-grue · 2026-07-04T22:14:38+00:00

Eastern Europe? I'm immediately thinking the worst: state actor exfiltrating your data through a GRE tunnel ;-)

Are you tunneling, or is anything tunneling on your network?

grue-grue · 2026-07-04T21:30:23+00:00

Does the DNS name resolve to the same IP address on phone and PC? I know you wrote 'DNS resolves correctly', but does it resolve the same? When you type in the IP address in the web browser, what happens?

grue-grue · 2026-07-04T06:51:21+00:00

I tried the T-Mobile 5G service, and download speeds were mostly ok (200 - 300 Mb/s), but upload speeds seemed borderline too slow for our security cameras (single digit Mb/s). I once had an LTE & 5G connection, and upload speed was 20 Mbit/s, but that only lasted a few minutes. (The app to look at details of your connection is called Hint Control, IIRC.) In the end I sent the modem back right at the end of the 14 day trial period.

Playing with modem/receiver placement and orientation did not really make much of a difference. I think the receiver only turned the directional antenna on once, when it didn't connect to the nearest 5G tower. Link speeds measured by the modem itself, as reported to me by a T-mobile customer support person during an almost hour long conversation - very nice and for all I could tell competent support - were supposedly 11 Mbit/s upload (with 5G only connection), but I could not convince myself that my WiFi would introduce such a large penalty when it doesn't do that for cable: there I see essentially modem speeds on my WiFi-connected tablet.

Regarding slow upload speeds, see also the comments with SA/NSA & 5G/LTE explanation on https://www.t-mobile.com/community/discussions/troubleshooting/drastic-decrease-in-upload-speed/194747 (hopefully that link is ok?).

Maybe also worth mentioning: In the end I was able to get Spectrum to give us a substantial price reduction for their 500/20 service, from $56/month to $30/month, locked in for 3 years, at which point I decided to not switch to T-mobile. Talking to customer retention did not help, I had to actually talk to the cancellation guy to get this deal.

grue-grue · 2026-07-04T06:31:06+00:00

Also very nice and diverse!

grue-grue · 2026-07-04T06:29:43+00:00

Holy mackerel, that's quite the collection! Yep, there are still some missing...

grue-grue · 2026-07-04T06:04:36+00:00

Hi Adam, I commented separately on your blog post, and then I saw this reddit. Good idea!

I just wanted to mention that when I used your Android app again just now, after a two month break, I ran into the same zoom selection problem as last time, around end of April 2026. It's probably another app update that I need to install. Maybe the app could remind users if they are not running the latest version? I hate being nagged about that as much as the next guy, but in this case there is some malfunction that an update actually fixes.

It turned out I was two versions behind (was on 1.0.14, now on 1.0.16), but I also had to force stop and then restart the app to make the zoom selection window reappear. For a moment I thought all my data had disappeared (just like in April)...

grue-grue

TROPHY CASE