My new kettle

 

My *acting* kettle "pro tem" because I refuse to be naive and believe that *this* is the immortal one.
It has a bigger spout than the last one, which I wrote about but prolly erased.

https://orphanrocks.blogspot.com/2024/06/topwit.html

The old one holds the record for being the least long-lasting, bought sometime in June, apparently, and dead last week.

Kewl

The new one has a very nice spout (Did I mention how important the spout is?)
It has a temp-management button control panel but no actual thermometer.
I miss the thermometer on one of the other dead pots.
And if it dies or meets an unfortunate end, I'll prolly buy another, purely for the size and the shape.
OK. 

I try rubbing with a paper towel,
but I doubt these things are triple-ply all-clad and I
worry about the sheen (anodized aluminum?) wearing off.
The dull-gray vs the pretty-shiny catchers, hmm
"CLR" cleaner works in minutes as compared to vinegar which takes longer.
CLR+Vinegar is a biggie no-no (they say)

Have you heard of a "Limescale catcher"? It looks a LOT like steel wool.

It's also expensive.
Should I get one? Or research more cheaper options (like maybe 99c steel wool?)

No one answered.

embargoed war/gas prices
 

Guys say it works and guys say it does not work.
I'll totally guess here:

Big-beautiful stainless bottom vs ceramic (e.g.) bottom, 

the collector looks like it's at a dance that never gets any dances 

because the stainless bottom is just too attractive.
(Unless you maybe buy a couple friends it can talk to)

This gets longer, more mumbly daily because Google with its vaunted AI seems to think I want to actually scrub away something, and Google (the bot) always lectures me on the dangers of scrubbing stainless.

Yes, yes OK (stfu), but can a "stainless scrubbing pad" (I can't help the name) double as a descaler?

The reviews, mixed.

A DIY science show blog: Warning: Vinegar DISSOLVES Steel wool!!
It's like, OMG, my expensive descalers will eventually melt away??
Yes, if you follow the advice of advice givers and use vinegar overnight without removing them!!

It does not work, so they bought another.

(Another WHAT??!!)

I'm thinking, *possibly*, um, steel-wool pads 

that you buy from the ninety-nine-cent-store

Aren't actually steel, and/or they're slightly crumbly, 

But I just might be in my "Buses don't make smog" phase, trying to convince myself that teeny tiny little wool-things for 3x the cost, are better somehow.

I really *want* a new surge protector, but I'll settle for 🥲🥲

The stuff I *need* which will drown me til I die, forever.

PS *I* can know stuff, be an expert, or (IOW) be a reddit-type person:

Only heat up the water enough to make your drink, 

beeeecause the hotter the water, 

(we're not going on about store-bought water you lug home and almost die)

(um) the hotter the water the more the calcification, 

which you can see next to where the heating-element gets hottest. 

Don't REheat water, calcification happens twice as fast that way.

Eventually little white fish swim around your water (ew).

I won't go on about steel wool, but maybe the next time you're in a supermarket, a jumbo stainless scrubber (if they say "stainless") would be nice, and they're prolly on sale(?)

Wipe after using, unless you're clumsy, and risk dropping it into the sink or on a floor.

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I'm becoming more and more convinced that these things are the scaled-up versions of those cheaper scouring pads. And I can see maybe why a true kettle (one with a small whistling spout) would want one of these upper-crust versions, just like how mayo comes with EVOO or avocado for only $5.00 more, it's a marketing-thing.
Buy less, pay more, Haute-ball

But My "kettle" is more pot than kettle, with a very wide mouth, that would fit a normal-sized scouring pad easily.
My questions would have to be answered in a year or so:

• Is it too big (interferes with temp control, maybe?)
• Scratchy (being so big) maybe?

I've yet to hit on the exact Martha-Stewart type article telling you to get one instead of those hoity-toity posh versions.

BUT...people try and sell the bigger ones by cramming everything it could possibly do into the title "Kettle descaler scouring pad"

Draft (Yeah, "Draft")

 

Mounting-holes on a router are not strange, it's common to see little plastic holes with a clever half-lid to hang on to the screws you put on the side of a wall. 

or a desk.

THESE holes require an exact threaded screw, and they come from...where?
The other side of the wall?
The underside of a desk?

From another piece of Netgear equipment?

A metal cabinet with forgiving holes ("slide holes"?) could quite easily hold the router, if you already knew which screws to use (sold separately)

This will ramble on more but that was the gist, bye.

Ventilation holes disguised as screw-holes? Anyway the ventilation seems restrictive, it's so mathematically perfect. While You and I would just stick lotsa holes on the side, they thought this would be gauche, and stuck them instead as discreet vents facing away from the...face (the front.)

 

On the sides-bottom and sides-top, towards the rear
(Because air can get so untidy)

My last router had wings. They snapped off under pressure (not much pressure)
But keeping them folded to protect them would have overheated the router.
This one thankfully has no wings, just not a lot of airholes, either.

What can I say, I'd dislike the fung-shui designers at netgear.

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piddly vs cosmic: "Jet stream"

 I briefly (five minutes ago up until 5 minutes from now) want to know the name of the international jet stream, the one that affects heatwaves.
The one that looks too far away, unless it's in a good mood, and it drops south.
The one that affects the local winds.
Well, nevermind.

no, the west-to-east big-blue-ribbon-thing (or it that artist-propaganda?)

I'm convinced, have been for yeeeeers, that most weather enthusiasts don't care much about weather west of a line on the map.

They will talk up a storm (lol) about the eastern seaboard, about Florida, and sort of leave us be ("It's hot." Duh)

This here map shows we're unworthy of a jet stream, only the east coast was blessed by god to get one, we're supposed to be in outer darkness (says this map)

Our stream (on the extreme left) can't put out, it's too weak.

Here's another map. I get most of it, but not all.

I thought to be smart, turn off the surge-protector (like before a storm) in hot weather, when the router was not being used.
The first three days were OK, once/twice daily it got shut off, but the third day

it wouldn't turn on, and then it did, but it buzzzzed like in a frankenstein-lab.

My particular model retails for over $70, and a USB-connector version is nearly $100.

OK. I guess I can leave the switch alooone. 
(Hmm)

PSC?

The bottom line or TLDR, was that yesterday,

 AFTER a power-failure-recovery, 

 my Pixel 7 phone couldn't find the 6Ghz Wifi with both of its teeny antennas.

Then, it could, and no amount of fooling with settings has messed it up again.

• Bandwidth?
• PSC Channels?
• Country-Code? (Router changing its own country code (based upon an unseen invisible force?)

So maybe an 802.11d router from Zimbabwe (wherever)
*Could* have been broadcasting a no-no country code???
??

They wake up, see no one else (for a little bit) and start singing their own national anthem?
Which scares the pants off of routers like mine? (OMG, "USSR")

A hoary router, 
in the library, 
with a candlestick

I don't understand this yet, but I wanted to make copious notes just in case:

"The full list of PSCs is: 5, 21, 37, 53, 69, 85, 101, 117, 133, 149, 165, 181, 197, 213, and 229" (Says some guy)

and somewhere else it says

 

Someone somewhere said that the channel-numbers change,
 spending upon the width

The above dinky chart pairs up the channel numbers, something most router users cannot do (They must PICK a single channel.) The mercurial rules I was mentioning (somewhere) apply here.
Plus I gotta figure out what channel "Puncturing" is.
Apparently (I am totally not sure) the mac address can include data telling the systems to avoid certain channels, due to noise (or something)

But, assuming the phone is smart enough to figure things out for itself,

the Pair "101/117" is the one I should use, except different apps mention slightly different channel-numbers. 

Lemme go double-check-see, 

but I'd swear the App will say my channels do NOT match any rule.

In case I never come back, I'll forward this to the last entry I wrote, whatever it is.

Step 1, connect. 
Step 2, run a damn app and look at the channel numbers it says I am using!
OK, It says in typical Greek, CH 101(111) so, NOT 117, hmm

Now let's try the PC:

101, says Windows.

"Turbo WiFi": Useless crap.

"Acrylic" is a godsend:

Wait, so it's on 101, 111 but not 101/117

I certainly do not know what channels I am using except MAYBE 111 appears to be important somehow. 
It was really supposed to be 101, I'll doublecheck but, yeah.

 

Channel 101, 6ghz (from 105) elicits this message.
Say What?
DFS encroaching upon 6Ghz, or is it speaking of my 5Ghz settings (which are offline right now?)

Power-cycling the router "fixed" the DFS message.
And I'm not so dense as to force a non-PSC channel again (it may be what triggered the cryptic DFS message in the first place.)
So I set it to "101" and everyone seems happy.
For Now.

My best guess (and it's only a guess): The Pixel Blacklisted the router and ignored the signal, until I changed the signal enough to get it to recognize it again.

There's also this:

My Wi-fi region is grayed out and cannot be changed by myself.
But SOMETHING changes it!
Yesterday it said "Canada" (I swear)
And today it says "United States"

How does it know which region to dictate?
From neighboring routers, some of whom may have been confused by the outage?

I'm going waay out on a limb of a very tall tree here.
But since I cannot change the region myself,
Since the firmware is Up-to-date as of a couple days ago,
Something makes it change.

But that only becomes relevant If my PC card was Also unable to use it, and it did Fine at 6ghz.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/511362/determine-aps-wireless-regulatory-domain

Anecdotally, the most-restrictive router's default rules are overridden programmatically.
But then they sort of say, stuff is ignored, yada-blah, but I keep coming back to my PC network card running perfectly during the crisis. No, something about the signal the PHONE did not like, which has been fixed.
Fixed how?

59x20, OK 

Dong knows Tech has a nice rant about 6e, and I am still reading,

and if anything earthshaking turns up, I will edit this.

(Still reading)

I wanna add, concerns about noise/interference grow with the width of a channel.
...

THEN The article sort of gets mathematical but the take-away seems to be, Wi-Fi is overrated (beeecause interference, phases of the moon, etc)
Airports, weather stations, the number of "Streams".

I hate it when articles get technical, obfuscating the obvious...we're not about to build routers, so we might not care what the individual (through the entire spectrum) channel widths are. 
SOME stuff is great to know, other stuff is snorable.

My WAN link-speed is exciting, not something to dismiss, but like everyone everywhere, I just made sure the labels "2.5g" on the router matched up, to my PC and to the T-Mobile modem.

Actually, T-Mobile does not label their ethernet ports except to say that one is "1" and the other, "2".
WHY am I bringing this up?

LINK SPEED, which right this second is only 1000, not 2500.

A girl asked why I was only getting ~900Mbps download, and this could explain it.

Now I need to go read f'ng tomes on the ethernet ports of the Arcadyan router.

2xgbe means 2 1-gig ports, 
(1 gig, not 2.5)
Is there another tome about "Aggregation"?

Abandon all (aggregation) hope.
But then why does everyone and their brother insist you buy 2.5Gbps equipment?
Well, that was never the primary problem; stuff is "pass/fail" not fast/slow.

My router-to-router ethernet cable is Cat 6A, if any picky people wondered, but it's never been verified by me. It's thick, ugly, IDK, it should work.

Wi-Fi cheatsheet: The basics of current standards

Wi-Fi cheatsheet is too big to reprint, (and too full of arcane data,

that No one will test you on except maybe in Reddit)

I was hoping maybe to slice off a piece, but it isn't looking good.

Not that I'm wanting yet another lecture,
BUT
you can see from the chart that axe vs "be",
"Be" is magically faster somehow.
This is the defining moment of WiFi7, and they sort of dropped it
(from the chart.)
Basically, (no folderol,)
Data is crammed into blocks ("packets", for the insanely picayune, geez) (Think, first-class letter from a cousin)
And the more you can cram, the more data per block "Packet" (happy?), magically faster (see?)
Now you prolly wonder WHY in hell they didn't apply meatier blocks 
(better envelope-cramming)
To ALL standards, but then they wouldn't be standards anymore.
Still, it's a thought.

OFDM and QAM are related, I swear, but I don't do math.
It just *seems* that way to me.

This link seems very happy about something I cannot really read. Bandwidth is increased with wifi 7, yay.

 "Wifi Analyzer" 

"(Open Source)"

By Vrem Software development.
Easy to read, shows Bandwidth (I think), anyway compared to the first one I tried, it's fantastic.

Now if they make a version for windows, that'd be perfect. I'm still looking.
The one I have now is on the phone.

IPV6 on T-Mobile is a nightmare even if you can hack through all their jargon.

Relay/passthrough=Bust (read below)
Bridge mode (OMG) super bust
(sq-whut?)
Well anyway I've been reading platitudes and histories-of-the-world all evening, to no avail.

The thing that worked was putting the T-Mobile thing onto the invited guest list. ("Access control")

Before that it was being stopped at the door.
It's bizarre sort of; the internet worked, just not any instructions for IPV6, although IPV4 worked just fine (That's what makes it bizarre)

Once stuff started working, it's true that "Pass through" was the answer, keeping the modem and the router happy.

With even *more* research I could probably have gotten one of the other modes to work as well, but this will do for now.

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My trains of thought have cleared this station, new ones are moving in.

Like ok, I wanna run a "speed test" to bask in my newfound glory, wallow in my wifi-ishness (except I just reminded myself, I'm still on Wi-Fi and want to waste it on Wired speed)

But won't running speedtests eat up my new billing cycle?
How much does T-Mobile Really want, for unlimited data??
Unlimited-unlimited-data, not the marketing bullshit they only call unlimited?

and six more plans having to do with you using your phone outside your house.

Unlimited "PREMIUM" data (as opposed to great-unwashed poor tired hungry data?)
Not Net Neutral, says I, to which in my head they laugh and say (whatever business lawyers say,) "Neutral? Communist!!"

Nothing to brag about, but it's my personal best, hmm

And in the middle of a very very hot afternoon, uhm,
presumably thick with whatever-the-hell people do on hot afternoons (Both tests are "wired," not "wiFi")

WPS?

Do you feel underdressed when approaching a new feature on a router?
Like you were asleep when they announced the feature?
How about a feature that came and went bye-bye while you were sleeping?
"Don't use WPS!
say the wise ones.
WP-whut?
Well, *&^%, if you're not supposed to use it, why did they include it?
https://community.netgear.com/t5/Nighthawk-with-WiFi-6-AX-and/WPS-link-in-web-interface-on-Nighthawk-RAX70-6-6gb/m-p/2337378
And, why is it so hard to use?

OK, All radios must be on and transmitting, and then the unusable feature wakes up. O!
OK, nevermind, go back to sleep.
A note to myself, why they don't use "Easy Connect" or whatever.

Is "Easy Connect" easy to get or do you need a different router?
Never Ever admit you're dumb as toast (in 2021):

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22wi-fi%22+%22easy+connect%22+%22netgear%22&oq=%22wi-fi%22+%22easy+connect%22+%22netgear%22
A much more expensive Wi-Fi system from Netgear has "Easy connect"
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Questions for another day:

I've been concentrating so much on the 6Ghz frequency, I've neglected the other bands.
Specifically, ALL channels in the complete Wi-Fi spectrum are composed of 20Mhz channels, right? Because it's confusing when people start talking fast and using acronyms and shorthand-speak. An 80MHZ channel (eg) is really 4 twenty mhz channels, right? There must be another way to refer to "Channels" besides "Channels" (20 MHZ ones) and "Channels" (biggie 40, 80,160, 320)

Well, then there's Bands (2.4, 5, 6ghz)
I'm pretty sure 802.11be is not restricted to one band, so in theory, 

a guy could maybe contrive a 2.4ghz, 20mhz-wide channel that talks a language foreign to the other users (They all being 802.11g,AC,AX, etc)

WHY you'd do this is a little hard to explain, it's like sitting on a bus and listening to foreign languages being talked loudly. 

Plus you would be cramming more data per channel, 

than anyone else around you, 

PLUS you'd be getting long range wi-fi 7.

It's a thought.
Would it actually work?
I'm soo not sure.

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