Wi-Fi signal strength

In Googling about how devices classify the signal strength to the number of bars on a Wi-Fi icon, I came across this wonderful page from Dong Knows Tech. I think that I might clip this to my notes for ease of sharing, as it gives a nice balance between what someone may want to know without going to deep into the maths. Which over the years, I’ve mostly learned to just pay attention to as doubling and halving of power, because smarter people than me created radio stuff. That page also gives good re-enforcements for the less savvy, that while more dBm is better the difference between two values in dBm isn’t a straight line: it’s curvy. I especially like how it explains the difference between broadcast power and received signal, because most normal people don’t use negative numbers as often as us code monkeys do.

Also was helpful for me since I’ve now learned how to bring up the data on my Mac without having to pop over to system information. Sitting in my dining area off the kitchen, Shion gets a respectable enough -74 to -77 dBm — now consider, my 10 year old Asus is literally across the house and on the second floor. Making me at the furthest point from my router that doesn’t involve sitting in front of the fire place or stepping outside onto the patio. My dining area is actually the worst point inside despite the fireplace being further from the router, because the stairs and kitchen cabinets lay in between: that is to say, my fireplace has better line of sight but worse distance to my router; my dining area has shorter distance but more obstacles in terms of pipes, studs, and drywall, and you know an actual floor/ceiling instead of just looking over the upstairs railing. The dBm value is a good read of this, as standing in front of my fireplace, Shion reads about -62 to -67 dBm.

For me, I’m finding that the 5 Ghz Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) from my old RT-AC68 is good enough that I am getting usable signal virtually everywhere in my home. On the 2.4 Ghz band, devices show full Wi-Fi bars pretty much everywhere when scanning for networks. Most of my devices are on 5 Ghz, so I’m finding a lack of reason to shift. I was a little concerned about what the modem’s location would do to signal if my router is next to it.

And then I remembered, I used to have to put an entire apartment building between me and my Asus before my phone’s Wi-Fi crapped out 😂

Coffee

There is nothing like the sweet bliss of coffee in the morning. I almost wish I had brought my phone downstairs, I’d grab one of my smile 😄

ARM Power

When you realize you haven’t charged your laptop in more than a week and it still has half a charger left.

Stick that in your x86, Intel!

With a big gap between the beginning and the end of moving stuff, since transferring operations I’ve spent the nights camped out in my new bed room sleeping on the floor. All of the blankets turned into a sleeping mat and my woobie for a blanket. Kind of like how it was the first night where I grew up, how we spent the night on the floor because nothing was unpacked yet, except without a mattress and this was quite a bit longer than one night.

While I was surprised how little my back was bothered by sleeping on the floor, tonight now that I have my bed, I realize that I’ve missed it quite a bit. It’s not so much the floor itself as it is the getting up and down from it that’s exhausting. Ahh, that bliss of laying back and feeling an actual bed underneath!

In retrospect, given the tiny rooms I tended to have growing up, I kind of think if Japanese style futons were actually a thing in the west, I might have found that more pragmatic as a kid than an actual bed. Not that the dogs would have been happy without their favorite nappy spot, lol.

But in the world of having to get up in the middle of the night to go get a drink of water, take a leak, check a text message, and so on, it’s just easier for me not to sleep on the floor….

Hoozah for movers!

New chapters and new homes

Lately, I’ve had a lack of free time and probably enough pressure to take a few years off my life expectancy, but I’ve finally hit that sweet spot where I’ve handed over my apartment’s keys and all my crap is now moved to my new home, although I suspect it will be closer to Labor Day that anything resembles sanity.

Thanks to a friend putting me in touch with an awesome realtor, I was able to find where this new chapter of my life is taking me. I think, I’m officially in debt up to my eyeballs now, but at least it’s for good reasons. Especially as cost of rent is effectively my largest cost of living, and retirement is another thirty years out, the timing works. It’s just not what I had expected to be doing for a few more years, but life decided on other plans.

I now find myself experiencing something that I’ve rarely experienced in a home: having space! It’s technically little things that make me feel this, but they add up. Things like having enough bathroom drawers to organize things instead of everything on the counter. Being able to create a separate study to use as my computer and game space instead of a desk that’s either crammed next to my bed or into a living room. Things like that really add up after a while especially when you’ve spent most of your life with space as a pure premium in fairly tiny apartments.

When I moved last time, I felt like Paul Atreides in the arc of Dune where he notes that they have entered the time where many will come and seek their life. This time, I feel more like I’ve arrived at Sietch Tabr, an orderly place of refuge. Actually, I’m tempted to incorporate an Atreides banner into my decor, if I can find one I like.

Moving is a process full of many little things. But I’ve generally found it a positive opportunity to revisit how I do things and let my inner pain in the ass out. Yeah, I’m the kind of nut who will go around measuring rooms and planning where things should go and building a vision of what the space should look like and how to mold it to fit desired use cases. I have a feeling, if I ever had a wife she would need to be patient to put up with me, or the same kind of pain in the ass that I am who enjoys bringing order to the chaos of “How will I use this space?”, enough not to stab me with a tape measure 😂

Ahh, it’s going to be fun having a study 🙂

Welcome to the 21st century

It’s taken about twenty years, but I finally feel like I’m living in the 21st century.

Not sure if that’s sad, or if the use of Internet and digital paper replacing things I’ve had to suffer telephones and hardcopy for catching up this much, just proves how much I hate phones 😂.

That said, if we hit the point of the three sea shells and all restaurants being Taco Bell, someone toss me back in the freezer.

Last box

Finally finished going through what seems to be the last box of “Get around to it”. Mostly some of ma’s stuff, or more likely some of her things that I didn’t have time to shift through when I moved. I had considered having it hauled off with some old furniture that I’m getting rid of, but decided it better to go through it and trash stuff. Walking to the dumpster is both good exercise and cheaper, lol.

Glad that I decided to sort through it because of all the things I didn’t expect to find. Most valuable, photos that never made it into the family albums or that have been missplaced over the years. A handful from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that probably have copies or related photos in the family albums. But also some dating back to the ’50s and ’40s, those kind where you recognize your grandparents and go “Wow, they were young back then!”. There’s even a few of what looks to be grandpa’s masonry work on their house way back when. At least one, I’m guessing dates back to the first generation in America from the look of it. These need to be moved into the albums or perhaps an annex to them.

This is also weighed out by the number of junk found in the box. I’m pretty sure that I just threw out enough refrigerator magnets and little souvenirs from like every vacation ever and countless documents from courses my mother had done over the years that were filled under, “Hmm, might be interesting” and set aside. A few recipes I had wanted to keep. Etc. Probably all the DVDs I knew I had but haven’t found. Not to mention the damn paper shredder that I’ve been looking for for the last 6 or 7 years! Less thrilled of course is when I found the Tribbles we bought back in the ’90s. But nothing is perfect.

Between the patio storage area being cleaned out and the various inside boxes, I think I’m finally caught up with cleaning out my mother’s things. It’s only been 7 years, lol.

Dreams and stresses

I found it a curious set of dreams when I woke up this morning. On the more positive side, I dreamt of waking up to find the dogs and had time to give them all hugs before waking up in the middle of the night. In another dream it involved traveling with my mother and sneaking past dangers and onto a long train ride.

I’m just gonna say, that first one was much nicer than the 50-foot tall bipedal squirrel with dragon headed tentacles and muscles on its muscles out to eat people in the woods. Actually, everything was a lot nicer than that part!

Typically, the quality of my dreams tends to shift. That life of late has been elevated stress, probably doesn’t help very much. But I never cease to be amazed at some of the weird shit that I dream of.

Sometimes I wonder

Growing up finances were often tight. Whenever I hear the Juston Moore song “We Didn’t Have Much” and it’s lyric that “We had it all when we didn’t have much”, the break in the stanza often makes me think back. My family didn’t have much and certainly didn’t have that song’s kind of “All” during my formative years, but we had all the things. I always found it amazing as a kid that despite how tight things were, we had 3 TVs and 3 VCRs, which as a little boy seemed an order of magnitude more wealthy than we were by a long shot. Of course the way that worked out is a lot of our things were often rent to own or the bank of grandma, and mine were often hand me down. I didn’t care that my VCR was probably the first one pa bought back in the ’80s, it was just awesome sauce being able to watch VHS off in my own corner. When I was older, I found it more amazing that we had so much given what my mother had to work with. That’s the kind of way it was.

When I got to be older, I noticed the affects of this when observing others. As a teenager, I had come to the conclusion that my willingness to spend $1 was probably closer to how willing most folks I knew were willing to spend $20. Since we had little to work with it was often imperative to spend it wisely, especially for big stuff. Because if we screwed up there might not be the option to take it back or buy another. A lot of times the only options were the cheaper ones and the worse deals, but we still had little cause to complain. Like my first laptop: I had the third cheapest laptop at Best Buy because the cheapest was sold out and the second cheapest couldn’t run FreeBSD. Despite that, I loved that laptop and used it for about six years and a lot of my early programming.

Sometimes I wonder about how this has affected my mentality as an adult. Actually, I think my current laptop best reflects how child hood affected my purchasing decisions. Shion is actually the most expensive laptop that I’ve ever bought. It was very carefully planned and budgeted for. It was very carefully decided how much the cost was worth it to me versus the value for those dollars. Kind of like my dad, I don’t have a problem spending an inordinate amount of money on something to solve a problem, but like my widowed mother, I learned to spend it well when I do.

I also developed a metric for factoring into these sort of problems: value over time. It’s kind of like amortization but the formula is simpler, since there’s no loan interest. When shopping for my laptop, I tallied the cost of the various configurations and its value to me. Then I broke it down based on how many years I might use the system: 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, or 12 years. From experience over the years, I know that the average time I will use a computer for is approximately 6 years. It may be a few years less or a few years more but about 6 years is the average. So, to make it a good deal the value had to be a good deal for the 5 years mark and an acceptable deal for the 3 year mark, and at least balance out by the end of the decade.

Likewise over the years, I developed a concept for obsoleteness of computers. If you buy the cheapest laptop you can get from the current hardware and will use it heavily: it will probably be worth buying a faster cheapest computer in another year or two. By then, you’ll often pass the point where doing a task very frequently becomes enough bottleneck that being able to do that task faster is worth the upgrade costs. Accordingly the opposite is true but with different numbers: buy the fastest machine you can get, and in about 10 years it will be about as good as that ‘cheapest’ option will be, if you replace it with the cheapest machine a decade later. That balances out with the average time I use computers, which is in 5 years in enough things will have changed that if the system isn’t enough of a bottleneck to be worth replacing yet, it will be soon therefore start planning; and if it’s already a bottleneck, start planning.

Moral of this planned obsoleteness is don’t be first and don’t be last to upgrade; rather upgrade when the improvements are worth it. And if everything goes sideways in about ten years, whatever you can afford won’t be any worse than a ten year old computer, lol.

Shion has now been in service for approximately 1 year. So far, it’s proving to be quite effective with no sign of retirement on the horizon. Based one earlier calculations a year ago, in another year it will have proven to be an ok deal; next year it will have proven to be a good deal; by the third year it will be a great deal; by 5 years, I’ll definitely have gotten my money’s worth. Here’s hoping that I don’t drop it out a window or sit on it by mistake 😂.