Spent the morning setting up our new ISP hardware. Spectrum Cable to Frontier Fiber. Much better! 😀

500/10 to 1000/1000, lower pings and lower cost.

I still need to do a few home network changes/adjustments to get the max out of the connection, but it's up and running!

Nice! Mine is only 1000/100. 🤣

dr_st wrote on 2025-05-22, 19:01:

Nice! Mine is only 1000/100. 🤣

I'm happy with it! Is the speed necessary, nope, but it sure is nice!

I just ordered all new CAt6 cables to rewire my home network. All 5e at the moment. Yes, 5e can go over 1G on short runs, but my cables are quite old. If I'm going to replace them, may as well "upgrade".

I've got a TP-Link Archer A8 AC1900 router, and it's served me very well, but capped at 1G wired. Thinking of picking up a much newer TP-Link BE3600 and use it's two 2.5G ports. One WAN and the other to my TP-Link TL-SG105S-M2 switch then out to my 3 main systems, they've all got 2.5G cards already.

Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usual in ISP choices. There were two votes for municipal broadband (one being over 10 years ago and the other being in the last local election), and this town is the only place in Northern Colorado that I'm aware of that still doesn't have it. On the other had, I've heard a lot of complaints about municipal fiber in Fort Collins going down.

Of course, it's even slower today because I updated Linux and got some broken firmware. I'm now using an ancient USB thing that only works in Linux. It's using an AR9271 chip, but with the device ID reprogrammed so it only works with a Netgear driver in Windows. I might try to hack that to the generic AR9271 device ID some day just to see if the generic driver is any better. The Netgear driver randomly disconnects and reconnects automatically a few seconds later. Modern Windows hides that, but XP would give me a bunch of pop-ups to indicate that this was happening (and yes, it has been happening since XP was still supported).

Since I have some kind of weird company holiday today, I was getting some yard stuff ready and decided to check my UPS battery while I was buying a new trimmer battery. My UPS is four years old, and apparently APC stopped giving the battery replacement reminder after three years. Maybe I'll leave it another year since the Duracell SLAs don't seem to last very long.

I dug out my old desktop today, and the CPU fan was a little noisy when I first turned it on. It settled down, but maybe it's time to finally replace the stock cooler. I just need to find something that seems appropriate for an i5-8500. Liquid cooling and large tower coolers are a waste on a CPU like that, but I don't have any height limitations. Maybe I'll just get a 92mm tower cooler since they seem to be cheaper than down-blowing coolers.

lti wrote on 2025-05-23, 19:51:

Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usu […]
Show full quote

Meanwhile, I'm on 12/1. I should check fiber availability again, but I seem to live in an area that's even more screwed than usual in ISP choices. There were two votes for municipal broadband (one being over 10 years ago and the other being in the last local election), and this town is the only place in Northern Colorado that I'm aware of that still doesn't have it. On the other had, I've heard a lot of complaints about municipal fiber in Fort Collins going down.

Of course, it's even slower today because I updated Linux and got some broken firmware. I'm now using an ancient USB thing that only works in Linux. It's using an AR9271 chip, but with the device ID reprogrammed so it only works with a Netgear driver in Windows. I might try to hack that to the generic AR9271 device ID some day just to see if the generic driver is any better. The Netgear driver randomly disconnects and reconnects automatically a few seconds later. Modern Windows hides that, but XP would give me a bunch of pop-ups to indicate that this was happening (and yes, it has been happening since XP was still supported).

Since I have some kind of weird company holiday today, I was getting some yard stuff ready and decided to check my UPS battery while I was buying a new trimmer battery. My UPS is four years old, and apparently APC stopped giving the battery replacement reminder after three years. Maybe I'll leave it another year since the Duracell SLAs don't seem to last very long.

I dug out my old desktop today, and the CPU fan was a little noisy when I first turned it on. It settled down, but maybe it's time to finally replace the stock cooler. I just need to find something that seems appropriate for an i5-8500. Liquid cooling and large tower coolers are a waste on a CPU like that, but I don't have any height limitations. Maybe I'll just get a 92mm tower cooler since they seem to be cheaper than down-blowing coolers.

Iv been picking up the Arctic 92mm tower coolers for $14-25 new on sale and have been very happy with the quietness. Absolutely overkill for the R5 2600 and R5 5600x they went on.

I need to switch VM software. VirtualBox randomly crashes with the same segfault (blaming different CPUs every time, but otherwise identical text in dmesg), but only when the VM is left idle (not the active window) for a long period of time. I can find people getting similar segfaults immediately after launching VirtualBox, but not randomly after starting a VM.

1[63282.770315] VirtualBox[52837]: segfault at 8 ip 00007feb73fd8b58 sp 00007ffff3f8b1c0 error 4 in libQt6Widgets.so.6.9.0[3d8b58,7feb73ce9000+4cb000] likely on CPU 1 (core 1, socket 0)
2[63282.770327] Code: 6c fe ff ff 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 4a 42 35 00 e9 ff fe ff ff 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 3a 42 35 00 eb c5 4c 89 e7 e8 88 fd ff ff <48> 8b 50 08 f3 0f 6f 82 38 01 00 00 4c 8b b2 48 01 00 00 66 48 0f
3[63350.417106] VirtualBoxVM[52912]: segfault at 8 ip 00007fa615dd8b58 sp 00007fffc9d28a90 error 4 in libQt6Widgets.so.6.9.0[3d8b58,7fa615ae9000+4cb000] likely on CPU 2 (core 2, socket 0)
4[63350.417119] Code: 6c fe ff ff 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 4a 42 35 00 e9 ff fe ff ff 0f 1f 44 00 00 ff 15 3a 42 35 00 eb c5 4c 89 e7 e8 88 fd ff ff <48> 8b 50 08 f3 0f 6f 82 38 01 00 00 4c 8b b2 48 01 00 00 66 48 0f

I'm downloading virt-manager now.

Trying to troubleshoot a 1TB SATA HD.

It has a broken GPT table but a good MBR table (as per gparted).
It copies files at 100MB/s, but can fall down to 250KB/s, varying in between. One file can go at 100, but the next one starts fast and take 5 minutes for 50 megs to copy across.

No idea on how to solve this not having to format it.
It also has 624 bad sectors. Maybe it's just dying out.

I can read fine and use the files, but being all my saved ISOs over a decade I was moving stuff to another drive.

Well, it is what it is.

This is what gdisk reports:

Using a brand new i3-12th config with an Intel Arc video card, basically has to upgrade various firmware so often.. I'm already at like the 5th BIOS for whatever instability and security patch, upgraded even the NVME disk firmware because it reported the wrong temp from the sensor, upgraded the video card drivers/firmware many times and still this last has the worst ever imagined cooling logic system with the fan rpm going up and down depending on the weather I suppose and making even a Geforce FX 5800 Ultra a less mind stressing video card... modern computing..

I've been thinking about making an HTPC out of some "not supported by Windows 11" hardware. Kodi looks limited (someone might want to stream something), so I might just run straight desktop Linux.

ODwilly wrote on 2025-05-27, 03:54:

Iv been picking up the Arctic 92mm tower coolers for $14-25 new on sale and have been very happy with the quietness. Absolutely overkill for the R5 2600 and R5 5600x they went on.

I looked at Arctic, and anything that supports sockets older than LGA1700 is listed as a discontinued product. There's still some remaining stock of the Freezer 7 X, so that's still an option.

Aside from that, the choices sold at places other than Amazon are lacking. Everything I've seen anyone try to buy off Amazon for the past year took a month to ship and arrived broken because it was thrown in an oversized box with no packaging material. Then everyone just accepts it and keeps giving them repeat business, which I don't understand. My closest Micro Center is in Denver, which means that I would have to drive down I-25 for an hour and a half.

Looks like I finally found both an internal and an external third-party batteries that work with my Thinkpad 25. After two internal batteries that didn't work. Let's see how long they last without bloating or failing.