You mentioned you reset the modem several times. Did you do the same with the router? And not just a soft reset, but pulling the plug? And if you did that, have you checked for router firmware updates?
I still have Comcast on a cheaper plan as a redundancy, since I work from home.
I am fascinated by this... I work from home as well, but if my internet goes down, I would either go through my phone as a hotspot, or maybe go to the local library or Starbucks for the day. Or just tell them I'd be online tomorrow. 
I would struggle to justify paying even $20-30/mo for a backup plan.
You mentioned you reset the modem several times. Did you do the same with the router? And not just a soft reset, but pulling the plug? And if you did that, have you checked for router firmware updates?
Yep most of my resets I take both the cable modem and router down. Have also just cycled the router by itself a few times, and yes definitely checked the firmware.
*Legion* wrote:I still have Comcast on a cheaper plan as a redundancy, since I work from home.
I am fascinated by this... I work from home as well, but if my internet goes down, I would either go through my phone as a hotspot, or maybe go to the local library or Starbucks for the day. Or just tell them I'd be online tomorrow.
We do live virtual/hybrid corporate events. Going offline when things are happening in real time is a bad situation.
Phone hotspot is an option for getting my laptop online in a pinch, but my entire network stays online when my router kicks over to the cable connection.
Ultimately I want to replace the Comcast with satellite (ie. when Starlink competitors give me a non-Elon option) along with moving my house to solar panels and batteries for power, so even a mass power outage in my area wouldn’t take me down.
I live in the middle of a built-up suburb surrounded by schools and nice subdivisions, and I'm not sure I'll ever get fiber here because tearing up the streets around here to do much of anything sends the world into a NIMBYsplosion. I will sign up the day it is available, but that day may never come, it seems.
The place I lived in when I dropped comcast luckily was built with fiber to the home, I just didn't realize it when I moved in. But the house I am in now I am lucky enough (I guess) that it is in a area where the average house age is over 100 years, so everything is still coming in via telephone polls. So they just ran the fiber off of that. Now, how often will that cable break in a bad wind storm, we shall see.
Bit the bullet and did this.. and looks like it in fact is the router. 75 out of 75 pings came back, vs. the 10% failure rate without. Unfortunately I only have one device that has a hardwire port handy so can't test something else to be sure, but for sure everything plugged in via wifi to the existing router/mesh is experiencing ping problems.
Wait, all your devices are on wifi? Did you try directly connecting to the router? You could just be having some really bad interference.
Carlbear95 wrote:Bit the bullet and did this.. and looks like it in fact is the router. 75 out of 75 pings came back, vs. the 10% failure rate without. Unfortunately I only have one device that has a hardwire port handy so can't test something else to be sure, but for sure everything plugged in via wifi to the existing router/mesh is experiencing ping problems.
Wait, all your devices are on wifi? Did you try directly connecting to the router? You could just be having some really bad interference.
No, one device (my personal PC) is on ethernet. but that's the only one. I wanted to confirm my findings by testing a second wired device directly into LAN but I don't have one handy. I tried my work PC, but I think they have some security to disallow unfamiliar wired LANs.
It's alive!
Thanks everyone for support, as mentioned it was in fact the Orbi router. Got a new TP-Link from Costco and its working great.
TP-Link makes good stuff, I use their "Easy Smart" managed switches all over my house.
My only experience prior with TP-Link was a pretty janky ethernet-over-power device (which is probably something that never should have been invented), so I wasn't as convinced of quality, but enough sources have confirmed that its actually quite good.
Its ridiculous because in the end I have all of a 1100-1200 sq. ft. typical 2br urban apartment.. I shouldn't need a mesh network, but there's a black hole in here and I can't get signal from my office to my living room with just a regular wifi/router.
Disagree on powerline shouldn't have been invented. It is a great alternative when running ethernet across a house is not an option and if you are not sharing power with a neighbour, it doesn't have to deal with the interference that you would have on WiFi. I wouldn't use it with laptops, but desktops, TV boxes, game consoles, etc... it is a good alternative for.
Powerline is an affront to God and all that is holy, but it does come in handy sometimes even if it is jank as hell.
I've used it multiple times. Your experience is going to be VERY dependent on the quality and age of your power wiring.
*Legion* wrote:I still have Comcast on a cheaper plan as a redundancy, since I work from home.
I am fascinated by this... I work from home as well, but if my internet goes down, I would either go through my phone as a hotspot, or maybe go to the local library or Starbucks for the day. Or just tell them I'd be online tomorrow.
Agreed. If my work says it is that critical to be online all the time, then the company can pay for backup internet. If I was in business for myself I guess I would consider it.
Ethernet over power is great for applications where you need security, discretion and fast setup, and you control access to the relevant circuits. I have seen it combined with Li-Fi in... interesting usages.
Ahh..Powerline. Always the reminder that my old company lost $550M trying to make Broadband over Power Lines a thing…the good old days.
Ahh..Powerline. Always the reminder that my old company lost $550M trying to make Broadband over Power Lines a thing…the good old days.
Woof! crazy! I can't even imagine.
Youtube runs like absolute sh*t on my laptop. It takes forever for clicks to register. It takes forever for the mouse location to register so I have to wait upwards of 10 seconds before I can even access the controls. When I close the window, the audio will often (but not always) continue for 5-10 seconds. Sometimes, the fan goes absolutely apesh*t. This happens on both Safari and Firefox. I've disabled extensions, deleted cookies. Still happens. It does seem like it's not as bad in private mode but it doesn't stop completely.
Any ideas on how I would go about figuring out what's going on? I kind of doubt this is a hardware issue despite it being a not that new laptop (2018 MacBook Air). I have no issues with other streaming services and regularly have 4-5 Twitch streams open with no problem whatsoever.
Given it is an older Macbook Air and the fans are going crazy, it is probably thermal throttling. My wife's older Macbook Air (might be the same model) had the same issue and went with the non-air version when she replaced it because it degraded to the point of being unusable. Twitch streams are 2-3x more compressed then a youtube video so I wouldn't rule out hardware just because you can watch Twitch without issues. Try watching the videos at 720p or even 480p and see if the issues persist.
YouTube also runs like absolute sh*t on my 2019 MacBook Pro. The video playback is fine, but it uses way more battery than it should and the machine gets hot. Way hotter than it does when I'm editing videos in Final Cut. I think the problem is either with YouTube trying to push you towards their iOS apps, Apple not giving a crap about how that part of Safari runs on Intel hardware, or some combination of the two.
Could be turning off hardware acceleration in your browser. I know I had a lot of problems with a few interviews that used Google meet until I disabled that setting.
Could be turning off hardware acceleration in your browser. I know I had a lot of problems with a few interviews that used Google meet until I disabled that setting.
I was thinking about that too. Things may have changed but last time I checked it depended on which browser you use whether you get hardware accelerated video decoding on YouTube and depending on your video hardware that may end up being slower than using the CPU. That was on Windows. May be different on a Mac. My Mac knowledge is definitely out of date. I have a 2011 MacBook Pro and a 2014 MacBook Air. They make ok paperweights these days. I'm just bad at getting around to recycling PC hardware 
I have a friend that I do weekly Google Meet sessions and he uses a mac for his end. He had a similar issue where video would chug until he turned off hardware acceleration in chrome.
Looks like hardware acceleration isn't something an end-user can change in Safari. Lovely.
My dev machine is an old potato macbook, and I've sometimes had browser performance issues caused by an OS setting called automatic graphics switching, under Battery settings. I think on newer macs there's also a similar option related to video streaming. In theory they're only supposed to matter when the machine isn't plugged in, but I've sometimes found swapping them causes or removes a big performance slowdown in browser contents. Maybe related?
Maybe there’s a better place to ask this?
I'm trying to figure out what it would take to charge a 12V RV battery using my portable solar panel. I'm considering getting a LiFePO4 RV battery to significantly increased my Ah capacity while camping.
I have a foldable 100W portable solar panel. It has a controller that outputs up to 100W over DC5521, 60W over USBC, or 15W over USBA. I have a bunch of adapters that convert DC5521 to other ends.
I mainly use the solar panel to charge my big Jackery battery while camping and any other USB batteries or devices we take. Flashlights, speaker, fans, etc. The Jackery has a DC input and it's own charging controller so it works great from the solar panel's DC5521 with one of my adaptors. I use USB for charging everything else.
If I wanted to add a lot more battery capacity to my setup it seems like the cost efficient option is to buy a 12V LiFePO4 RV battery and find a way to charge that with my solar panel. But how do I do that safely? I can go from DC5521 to car (lighter) port and from that to the battery but is that safe? Will the BMS in the LiFePO4 battery manage that well?
I don't want to use lead acid deep cycle batteries for this. Yeah a pair of 6v RV batteries have more capacity per dollar than LiFePO4 (even if only using the safe 50% of capacity) but just barely and my experience with 6v RV batteries so far has not been great. They are also VERY heavy which sucks for camping. We already haul too much weight.
I could get another Jackery battery or one of their competitors. If I see a good enough sale I might. Those still tend to be far more expensive per Ah than just buying a RV LiFePO4 battery based on the prices I'm seeing.
I could charge the LiFePO4 battery from the Jackery 12v car port output but after reading more about that it seems that pass through charging puts a lot of strain on the Jackery and hurts it's lifespan so I'd prefer to avoid that.
Going through an AC inverter seems like a needless waste of power efficiency and cost but at least there would be a ton of things between the panel and battery trying to keep things safe. Not to mention even more weight.
Instead of DC5521 to car port to battery is there an option to go from USBC to a battery charger and for what cost? Not sure that makes things safer or not.
I'm going to read more about LiFePO4 BMS systems to see how well they handle themselves. If those are good then a direct DC path could be easy and cheap.
I could charge the LiFePO4 battery from the Jackery 12v car port output but after reading more about that it seems that pass through charging puts a lot of strain on the Jackery and hurts it's lifespan...
This surprised me. I know some EcoFlow models are specifically designed to be daisy-chained and expanded. Especially when you're talking DC-to-DC and not an AC conversion, that makes me think Jackery's charging design isn't as good as it should be. So maybe switching to a different ecosystem that allows you to expand might be worth considering, even if it means selling your Jackery. But I think weight is going to be a concern no matter what, if you're already feeling overburdened.
pandasuit wrote:I could charge the LiFePO4 battery from the Jackery 12v car port output but after reading more about that it seems that pass through charging puts a lot of strain on the Jackery and hurts it's lifespan...
This surprised me. I know some EcoFlow models are specifically designed to be daisy-chained and expanded. Especially when you're talking DC-to-DC and not an AC conversion, that makes me think Jackery's charging design isn't as good as it should be. So maybe switching to a different ecosystem that allows you to expand might be worth considering, even if it means selling your Jackery. But I think weight is going to be a concern no matter what, if you're already feeling overburdened.
The main place I saw that info was the general FAQ page at https://www.jackery.com/pages/faq
says:
Q: Do Jackery portable power stations support pass-through charging?
A: Yes, except for the Explorer 160, all other products support pass-through charging. But we don't suggest using it this way very frequently as it will reduce the battery life.
Which would make it seem like a blanket statement about reducing the battery life.
But, now I searched a bit more and found https://faq.jackery.com/hc/en-us/art...
It seems to be from an official account and says:
Q: Does the Jackery portable power station support pass-through charge?
A: Yes. All Jackery power stations support pass-through charging. Pass-through charging is a feature which allows the power station to be used at the same time when it is recharging. However, we recommend this feature to be used only on your device(s) that drain less power than the input wattage shown on the screen of your power station, to preserve the health of your power station in the long run.
That seems to imply pass-through charging only affects the life of the device when the Jackery is outputting more power than inputting (so, pulling some from it's battery). So maybe it's fine? I'd have to be careful to only do this when the solar panel is producing more power than the extra battery is pulling during charging. Not sure I will have any control of that.
I've looked at the EcoFlow models. Thing is, if I had another full power station (Jackery or competitor) I wouldn't need to chain them to charge them as I could just swap which the solar panel is connected to. The main reason I'm looking at LiFePO4 RV batteries is to avoid the expense of another power station if I can.
When I hit Ctrl+left Alt the world NORMAL pops up in big letters in the lower right hand corner of the screen. I'm guessing this relates to the monitor but it looks exactly the same. What is this and how do I disable it?
What kind of screen is it?
Resolved. This was caused by a old app called "game companion" that i used to force games into a borderless window.
I keep getting spammed with verification codes in my email account for a different email i have. I get about 4 a day. Is this evidence that someone is constantly trying to hack me or do i have a program somewhere that is trying to auto login but can't?
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