GETTING NOWHERE FASTER

A few weeks ago I had a day of my mobile broadband internet 
connection being very slow and dropping out. Nothing too unusual, 
but I was a bit worried that the 'new' USB mobile Broadband modem 
that I started using a couple of months ago might not have survived 
the heat of summer as well as the old one used to. I did notice it 
was showing a combination of one blue and one green light whereas 
previously both lights had been blue, but as it's second-hand I 
don't have a manual and don't know what the lights are supposed to 
mean.

Anyway after that day my internet not only became reliable again, 
but seemed faster! Eventually I looked up the AT command that 
requests connection status again ("at!gstatus?", this time saved in 
a notes file on the router itself) and saw in the response: "System 
mode:   LTE". So it's getting signal on 4G now (which I had hoped 
for when I upgraded from the old 3G modem originally), and I didn't 
have to build an antenna for it after all. Supposably the tower had 
been 4G-capable for years, but I guess they must have done an 
upgrade that made it work better, or maybe switch on another 
frequency (the modem isn't as clear about the 4G frequency in use 
as it was about 3G for some reason).

So results: ping times are down to around 50ms average from around 
250ms. Download speed when I installed some packages on my 'new' 
(and still mostly unused) laptop was over 800KB/s vs 350KB/s 
(250KB/s with the old modem which was slower even on 3G). So I'm 
back in the fast lane (though I guess technically now that would be 
5G), and best of all it won't all stop working in a year and a half 
when 3G is turned off.

It's strangely reassuring in a way because I've really been 
struggling to achieve much so far this year. In this case I'd 
forgotten that it was actually someone else's problem. If Telstra 
turned off 3G when 4G wasn't working for some customers, obviously 
most people wouldn't set to building their own GHz-band directional 
antenna in respose to this - they'd call up Telstra and ask why 
their internet/phone had stopped working, and Telstra wouldn't have 
anything to sell them to fix the problem. So they _had_ to improve 
it before that deadline, and I was quite safe sitting on my bum 
doing nothing. Not that I'd really trust that given how few people 
there are around here to complain (besides those driving on the 
highway that it also covers), but it's nice that it worked out this 
time anyway.

But besides getting more for my $2.70/month internet, I don't feel 
like I've made much progress so far this year. Last week in 
particular was extremely frustrating and unproductive. At least in 
terms of profitable activities - I got distracted by setting up my 
Internet Client some more, finally adding a Gemini browser and some 
other missing internet-related software. That was mostly in the 
evening, but late nights at my laptop lead to tired mornings when I 
can't stand stitting at a computer anymore.

Oh and of course Aussies.space was offline last week because the 
domain expired again. Nice to see that's finally fixed itself as 
well. Domain names seem to be a problem on Gopher, SDF's 
gopher.club seems to fail very often as well. I guess the obvious 
cause is all these silly TLDs that people keep using. They play 
silly games with the pricing for them, so that they cost far more 
than a .com in the long run even if there's a special offer to 
start with. Though it should still be easy to get email 
notifications before the names expire - the mob I use starts 
nagging me months in advance. Well I shouldn't complain, I'm 
getting this for free after all.

Well that's enough rambling. I have a more serious post in the 
works, but it's taking ages to finish. Today I want to properly 
mount all the ethernet cables that have been dangling over the 
floor and tripping me up from time to time ever since my Internet 
Client set-up required me to switch from wireless connections. I 
considered running them under the house (which is on stumps), but 
I've decided on just running them along the walls/ceiling. In all 
the years I've lived here I haven't had a single visitor come 
inside, so at this stage what's the point of trying for nice 
appearances?

I was also thinking of attempting to bake some shortbread biscuits, 
because they've stopped selling the cheap packets at the 
supermarket. In all the years I've been living here, I've also 
never used the oven. The stove gets used every day, but my attitude 
to cooking is that you spend time and energy making something that 
you only get to enjoy once, so the aim should be to minimise the 
time required, and baking always takes too long. My mother keeps 
buying me recipe books anyway though for some reason (I guess she 
knows I never eat out for dinner, but doesn't know that I just 
endlessly cycle through three 1/2hr recipes that I know), and 
shortbread deprivation may finally turn the tide. I've got all the 
ingredients except caster sugar - I can just use ordinary sugar 
instead, right?...

 - The Free Thinker.