Random Tech Questions you want answered.

mrlogical wrote:

Is there anything I'm missing, some reason to think that my service could be worse even if Xfinity is just selling me Verizon's network?

MVNOs can be slower than their hosts. Some of them perform equally to their host, but others do not:

“Our tests show that Comcast’s Xfinity, which operates on Verizon’s network, provides roughly half the average data speeds in urban areas where Tutela conducted tests—12.6 Mbps in comparison to 24 Mbps,” the network management firm wrote in its newest report, which is available in full at the bottom of this article. “The consistent quality score showed a 33.8 point disparity in Verizon’s favor.”

These results likely vary per area, per provider, per time of day, per position of the moon, etc.

I would say that if mobile data performance is super important to you, using one of the host providers is probably the best call. If saving money is more important, the MVNO option might be best. On the MVNO you should expect to have the same reception and call quality as the host provider, but I would expect some degree of traffic deprioritization when it comes to the data side of things.

Yeah, as long as there's a connection, I'm good, I don't really care about 12Mbps vs 24Mbps for just about anything I would ever do on my phone. Most importantly, folks in my town Facebook group report that they either didn't notice a difference between the two at all or that any difference was pretty minimal, so seems worth the money to me.

Yesss....feed the Kabletown empire.

I have a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse (K270 and M185), and lately I have been having issues where the keyboard just stops responding. I've noticed it when trying to type through a web browser (like email or posting here), but also in games where I'm trying to use the keyboard to issue commands. The mouse will work fine, but it's like the keyboard gets stuck. Eventually the keystrokes I've been hitting will come through all at once, like they got backlogged in a pipe and suddenly everything is released. So I don't think that the USB connection is failing, or how would the keystrokes be stored?

So far I've reinstalled the Logitech keyboard/mouse drivers, moved the little USB nub to the front of my PC (more direct line of sight to the keyboard), and I've tried to see what's going on with services/programs in the Task Manager when this happens, which is not much. I have no idea what else to try, but this is seriously annoying. What else might I try short of buying a completely different keyboard/mouse setup?

Does this happen when you have another USB device connected, by any chance? I have a similar issue with my keyboard, but it only occurs if there is a USB thumbdrive or external HD plugged in.

Yeah. If you have a bunch of USB devices all connecting to the same controller, you could see what amount to traffic jams of data. Pull out your motherboard manual and see if you can plug various things into different busses.

Hmm, yeah come to think of it my USB slots are pretty heavily loaded. I had this problem while flight simming yesterday, so I had:

- USB keyboard/mouse
- flight stick
- throttle
- rudder pedals
- Rift S headset

I'll have to see if I can figure out how many USB buses I have, and whether I can separate things more. Good suggestion, thanks!

Edit - So I'm not sure how to figure out how many buses I have. The manual is...minimal. Can I assume that USB 2.0, USB 3.2 Gen 1, and USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports are all on different USB buses? What about ports that are connected via expansion headers, like for a case front panel? It's an ASUS Tuf Gaming B550M-Plus motherboard. Maybe I'll have to just experiment and see if I can find a good arrangement.

Assuming it takes them, trying changing the batteries.

Hey friends, random tech question here! I just found out my PC can be a WiFi hotspot, which would be AMAZING since the PC is hardwired and the WiFi signal in this part of the apartment is crap. Is there any downside to leaving it on all the time, though? It’s not something I can just set to be on all the time (though I did find a workaround to have it startup with the PC itself), so that makes me wonder if it’s not meant to be used as such.

Thanks!

Power options always default to saving energy by putting a system to sleep. Other than your power bill, there's not much of a reason why a PC can't run 24x7 though. My PC has been our home server since 1998-ish (changing soon!). The hardware does just fine if left on, and mechanical storage drives will still spin down when they're not being actively used.

Of course, there's a question of how much latency you will have with a full operating system compared to even the cheapest access point or router in AP bridging mode.

Usually, the network operates in the kernel, so it should be low-latency. And modern NICs often have their own processor, which means that most of the network stack actually runs on the card and the packets don't have to go back and forth to the kernel to be processed...

That won't work in this case, Robear, because the packets will have to move from the wireless to the wired adapter, meaning the CPU will have to be involved. PCs don't have dedicated routing or switching fabrics, it all has to be done by the CPU.

Veloxi, I would never do that with a Windows machine, only a Linux one. I often use LInux for that kind of thing. If you're on Windows, what I would suggest is buying a WiFi access point and an ethernet cable. Plug the existing connector into one of the LAN ports, and run the new cable from the PC to another LAN port. Voila, you're exactly where you are now, but running through the router's switch.

Next, turn on the wireless functions and set the router to dumb bridge mode, where it's being an AP but not being a firewall or a router. In effect, the WAN port won't exist, and the router will just bridge anything it sees on either interface to the other one. It will offer no services, doing no firewalling, routing, DNS, or DHCP. All it does is shove packets back and forth. The WiFi network will stay up no matter what you do with your PC.

I think most decent routers can do this, but you might want to verify that your choice can run in dumb bridge AP mode.

I just did something very similar to what Malor described, and it's working very well.
I was getting close to needing a new router, so I bought one and retired the old one to AP-only mode. The backbone between the AP (old router) and the new router is running over my wired network.
My old router was an Asus RT-AC68U, and the new one is an Asus RT-AX88U. Their default firmware made it ridiculous easy to set the old router up as an AP. I would hope this is pretty true for all the major home networking manufacturers.
My setup uses the WAN port on the old router for backbone traffic, and I can use the four LAN ports for additional wired connections (which is very welcome in our current WFH situation).

Oh, right, I forgot it was wireless to wired. My bad.

I have a silly annoyance with my pc that I'm not sure if anyone has any advice for:

I am unable to wake my desktop pc with my wireless mouse or keyboard. I have to hit the power button on the tower to wake it up. It's behaved this way since I bought it and it persists no matter which peripherals I use or which usb ports.

Any thoughts?

Edit: I should've mentioned that the devices are set to 'allow this device to wake computer.' However, under the Human Interface Device section I have several drivers labelled 'USB Input Device' that has the wake option disabled and greyed out so I am unable to change it.

Are the receivers getting power when the computer is asleep?

Vargen wrote:

Are the receivers getting power when the computer is asleep?

Just double-checked, yes they are.

You computer may be going into a Deep Sleep State (it is a BIOS setting called lots of different things on different motherboards sometimes deep sleep sometime S3 Sleep sometime Hybrid Hibernation) and sometimes they don't respond to wake signal from USB or Network pings in that state. We have had to disable that on the Dell PCs on our campus to enable Wake on LAN functionality.

Rykin wrote:

You computer may be going into a Deep Sleep State (it is a BIOS setting called lots of different things on different motherboards sometimes deep sleep sometime S3 Sleep sometime Hybrid Hibernation) and sometimes they don't respond to wake signal from USB or Network pings in that state. We have had to disable that on the Dell PCs on our campus to enable Wake on LAN functionality.

Didn't even think to check the BIOS! Indeed there was a setting 'Allow USB devices to wake' that was disabled.

No more reaching under the desk to wake up my computer. Many thanks.

The only Apple device I own is my iPhone, but I would like to experiment with Swift a bit to develop (maybe) something for it. I've seen there's a Windows version of Swift now, would that work to develop for my iPhone? The documentation I find online is super unclear to me.

I am pretty sure the answer is yes...

It seems to be both the windows tools to create swift applications and the compiler or run time to run swift created applications on windows.

dejanzie wrote:

The only Apple device I own is my iPhone, but I would like to experiment with Swift a bit to develop (maybe) something for it. I've seen there's a Windows version of Swift now, would that work to develop for my iPhone? The documentation I find online is super unclear to me.

No. Swift for Windows is still pretty immature, but in any case the programming language alone isn't enough. You need all the system libraries, code signing tools, and various other toolkits that come with Xcode. The system libraries - the frameworks that let your code interact with iOS - are the critical part, and they can't be ported to Windows because the OS is too different. You can't develop iPhone/iPad apps without a Mac, and I'm pretty sure you never will.

You can use something like Macincloud Xcode, which gives you a virtual Mac environment. That one runs $1 an hour for a Mac Mini, prepay 30 hours. Cost is based on usage time and includes pre-installed Mac apps and tools.

AWS has Amplify, which is open source dev tools for IOS development, looks like. Google Cloud seems to have a similar offering. And of course you can run MacOS on a Windows box in a VM.

There apparently are cross-platform IOS dev tools that actually run on PCs, but they seem pretty hairy. The big one is Xamarin, which seems to be C# based.

Thanks guys, I will be sticking with Android then. I have an old OnePlus 3 lying in a drawer as our backup phone, I will be using that. To be honest, development has always fascinated me but I have never cracked that nut. I have an idea for a grocery store list though, and I've been made to believe that to-do lists are relatively easy to program.

But as there's a non-zero chance I get distracted by a new shiny, it would be silly to invest even in an old Mac to learn Swift.

You would also need a $100/year developer certificate to load any of your own software on an iPhone, AFAIK.

Malor wrote:

You would also need a $100/year developer certificate to load any of your own software on an iPhone, AFAIK.

Pretty sure I've done it without the 100$ license, but that was on my own phone or iPad. I think the license is only if you want to get on the app store.

The legality is questionable but it is possible to run macOS in a virtual machine. I set one up a few years back to help with my transition from macOS to Windows.

I don't see how there's any question about legality, provided you have an officially licensed, purchased copy of OSX to install. Which is exactly what I did a few years back, in a VirtualBox VM, thinking I was going to get into iOS development - and never did.

Edit: But IANAL, and you should of course not treat anything you read online as legal advice.

I did purchase the OSX Snow Leopard installer disc direct from Apple for about $30, but it doesn't look like they offer that any more.

merphle wrote:

I don't see how there's any question about legality, provided you have an officially licensed, purchased copy of OSX to install. Which is exactly what I did a few years back, in a VirtualBox VM, thinking I was going to get into iOS development - and never did.

Edit: But IANAL, and you should of course not treat anything you read online as legal advice.

I did purchase the OSX Snow Leopard installer disc direct from Apple for about $30, but it doesn't look like they offer that any more. :(

macOS (was OS X) is no longer something you can purchase separate from a Mac, and is only licensed to run on Apple hardware.