Find the GUI on wordland.social

I’m often called upon by my neighbors to troubleshoot their crummy network connections. I already have good advice for solving bad latency caused by bufferbloat but I also hear, “My network connection is weak”, and I would like a nice tool to give me a visual sense of the facts on the ground.

I looked around for tools that will do this. There’s an NetSpot for Android that has a free tier, but I wanted a free version. I found python-wifi-survey-heatmap, but it only runs on Linux.

Then I found wifi-heatmapper that is a Javascript app, and has been customized for macOS, Windows, and Linux. I’m horsing around with it to see what it’ll do.

I'm checking out Wordland. Let's see if this actually posts to my Random Neurons Firing site… Hokey pokey! It did!

This is very cool. It seems to hit all the important points of textcasting.org

Should this be a header?

Nope, doesn't seem to work yet

Bold, Italic, H4 (?) Lists, too…

1. a

2. b

3. c

   • aardvark
   • banana
   • candle

'Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogobes,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

And editing a prior post works! I never get it right the first time…

Update: 25Feb2025… Comin' back to add this update…

I really like the Crusader network test application for measuring network throughput and latency. It’s cross-platform and provides a useful reference for network measurements. But the macOS binary opens a Terminal window that’s confusing and “gets in the way”. Furthermore, you have to know which binary to use – Intel or Apple Silicon.

I decided to create a double-clickable “macOS application bundle” that hides the unwanted stuff and launches the proper binary file. In addition, it now has a nice icon file.

It turns out to be pretty straightforward to make the bundle. Even though the bundle isn’t signed (and needs to be granted permission to run the first time), it operates exactly as desired.

I put the process into the create-crusader-macos-app repo. The script shows how to combine all the pieces – downloading the binary file(s) from its own repo, the Info.plist file, the .icns that contains the icons, and a startup script that are required for the bundle.

It’s now easy to build the app anytime a new version gets released.

I wanted to create a macOS bundle for an application that I use frequently, and wanted it to have an attractive icon. I had a good PNG image, and knew that there must be a way to convert it to the multiple sizes required by modern macOS.

I found Ben Souchet’s png-to-icns repo that does exactly what I want. It takes a 1024×1024 PNG image, and outputs the desired .icns file.

I’ve been following the progress of qStudio – a SQL IDE that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s great for running SQL queries against a database. I haven’t used its Pulse features to create real-time graphs of live data, though.

My use of qStudio is driven because it includes the PRQL compiler that takes a modern query language and compiles it to SQL statements. The qStudio IDE allows me to write straightforward PRQL queries and immediately execute them against my SQL database.

Quick Start: My friends want to pick through some of the SQL data we’ve collected for a project. I wrote a series of tutorials that show how to get started using qStudio with PRQL. They are at https://github.com/richb-hanover/qStudio-PRQL_Quick_Start

Installation: There’s a pretty good qStudio installer for Windows on the Downloads page. And the .jar file seems to work fine on Linux. But it’s a bit of a pain to run the .jar file on macOS. So I created a macOS application bundle for the combination of qStudio and PRQL. You can download the macOS file from: https://randomneuronsfiring.com/wp-content/uploads/qStudio.zip Check the Quick Start #2 for details on approving it to run on macOS.

If you work much with OpenWrt, you likely have a pile of older routers that you’re no longer using. But what to do with them? You could pass them along to friends/family or even donate them to the local thrift store. But first you must solve a big problem…

Read the README for more info….

I’d welcome comments on the settings/packages/documentation. Thanks

@SiemusS recently asked me to review the draft documentation for FQ_CoDel for OPNsense.

The document turned into a fairly nice description of the FQ_CoDel algorithm. See https://github.com/opnsense/docs/blob/master/source/manual/how-tos/shaper_bufferbloat.rst