Category Archives: Life

Crusader Documentation Updated

I am pleased to note that my PR for updated documentation for the Crusader network throughput and latency tester has been merged. Crusader makes fine-grained tests of network performance, either on a local network, or the wide Internet. For more details, see the Crusader repo.

Dave Täht for Postel Service Award

I posted this nomination for the John B. Postel Service Award today… I strongly recommend Dave Täht for the Postel Service Award. Regrettably, this must be posthumous. I first learned about Dave when I stumbled on his post talking about experiments with the CeroWRT software to decrease latency in home routers. This must have been

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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.

More on wifi-heatmapper

I posted before about the wifi-heatmapper project. I have been working on it to tune up the user interface and make its display a bit easier to understand. My PR is at: https://github.com/hnykda/wifi-heatmapper/pull/24

Switching to Wordland for posts…

I am switching my blogging to use Wordland.social. I formerly used the standard WordPress editor (Classic, then Block), but they always felt klunky and slightly overwhelming. The process of logging into WordPress, then editing with those tools was enough of a drag that I didn’t bother to post as much as I could. Instead, I now

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Making Local Speed Tests

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

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VSee Network Stability Test

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:

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Playing with WiFi heatmaps

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

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