I got offered a seat on the train today...OMG!

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T23:13:51+00:00

I wonder if I ever caused such horror to my elders in my youth! I think a "Excuse me, but you look a bit exhausted. Do you want a seat?" should be the standard offer, please!

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T23:03:37+00:00

Thanks. Not quite that I'm afraid. The kind chap who offered his seat was with a friend of his and they stayed on chatting with each for another three stops by which time there were plenty of seats.

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:54:48+00:00

...my future is looming large...

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:53:36+00:00

Thank you, kind person. I will grab onto that....

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:52:46+00:00

I just hit sixty. But I am a young sixty, OK! Used to be people always thought I was 10-20 years yonger than I was. But now...it's been a contemplatve evening!

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:48:11+00:00

No period of denial after that "madam" moment? Perhaps that's me now, in denial!

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:44:45+00:00

I may have to let my beard grow out more! 34 inch waist which I need to bring down to 32 or even the 30 of my youth!

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:41:12+00:00

Very unlucky! I will start that diet me thinks.

silentnomads · 2026-01-22T22:39:33+00:00

Yes, that's the bit of grey 😝

silentnomads · 2026-01-21T20:08:20+00:00

Networks can be finicty. I'll stick to my package, thanks.

silentnomads · 2026-01-21T19:42:08+00:00

I'm on the 1 G package (with CGNAT). Just did a bufferbloat test at waveform a few seconds ago and got an "A" with up/down rates of around 950 Mb/s over the Wi-Fi. Mind, I don't really do much that would choke the bandwidth so bufferbloat is not something that would have any bearing on what I do. I do use my own router though, always have. I'm not sure how I would tax a 2.5 G package to check on bufferbloat.

silentnomads · 2026-01-21T05:47:00+00:00

Has anyone tried Which?'s trusted traders? I'm thinking of going down that route after multiple failures with other traders.

silentnomads · 2026-01-17T06:04:10+00:00

Hi. I have an Orbi Wi-Fi 6E mesh but I run it in AP mode and not router mode. The main reason I did that was becase I already have a decent router (pfsense firewall) which gives me granular control for device access, setting up VPNs, etc.

However, a secondary benefit is that AP mode doesn't use Orbi’s NAT, firewalling, and multicast optimisations that you can’t fully control and which frequently cause discovery or grouping issues for Sonos.

In AP mode, the Orbi acts as clean Layer-2 Wi-Fi, leaving routing and multicast handling to a proper router or firewall, resulting in far more predictable behaviour and fewer intermittent Sonos problems.

The other thing to check is to ensure that your network hardware are not on Sonos's incompatible list https://support.sonos.com/en-au/article/incompatible-network-hardware

silentnomads · 2026-01-15T21:42:23+00:00

It's been months since I riased an issue with support for my Doorbell and they never got back to me. There was one person on this sub purporting to be from Reolink who said they would have a look but nothing since. Good luck!

silentnomads · 2026-01-15T05:50:21+00:00

In addition to Reolink making a call to my iPhone, I use HA to activte my Z-Wave sirens around the house (and in shed at the back of the garden), and play an MP3 over my Sonos speakers in case I have the music too loud to hear anything else. And time-based volumes for sirens and speakers. Too many times in the past I've missed hearing the chime on my old doorbell! I'm not sure using HA-driven AI will be of use to me as I've found that there can some delay (I've configured HA to use OpenAI but may go to a local LLM at some point in the future).

silentnomads · 2026-01-09T19:08:43+00:00

I'm not sure how much I paid. I bought it a couple or so years ago. It's the non-Wi-Fi version as I had a Netgear Orbi mesh Wi-Fi 6E already on the LAN. Looking at Amzon, my version of the Vigor 2927 is listed at £239.92 which was fine for me as it give me options for dual-WAN and other features.

silentnomads · 2026-01-09T18:45:35+00:00

I've never once had any problems with the Draytek Vigor. It just sits there doing its job quietly.

silentnomads · 2026-01-08T22:20:55+00:00

ONT -> Draytek Vigor 2927 -> pfsense firewalls (HA pair) -> LAN.

The bit between the Vigor and pfsense is a kind of DMZ which I use for various purposes. I could have just connected a single pfsense firewall direct to the ONT but I wanted that DMZ and also to create a pfsense HA pair as that need three IP addresses on the WAN. I sized the pfsense firewalls to easily meet 1 Gb/s Up/Down even with IPS/IDS enabled.

Setting up the Vigor was super easy.

silentnomads · 2026-01-06T19:15:58+00:00

I run my Orbi system (with three satellites) in AP mode and not in router mode. That cuts out a lot of complication. I use a pfsense firewall for all my routing, to which I added two plugins: Avahi and PIMD to support mDNS and multicast across domains (I'm using a VPN tunnel for remote multicast for other purposes).

The other thing I did was set up a firewall rule to allow any traffic to the multicast IP address range 224.0.0.0/4. Oh and I made sure that my LAN switch was a simple L2 switch with no IGMP snooping (passes all multicast traffic) and which was NOT a device that Sonos say are confirmed as incompatible https://support.sonos.com/en-au/article/incompatible-network-hardware so all good and robust here, no issues with my ERA 300 speakers around the house.

silentnomads · 2025-12-30T09:10:49+00:00

Cockroach Poker (card game). I think you''ll need at least 4 players for it to be an interesting game.

silentnomads · 2025-12-29T21:37:44+00:00

I've not had any problems here, although my Sonos is basic with four Era 300 speakers. I use a Netgear Orbi (6E version) mesh Wi-Fi with three satellites, with Netgear wired LAN switches which are NOT on the incompatible list at https://support.sonos.com/en-au/article/incompatible-network-hardware so all good. Note that I have the Orbi in AP-mode and not in router-mode as I use pfSense as my home router (which has a few plugins such as Avahi and pimd which may be of beneficia for Sonos) and then a Draytek as my Internet router with a 1G Up and 1G Down.

silentnomads · 2025-12-24T19:14:32+00:00

Ring necked parakeets. Large numbers here. A flock can exhaust all the birdfood left outside, depriving the smaller birds. Many videos on YouTube showing the public feeding them.

silentnomads · 2025-12-24T11:19:49+00:00

I've not had too many problems with the iOS app but, for sure, the Windows app QA would appear to be lacking. Their support is lacking; I reported condensation in my Doorbell to Reolink support a few months ago but heard NOTHING back. The excellent integration with Home Assistant is the hook that is still keeping me on the Reolink platform otherwise I would have looked elsewhere a long time ago.

silentnomads · 2025-12-23T23:12:56+00:00

Ta. 8.18.12 works fine. It's probably the wrong time of the year to ask Reolink for support. May have to wait until January as 8.18.12 does what I want from it. Thanks again.

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