Martin – Page 20 – WirelessMoves

microSD cards Speeds in 2023

It’s been almost 5 years since I’ve last looked at the speed of removable flash storage media. I use them a lot for transferring very large files among devices, so speed is trump. If size doesn’t matter, the current speed limit for high speed USB flash drives seems to be the speed of the USB port. In case of USB 3.2 Gen 2, that’s somewhere around 1 GByte/s. If there is limited space in the pocket or backpack, MicroSD cards and a good USB adapter are an interesting alternative. Despite speeds being much slower, read/write performance varies significantly between cheap and somewhat more expensive cards. So let’s have a look where the bar is at the end of 2023.

Driven Between Intel and AMD – The Wi-Fi Divide…

In the past few years I bought a number of Lenovo notebooks for me, friends and family to run Ubuntu Linux on them. Most of them had AMD CPUs inside, because they had a price and performance advantage. These days, however, I’m drawn again to the Intel side for a simple reason: Integrated Wi-Fi.

Moving from POP3 to IMAP in 2023 – Yes, Really!

It’s 2023 and so far, I was still using the POP3 email protocol for fetching my emails on my notebook. But why on earth?

It pretty much stems from a time when bandwidth on mobile networks was scarce and expensive, so I wanted to be in control when to download email. Initially, I also had a size limit per email in place, but I guess I must have removed that on my notebook a decade ago, once prices became cheaper and mobile networks faster. Not sure when anymore.

But even then, I continued using POP3 for two reasons: First, I liked not to be bothered by new emails instantly and second, I liked the setting that automatically deleted an email on the server after removing it from my inbox. No need to keep my private data on a public server indefinitely. But it seems the tide has turned.

Today, pressing the “check for emails” button feels like too much work. And anyway, my mobile devices check for emails periodically and notify me anyway, so I might as well go that step on the notebook. So here we go, I’ve changed over to IMAP. And since I can still use local folders, most email moves from the server to my local folders the same way as they did with POP3.

P.S.: Yes, I know the world has moved on to webmail, and IMAP is so yesteryear…

LineageOS 20 on a Refurbished Pixel 6

Over the past years, I’ve been using LineageOS on a 2019 high end smartphone. It has served me well over the years. When LineageOS moved from Android 11 and 12, however, they wanted me to side-load a new ROM image instead of using the app based updater. As I wasn’t sure if this update would also require me to do a factory reset, I refrained from trying, as I shied the effort of reinstalling everything. But obviously, that was not a sustainable attitude, as I did not get security updates anymore. So the pressure rose, until I recently found a good combination of a real world smartphone hardware to upgrade to, at an acceptable price, and new features to make a switch worthwhile beyond the pure security update concern.

OnlyOffice Online During a Train Ride

I’ve been working with OnlyOffice in combination with my Nextcloud setup on a server in a datacenter in Finland for a couple of months now, and I have to say I’m quite satisfied. Compared to the Collabora Online setup I used before for many years, the user interface is swift, and it doesn’t really matter how far the client is away from the central server. This is because OnlyOffice, like other solutions, e.g. the one from a certain company in Redmond, does pretty much all processing and rendering in the web browser, and only uses the server for synchronization and saving updates. But still, an online connection is required during editing a document. So how does this setup perform on a train ride?

More Programming with ChatGPT – Cool, But Not All Smooth Sailing

And again I had a little programming challenge I wanted to test ChatGPT with, and to hopefully get a result more quickly: I have an CSV input file that contains locations with GPS coordinates. The file is huge and I’m only interested in entries that are close to a given location. Such a kind of search didn’t sound like it should be done with a Bash script, so I decided that I wanted to approach this with Python. So how did ChatGPT do?

Nextcloud – OnlyOffice Install – Self-Built vs. Docker Hub Image

Back in July, I had a couple of posts how to get a ‘dockerized’ version of OnlyOffice to play with Nextcloud. The docker-compose.yml files I found at the time in the developer company’s resources downloaded and then built the OnlyOffice image locally. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it takes a bit to startup the first time and the update procedure is a bit different from just pulling a new image version from Docker Hub. But there is a Docker Hub image available for the DocumentServer part of OnlyOffice, so let’s have a look at how to use it.

The 6 GHz Wi-Fi Mess

It’s interesting how quickly the wind can turn sometimes. While my problems with 5 GHz Wi-Fi, i.e. radar detection and 160 MHz channels seems to have been fixed by cool software upgrades of the AVM devices I use, my first steps into the 6 GHz band with 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6E) haven’t been as successful as I was hoping.

Wi-Fi Backhaul on a 160 MHz Channel – The Gbps in Sight!

In the past, I’ve come very close to the 1 Gbps of a standard Ethernet connection over my Wi-Fi backhaul between a Fritzbox 7590 and a FritzRepeater 3000. However, it was not quite 1 Gbps, and every now and then the speed dropped to 500-600 Mbps. This was mainly for two reasons: While both devices supported 160 GHz channels between them on paper, AVM seemed to have had a problem with it on their Repeater 3000 and hence, they limited the channel bandwidth to 80 MHz in some software versions. Luckily, 4 MIMO streams are supported over 80 MHz, so I could still almost reach the 1 Gbps, despite the limited bandwidth. The second reason why I was a bit unhappy was that some software versions often fell back to the lower part of the 5 GHz band with a much more limited transmission power. So that was the status quo for quite a while.

Switching To eSIM in Slight Distress

I’ve been following the development of the eSIM on this blog for 6 years now and in recent years, I’ve been downloading and testing eSIMs to see how the process actually works. However, all of that was for learning and educational purposes only. But now, finally, I’ve used an eSIM ‘for real’ to get me out of a slightly disconcerting situation.