This article has an overview of the space and some specific recommendations: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/12/23/i-am-very-happy-that-budget-smartphones-finally-really-dont-suck/ (Pixel 4A, Galaxy S20 FE, Galaxy A71 5G, and OnePlus Nord).
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I bought 3 wifi 6e m.2 chipsets while I’m in the US b/c they were relatively cheap and I’m pretty sure I’ll use them all eventually, but the first wifi 6e router got delayed into next year 
the 802.11 of the magi
wifi 6 seriously isn’t worth upgrading to either since I already have the lone 3x3 ITX chipset that was ever manufactured (miniPCIe to match my Z77 board, no less; they never made a 3x3 m.2 card that I’m aware of, even though some of the newer mbps have 3x3 onboard) and going down to 2x2 without the addition of 6ghz is basically a wash on my 7-year-old tech
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Yeah I’m feeling a bit salty about splurging on a giant Wifi 6 router right before Wifi 6E was announced. Despite being just an extra letter it sounds like a much bigger deal with all the extra wavelength available, especially in my apartment context. Early bird 6E will have no competition at all, like the good old days of 5Ghz
if it’s any consolation I have no idea how long it will be before wifi 6E routers aren’t hideous and insultingly expensive (2022?) and it’s kind of a silly thing to wait on
(other silly things I’m waiting on include an APU with a 5900x level of performance that doesn’t block PCIe 4 lanes the way that current high end APUs – the ridiculously expensive ones that aren’t officially available at retail – do)
I swear that I will be able to justify replacing 2012 tech with 2022 tech
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MY WEEK:
Wed.: got fed up with Breadbox constantly crashing doing not much of anything (playing web video in Firefox) and, looking at the errors Windows was shooting out, declared that it was Windows that was fucked and I just can’t be bothered to install Windows again. so I’ll install Linux instead, obviously.
I’m profoundly lazy and didn’t want to setup extra boot stuff to get my older GCN card on amdgpu so I install Solus. everything is good except Steam can’t see games on the (NTFS) drive in the system
Thurs.: decide that clearly Steam not being able to launch games from an NTFS drive is an OS issue so I nuke Solus and install Pop OS, where you have to add blacklists and stuff to the bootloader to get amdgpu loaded. fucked that up, installed Manjaro-KDE. the actual Arch wiki itself has explicit instructions on getting amdgpu loaded on older cards, sort that out, install Steam, same issue, games won’t load off NTFS drive. Steam wants things sorted out at boot, look up doing a quick mountpoint, reboot, games load. GPU causes crashes, web video seems fine.
watch some web video later on in the evening, Firefox crashes the same way it did in Windows, I throw my hands up and run memtest. 30-40 minutes deep into the first pass and it spits out 2 (two) errors. I go “fuck it” and lower the RAM speed from 2933 to 2800 and everything is fixed
Fri.: working computer, Merry Christmas
Sat.: games and Cemu crash and I’m pretty sure it’s the GPU’s memory speeds (my R9 290 is one of the ones with the memory chips that can’t run at stock speed without occasional system crashing). normally I get around this in Windows by downclocking the memory and giving the core a slight boost in Afterburner but there’s no real set-and-forget OC utility in Linux
Sun.: I take apart a (late-2000s) Mac mini and a laptop and try to Frankenstein their parts together for some reason? also my local Microcenter had an open box TU150 for 40 bucks out the door so fucking whatever, it’s bigger than an SG13 but I’m bored
I transfer the build and it barely, barely firs underneath the TV. but, it has a handle!
I try playing game again and get a crash instantly and figure out the solution
today: finished putting the Mac mini back together (there were… complications) and then tore it down and put it back together again (a thing I can do in 5-15 minutes now) and it doesn’t work anymore so I guess I did good
bolstered with confidence, I take not-Breadbox and get to the task of modding the GPU’s bios with a new clock table. this involved:
- Boot into Windows
- Windows is not happy that you’re seeing other OSes so it’s angry and has to fix itself for a while
- Boot into the bios and enable the iGPU so I have video if I bungle the flash
- Windows doesn’t see the iGPU? also Windows refuses to shut down?
- Windows wasn’t installing the iGPU driver correctly so force that and also that fixed it not shutting down
- Everything is now “working” so I get to the arcane art of Powerplay table modification (it’s not that arcane)
- Flash the vbios and why does it look like the flashing program has hung no wait it’s good
- Reboot and check if the clocks took and they did
- Boot into Manjaro and boot a game to figure out if things are stable there and oh, Manjaro and the mounted game drive aren’t playing nice anymore
- Find out that because I rebooted from Windows instead of shutting down that Windows made the file system unclean and the fix for this is doing a shut down instead of anything else from Windows
- do that
- Everything works
next project: smack my 2500k around because it has seemingly died in between the last time I used it and now
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wanted an excuse to get both a standalone numpad and something with round keys though both of those product categories tend to look/feel excessively cheap in my experience, and I found something that actually combines them well:
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also, apparently devices running a linux distribution called “open dingus” are going to be supported by upstream retroarch moving forward, which makes them a lot more worth buying for those of you who hate when I talk about iPhone emulation
i will get one of these gateron-blue equipped calculator/keypad combo ones, to go with my matching keyboard, one day
the one you got looks cool, too
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Big advantage to ortho boards is making a numpad layer on the right hand that feels the same as a numpad because there’s no stagger. My 2006 MacBook had an embedded numpad and I got hooked on it.
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this is…a good idea I should set up
I’ve always had accuracy problems with the normal number row and I find that a bit easier with ortholinear, though I’m still not perfect
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shuffling around all the stuff on my hard drives so i can empty and reformat my file server, gotta love those classic games
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really glad I cleared this one years ago and never have to pick it up again
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I finally have my Pi 4 set up as a file server, formatting my drives as
EXT4 rather than NTFS has me saturating the gigabit connection during some file transfers bc its so fast (not a big deal most of the time bc its not doing these huge transfers 24/7)
im glad i got around to setting this up during my winter break from work
im mostly using it to store and stream pirated stuff across my various devices, i have an old laptop in the living room running retroarch and streaming roms and isos rather than storing them locally, it seems to work fine streaming up to ps2 games from the network, I haven’t tried anything larger yet but I have no idea how well it would work
i have the laptop connected up to the wired network (for wake on lan and better performance) and its configured so closing the lid doesn’t turn it off so i can stuff it under the entertainment center, i also have vnc running on all of my devices so i can remote in and use my phone as a mouse / keyboard / remote for the tv
my original server setup used a pi 3 but my transfer rates were below 10 MB/s, which is pretty low for a system capable of end to end gigabit, so I’m repurposing that one into an ip camera for our dubia roach enclosure, i’m not exactly sure how im gonna broadcast it online(twitter bot maybe, but live cams are more interesting 2 me), but my enthusiam hasnt waned yet
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find the ancient msi icon comforting
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I do miss software coming in big cardboard boxes tbh.
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My mom says the wifi reception is terrible on her end of the apartment. We are using some old Apple Airport Extreme router. What’s a good wifi extender dealie? This is life or death, she spends all her time in the kitchen now cuz it’s the only place her phone works and I dunno if I can deal with another day where I have to listen to that Harry Nilsson playlist with Spotify ads.
I don’t have a real answer so here’s a joke answer: Just build your own!
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That’s a damn good question because my 2007 era airport extreme is probably gonna give up the ghost soon. What is a good home wifi router these days?
seems like going ubiquiti and getting an edgerouter x and one of their aps is the best idea and about the same cost as an airport extreme was
or getting whatever tplink thing you can install openwrt on
prob going to do the former when my airport is done
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this is my favourite last-gen router:
it’s much better than an airport and I’m still using it, won’t be replacing it until there’s a ubiquiti wifi 6E router
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