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Ubiquiti Unifi UXG-Max Router: The Most Boring Installation in Memory

The transition to AT&T Fiber meant jumping from 60/10 mbps service to 500/500 mbps service. Our old router was SmallWall on a recycled HP T620 Plus thin client. SmallWall is a fork of m0n0wall, which I used for years previously. And a history lesson, m0n0wall was the progenitor of pfsense.

Alas, that little hardware/software combination simply wasn’t up to this new, and much faster, ISP. It could only manage to pass 120 mbps. The CPU tracking in SmallWall didn’t show it to be overburdened. I suspect other aspects of the hardware were the problem. It has a dual-ported Intel NIC. They’re 1G ports, connected to the host via a PCIe x4 connector.

UXG-Max

I could have swapped out the T620 Plus for something newer and faster. However, I decided to extend our installation of Ubiquiti Unifi gear by adding their Unifi UXG Max router. That would allow me to see the ISP/router performance in the Unifi UI, which is handled by the Unifi Controller app running on a local Raspberry Pi400.

We came to use the Unifi line by way of their Wi-Fi access points. That was the end-state of what had been a long-running search to deliver reliable Wi-Fi. When our Ubiquiti PowerAP N died we deployed Unifi AC Pro access points. So began our foray into “software defined networking.”

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Another Episode of Living with Mint Mobile

Stella is presently on a trip to The Netherlands. She’s travelling with our niece, who is visiting our great-niece who is going to school at the University of Maastricht. It’s literally a European Vacation.

It fell to me to do the best I could to help Stella prepare for her trip. In particular, to help arrive at a strategy for providing mobile phone service while abroad. As we are Mint Mobile customers, I checked their site for the potential of international roaming. Mint requires that we prepay some funds toward international roaming.

Mint-Roaming-Costs

Mint Mobile is quite expensive. Most especially the data costs, which could also be expressed as a whopping $200 / GB! Clearly their offer was not the way to go. We needed to consider alternatives.

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My Take – Using your mobile camera as a webcam

A couple of weeks back Chris Kranky offered a post where he explored this topic in some detail. It’s a good idea. Well worth exploring since common, and especially built-in webcams, are so bad. He tried a handful of iOS and Android apps on various handsets. It was a good experimental series.

I’d like to add a slightly different take, using a couple of additional apps that have crossed my path. In particular, I’d like to highlight NDI as a technology that’s very useful in this application.

What is NDI?

According to Newtek:

“NDI® (Network Device Interface) is a low latency IP video protocol developed especially for professional live video production, and is supported by an extensive list of broadcast systems from many manufacturers.”

NDI Camera

Newtek has offered two different NDI Camera apps. The original (no longer offered) which I bought for around $20, leverages full-bandwidth NDI. Full-bandwidth NDI offers the best image quality, and lowest latency, but requires massive bandwidth. It can work very well used when on a robust Wi-Fi network.

NDI Camera Julio

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Notes from The Big Texas Freeze & Blackout

The week of Feb 15th was extraordinarily tough here in Houston. As you probably know, we had an unusual cold spell that took the area into single digit temperatures. This caught the state’s electric industry entirely by surprise, taking about 35% of electrical generation offline. So vast tracts of Texas were both cold and without power for several days. Eventually, also without water.

We certainly felt the cold. Our 100 year old Craftsman Cottage was simply not built for this kind of weather. We were fortunate to have gas appliances, including a natural gas-fired fireplace in our living room. We closed off portions of the house to minimize the area we needed to heat. Put an air bed in the living room and did the best we could.

After Hurricane Ike (2008) we were without utility power for about three weeks. This motivated the eventual purchase of a portable generator. We bought it used from a neighbor who was tired of it taking up space in his garage. For several years, it sat idle, occupying a corner in our garage. They’re like that.

This one recent week in February we got to know Genny really well. We came to admire some of her capabilities and a few of her quirks. These lessons are worth sharing.

As you can see, Genny is a Predator (in a nice way) which is a brand sold by Harbor Freight. She’s pretty beefy, rated for 8,750 watts starting load, and 7,000 watts continuous load. That’s not that 14 KW that I had calculated necessary to run our entire household, including central air conditioner, but it’s still quite a lot of power.

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Tech we have deployed for Halloween

It started back in 2002. My wife brought home a large inflatable spider, something new for the exterior decor at Halloween. I struggled to find a way of using it that seemed appropriate.

In the end, I decided to give it context by building suitably large, lit spider web in the font yard. It spanned the gap between the house and a very tall Loblolly pine in the corner of the yard.

The children came in droves, and were filled with awe. They left with candy, and it was good.

Every year we try something new. We occasionally drop something that didn’t work quite as well as we hoped. This year I’d like to highlight a few things we’ve used that work very well.

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