Category: Technology

AiMesh | ASUS Global

 

ASUS routers are designed to give you the best possible WiFi coverage, and in most cases a single ASUS router will deliver smooth, reliable WiFi to every part of your home. But WiFi coverage can be affected by many factors: room layout, construction materials, and even furnishings! If your home has dead spots or unreliable signals, ASUS AiMesh is the answer! AiMesh is an innovative new router feature that connects multiple ASUS routers to create a whole-home WiFi network. It’s a powerful and flexible way to solve your WiFi problems that also makes the most of your existing hardware: you can mix different ASUS router models, so when you upgrade there’s no need to throw away your old router — you can use it to expand your AiMesh network! AiMesh gives you time-saving central control over all the routers, and seamless roaming capability means you never need to switch networks. AiMesh is WiFi you can rely on — for all your devices, all the time!

Source: AiMesh | ASUS Global

In the wake of the Ubiquiti hack, I was reading a HN discussion on their gear — since I use it extensively at my church — which got me thinking about mesh networking again.

Asus is the brand I really favor for home stuff, over Linksys (Cisco) and Netgear. Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different routers and access points. Asus products have consistently worked better, had better software, and respected the privacy of the end user. My $600 Netgear Orbi mesh system was so bad, needing a reboot almost every day, that, one day, I got so frustrated that I literally chucked it into the trash, and immediately went and bought a $400 Linksys Velop. I’ve come close to chucking it as well, based on problems I’ve had. It seems that almost every time I check the system, one of the nodes is offline, and needs to be rebooted. My plan C was to try the Ubiquiti Amplifi system next.

So I checked into where Asus was with mesh networking these days, and I see they now have a mesh system called Lyra. It’s $273 for a 3-unit set, and reportedly has the best wifi of anything in the space. The reason I’m bothering to write this, though, is that Asus has come up with a way to use their regular routers to establish a mesh network with just new firmware, called AiMesh. So you can have different models of Asus wifi routers, and mesh them all together. I see they also have a Zen line of wifi routers, and, at least according to the first and only article I read about it, it seems all of these units work together with their AiMesh firmware. This is such a cool idea, I almost want to buy some new routers to try it.

Now I need to go reboot my basement Velop unit…

Tenet

I watched Tenet last night. It’s confusing. I watched a YouTube video to clarify it. In the process of explaining it, they showed the scene where The Protagonist is in the first inversion room, dodging the bullets that cause the holes he sees when he first enters it. Of course, we later understand that it is his inverted self that is trying to shoot him.

Why?

Why is The Protagonist trying to kill his former self — when he knows this is his former self — and risk making himself disappear?

In my old age, I’m convinced that time-travel movies just never work.

OK, except for Primer, but that’s more of a time-dilation movie, rather than time travel.

Or maybe Time Cop (despite JCVD, and it’s budget), which actually gets time travel right.

Or 12 Monkeys, which is one of the best movies ever made.

OK, never mind. I guess it’s possible to make a good movie involving time travel. But Tenet isn’t one of them, despite what the Tomatometer says.

UPDATE: Another YouTube video says that The Protagonist was shooting at himself to empty the gun, and render it safe, citing his disassembly at the end of the sequence (which, by the way, is a lot freaking harder to do with a Glock than shown in the movie).

That’s a good explanation, but, like so many other things in the movie, you’d need to stop the movie and think about it to understand it. That’s not the mark of a good movie. The movie should explain itself. If you’re going to put a sequence in the film, you need to give the watcher enough info to understand why this is happening, in the context of the sequence, especially in a purposely-mind-bending movie like Tenet.

I just think Christopher Nolan started believing his own hype on this one. It’s a good story, but just a little more exposition, a little more emotion from The Protagonist, and slowing the whole thing down to give people a chance to absorb it — cut some action, if you need to — would have made this a far better movie.

UPDATE: JWZ, with whom I usually agree on reviews, excoriates Tenet is his usual, brilliant fashion:

Tenet: I remember that sinking feeling when they finally found the MacGuffin. “Fuck, that means it’s only half over??”You know how they say Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person? This movie is a stupid person’s idea of clever. Much like Inception. I mean, Bill and Ted 3 had better use of its cosmology. The camera tricks with the backwards fights weren’t even any good, or even comprehensible. And a backwards person sitting in a forwards car makes it backward? The stupid, it burns like inexplicable frostbite.

 

This movie was better when it was the Sugar Water video by Cibo Matto, which was mercifully only 4 minutes long. And had better physics.

Playstation 5 and Twitter

I have a very tolerate/hate relationship with Twitter. I think I’m literally on my 14th account, and I’ve deactivated my current one, only to reactivate before the 30-day time-out period, about 10 times now. There are many reasons.

One is that it’s just depressing. “Doomscrolling” is very much a thing, especially after something as tumultuous as people storming the Capitol building, or people storming the Portland police station, and attacking the mayor.

Another is the absurdity in the swings of the takes. Back and forth it goes, between hard-left and hard-right, while people always presume to read other people’s minds, in what has become the logical fallacy of the age.

Another is the brevity. You get just enough characters to make one point, without context. This leads directly to the problem above, in forcing people to make a contrary statement on a presumption of the conclusion of the statement they’re responding to.

Another is that ephemeral nature of it. Even if you can find a good exchange, it disappears “like tears in the rain,” and quickly gets lost. If you don’t bookmark it somehow, good luck finding it with Twitter’s “search” feature.

Last, but certainly not least, is the porn. I’m tired of the porn. You can tell Twitter to hide most of it from you, but it still leaks through. I’ll come back to this point.

For about 20 years, I’ve built (or bought) gaming PC’s, but a few years back, I decided to give my rig to my son, and try just using a Playstation 4 Pro for gaming. What I found surprised me. Besides a work computer for the past 6 years or so, I’ve only used Windows for gaming, personally, for about 25 years. Even with just this specific focus, I was always fighting to keep it up to date: BIOS updates, Windows updates, antivirus updates, video driver updates, mouse driver updates, keyboard driver updates, game updates, Steam updates, GoG updates, etc. The weekly maintenance on the thing was a not-so-invisible burden.

When I want to play a game on a console, I hit a button on the controller to turn it on, and within seconds, I am playing right where I left off. Updates are very rare. There are no intermediaries (like Steam) to patch. Occasionally, there will be an update to a game, but the system intelligently notifies me about them, and then waits for me to update them. If there are driver updates, they’re buried in the system updates. (It’s amazing how little code it takes to get input from a mouse, when you don’t need to be able to program a light show inside of it, program its 32 buttons with macros, and track every movement to sell back to the 3rd-party personal data market exchange.)

It’s just a completely different world. Just like when I finally moved from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu, and realized how much of my time was being spent keeping Gentoo happy, moving to a console was eye-opening about how much time I was spending on Windows for gaming. (Don’t even get me started on the care and feeding of Windows for programming.)

On top of all of that convenience and streamlining, there are no cheaters! Glory hallelujah! When playing a game like Battlefield on PC, I could always safely assume that there would be at least one cheater, and if I wasn’t already, my one and only goal in the game would be to switch to the cheater’s team, so that at least he wouldn’t aggravate me.

The downside, of course, is that you can’t have some super-specced monster running the game at 120 FPS in 4K. But $400 vs $1,500? $2,000? $3,000? And the knuckle-skinning hassle of building the rig and keeping it up to date? You can keep your graphics. Besides, if you tell me I’m missing something, graphically, when I’m playing, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Horizon Zero Dawn, I’m going to laugh in your face. Those games look incredible on a PS4 Pro, no matter what you say.

So, yeah, I’ve been trying to “cop” a Playstation 5. Specifically a digital edition. (I only have one disc. It’s the Arkham bundle that I got for $5 at a second hand shop. I’ve seen it on sale on the Playstation store for $5, and I’ve almost just bought it again so I can throw away the disc. I will probably play through both games again before I die.) Anyway, at this point, the only way to try to get in on a “drop” is to watch some select Twitter accounts which make publicizing when they go on sale their only purpose in life. So I reactivated my account. Again. I installed Tweetbot, added the PS5 drop-tracking accounts to a list, and turned on notifications for that list.

Yesterday, a notification went out that Best Buy was going to do a drop. I don’t know why I was bothering, because I’ve gotten one in my cart twice before, only to be told that none were available within 250 miles of my location. But I saw the notification, and I tried again, and nothing was working for anyone. I commented in the thread the same thing I said here, and several people liked the tweet. I gave up.

About an hour later, another notification came through that it was actually working, and even though I had to take the time to enter a new credit card, I managed to get one on order. So I commented back to the Twitter thread that I had, and an obvious cam girl (from her avatar and name) commented on my comment. This is what I mean about porn just being pervasive on the platform. You can limit it, but it’s everywhere. There are so many porn site come-ons. I’ve seen hard-core clips as comments for this sort of thing, so I was actually thankful it was just an honest comment.

And, yes, for curiosity’s sake, I went ahead and took the gamble with the click. At that point, I just had to laugh. If a girl that average looking can make money on OnlyFans, then good for her, and God Bless America.

Anyway, for all of these reasons, now that I’ve secured a PS5, I’m deleting my Twitter account again. The trash-fire-you-can-see-from-space will just have to burn without my attention again.

It’s not like half of Imgur isn’t Twitter reposts anyway.

PS5 Supply and Demand

I’m watching PS5’s being sold on Ebay to track how supply and demand are converging. Current completed listings seem to be hovering around $700-$800. They started out at $1,000, so I guess it’s getting “better.” The whole business of people using browser bots to snipe units and resell them really chaps my hide, but I wonder what my price point and patience limit actually is. Sony, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart have employed methods to help give non-botters a fair chance, but I don’t know how well that’s working.

I expect that the first place that will show supply and demand convergence will be Sony Direct. After they have them available for sale all the time, I guess stores will start having them on shelves? But what do I know?

In my disgust of not being able to find one, I was thinking I’d build a new gaming PC, but gaming CPU’s and GPU’s are impossible to find as well, thanks to freaking bitcoin miners, and the same sort of silicon supply problems affecting everything during this pandemic. What a lousy time to try to buy new kit.

I briefly had a thought that I’d buy a new M1-based Mac Mini, but it’s clear that the gaming prospects on the new architecture are going to be abysmal for a while.

Masterclass in Audio Production

I’m going to start posting these finds of exceptional audio (and video) production. Modern life has brought along a lot of garbage, but it has given us top-level-professional grade production technologies that amateurs like me could only have dreamed of 20 years ago.

Here’s another, which I’ve watched about a dozen times now.

Which reminds me: I really need one of these…

Tc Electronic Clarity M Stereo

Paul Graham on Why Billionaires Build

The ideal combination is the group of founders who are “living in the future” in the sense of being at the leading edge of some kind of change, and who are building something they themselves want. Most super-successful startups are of this type. Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to engage online with his college friends. Larry and Sergey wanted to find things on the web. All these founders were building things they and their peers wanted, and the fact that they were at the leading edge of change meant that more people would want these things in the future.

From: http://paulgraham.com/ace.html

Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and call BS on this. There’s nothing in the public record that makes me think that Zuckerberg had “friends” he wanted to connect with, or that Larry and Sergey couldn’t already find “things” on the web with Alta Vista or Yahoo! at the time. This is just revisionist billionaire protectionism.

Paul is trying to share well-known startup examples which prove that the average billionaire-founder isn’t building their empire on exploitation, but those two examples might be the most counterproductive that he could have possibly used. Both of these are of people who saw a business opportunity to exploit people’s behavior online to sell advertising, and built products to surreptitiously profit from it. If there was any consideration of building a better mousetrap, it was only to trap more mice for the purpose of milking them; not delighting them.

That, not exploiting people, is the defining quality of people who become billionaires from starting companies. So that’s what YC looks for in founders: authenticity. People’s motives for starting startups are usually mixed. They’re usually doing it from some combination of the desire to make money, the desire to seem cool, genuine interest in the problem, and unwillingness to work for someone else. The last two are more powerful motivators than the first two. It’s ok for founders to want to make money or to seem cool. Most do. But if the founders seem like they’re doing it just to make money or just to seem cool, they’re not likely to succeed on a big scale. The founders who are doing it for the money will take the first sufficiently large acquisition offer, and the ones who are doing it to seem cool will rapidly discover that there are much less painful ways of seeming cool.

Here’s where the wheels really come off his “essay.” All of the recent startups that have made the national consciousness — like GrubHub, Bird and Lime, and especially Uber and Lyft — all of them rely on exploiting underemployed people. Most people don’t realize how much it costs to employ someone, and traditional companies have borne a lot more than people understand. All of the “gig economy” work — as currently engineered — is exploitative, seeking to offload the burden (to us the technical term) of employing someone. If a person in a “gig-economy” job would factor in those costs, like wear-and-tear on their vehicle, or the increased insurance cost (that people should be taking out), a lot of people would find that they are actually losing money working for these companies in a “gig economy” position.

You can look at a simple chart of expanding productivity vs. flat realized income over the past 40 years, and quickly see that “trickle-down” economics hasn’t fulfilled it’s stated promise (no matter how much Rush Limbaugh tries to brainwash you otherwise), but the downward pressure on income for the past 10 years is coming more from exploitative “web 2.0”-type companies than traditional manufacturing, and the fact that the dot-com billionaire class, pushing the gig-economy, has been able to largely avoid scrutiny for that is proof that they’re rigging the game through the influence and cover their social-media-focused products can provide.

Graham’s “essay” is a joke because he — representing billionaires — and I — representing the other 7 billion other people on the planet — are talking about two different things. He defines “exploitation” as, say, child labor in the Orient, when the rest of us are defining it as “not making a fair deal with someone for their time.” Then, Graham ascribes political pressure to push the scales of balance of this trade back to the middle to simple jealousy, and that’s when his true colors really shine. Not only is he deluding himself about what it takes to exploit someone, he’s accusing people having a problem with the situation as being affected by base emotions, which are easily dismissed.

The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what users want. Newly started startups have no choice but to delight users, or they’ll never even get rolling. But this never stops being the lodestar, and bigger companies take their eye off it at their peril. Stop delighting users, and eventually someone else will.

Stop it. Just stop it. You’re making yourself look silly, now, Paul. It’s been a long, long time since YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, or Twitter “delighted” anyone. They are all predatory monopolies now — with nation-state-level influence — and they are all exploiting people and gaming governments to stay that way. Google and Amazon, in particular, were delightful, 20 years ago, when they gave us things like Google Reader, and the ability to block sites from search results we found counter-productive,  or highly-curated, highly-rated selections to choose from, with high-quality reviews to help make a selection. Now that they’ve achieved monopoly positions in their market, they no longer have to trouble themselves with such things as being easy or helpful to use.

In the old days, wildly successful companies and people would at least be expected to pay an increasingly-significant level of tax, but quiet changes to the tax laws over the past few decades has essentially given us a flat tax on income, and zero tax on corporations. Bezos is on track to becoming the first trillionaire by the time he dies, while the national debt has risen to $30 trillion dollars, and half the country is struggling to pay rent. The executives at all of these companies almost certainly pay less income tax, on a percentage basis, than I do. It seems like something has become seriously misaligned in our economy here, and I wonder how bad it’s going to have to get before something is forcibly done about it.

Homeshoring

Thanks to Covid-19, everyone who can be has been “homeshored.” The cost savings for companies “allowing” employees to work from home must be staggering. They’ve offloaded their spending on HVAC, power, water, internet bandwidth, office supplies, coffee, and toiletries to the employees. I expect homeshoring to continue, in large part, after Covid-19 is “over” (however that is defined).

The counter argument is what to do about onboarding new employees? How will they ever get integrated into their local workgroup, or the company culture, if they’re only interactions are stilted video conference calls? It’s a depressing thought. Many people are decrying how impersonal modern life is becoming, and what the lack of interpersonal relationships is doing to our society, and this trend doesn’t bode well for this either.