Random Neurons Firing

In addition to using ChatGPT for the Wifi-heatmapper project, I have also been having fun reading Simon Willison's blog, especially his Here's how I use LLMs to help me write code post.

I am delighted with Wordland – it makes it very easy to post to my various blogs. I encountered a problem uploading an image to one of my sites. I reported it here.

SOLUTION: This was a Jetpack problem. It turns out that I did have Jetpack installed, but the JSON API was not enabled.

Why was troubleshooting this so hard? There were a couple confounding factors:

• It's an atypical configuration – Jetpack was installed but without (today's) default use of the JSON API. This site – RandomNeuronsFiring.com – has been continually updated since, I think, 2013. I am unsure when I first installed Jetpack, but it could well have been before the JSON API arrived, so perhaps it was never turned on by default. Enabling the JSON API made images work flawlessly.
• Posting text worked fine (see recent posts on this site). It was confusing when posting images to my blog did not work.
• Posting images to another (more recently created) blog worked fine. Since it's a newer installation, I assume that the Jetpack defaulted the JSON API to be enabled when this site was created.

I found the answer by searching some of the other Issues, and saw someone mention Jetpack settings. I then checked the Docs and noticed the Jetpack JSON API requirement.

I hope the following advice – a) ensure Jetpack is installed; b) ensure the JSON API is turned on – can make it into a Troubleshooting section of the documentation in the future.

Update: I am not really sure what I did to "enable the JSON API" in my WordPress site that made it work. I went back to the site, checked the Jetpack -> Settings, and clicked the "Modules" link at the bottom. This shows a whole list of modules, and JSON API was active. I clicked Deactivate, and, sure enough, I was unable to make edits – I saw an appropriate error message. Re-activating it left it working fine.

There are lots of good Internet speed tests, such as Waveform, Cloudflare, or Speedtest.net. Unfortunately, these mix your ISP's performance with your local router/network so it's hard to tease out whether problems are local or remote.

The Crusader network speed and latency test does a remarkably good job of measuring the performance of your local network – transfer rates and latency – both for Ethernet and Wi-Fi.

To use Crusader, you'll need two computers – one acting as a server, the other as a client. To run a test, download the pre-built binary onto two computers (it runs on Windows, macOS, or Linux). Connect the first computer to one of your router's LAN Ethernet ports, and start it as a Server. Connect the other computer via WiFi and start the Client, enter the server's address, and start the test.

Read about how to interpret the Crusader results or more about running local tests in the Crusader docs. NB: These documents are waiting to be incorporated into to the main Crusader repo.

A while back, I saw a project called zoomready that I thought might be a useful tool for watching a network connection (even though it was Win-only, and I'm a Mac fan), but I now see it's deprecated.

I'm not disappointed – I have found a web-based tool that seems to do a similar thing: the VSee Network Stability Test. It was developed by VSee, a telehealth company. I am guessing they created it as a tech support tool so that they can request troubleshooting information when customers call in and say, "Everything stinks!"

To use it, go to the page and start it prior to your video call. Leave it running in a separate web page for the duration. VSee displays three continually updating graphs: "MOS" (Mean Operating Score, a 1..5 measure of voice quality), packet loss, latency and jitter. These indicate the quality of the network connection, while only consuming 4-5kbps while it's running.

I peeked at the Javascript, it's pretty clever. It starts an RTC client in the browser, talking to an RTC server on the VSee side. Since an RTC session continually chit-chats with the other end (normally sending audio or video) there's a continuing (many per second) stream of requests/responses. I haven't verified, but I bet they instead time stamps in the stream to gather statistics.

I asked the VSee tech support folks if they minded if we publicized the test page to a wide audience – they said OK.

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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.