227: A Donut of Good Internet

00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I saw somebody using an E Ink reader yesterday.

00:05SPEAKER- So unusual about that.

00:06SPEAKER- It was the size of a phone.

00:07SPEAKER- Oh.

00:08SPEAKER- So it was like, he held it,

00:09SPEAKERthe person was holding it like a phone, reading a book.

00:12SPEAKERAnd I walked up to them and asked them what it was,

00:13SPEAKER'cause I'd never seen one before.

00:15SPEAKERAnd they, we talked about it and it looked fabulous.

00:17SPEAKER- Is it just an E, it's not actually a phone?

00:19SPEAKER- So they make phones too,

00:20SPEAKERbut the one he has is just an E reader.

00:22SPEAKER- Wait, they do make phones with E Ink screens?

00:25SPEAKER- They're for people who have distraction problems.

00:27SPEAKER- Are they as slow to refresh as, for example, a Kindle?

00:30SPEAKER- It depends on how old,

00:31SPEAKERso they're faster than the old Kindles are, I would say now.

00:35SPEAKERLike if you have like an old first gen Paperwhite

00:37SPEAKERor something, probably faster than you're thinking E Ink,

00:40SPEAKERbut they're still not,

00:41SPEAKERyou're not gonna watch a video on these.

00:42SPEAKER- Okay, I guess the better question to ask is like,

00:45SPEAKERpeople who've used Kindles,

00:46SPEAKERlike that's quite slow when you turn a page, you know,

00:47SPEAKERit's a good second as it kind of slowly refreshes screen.

00:51SPEAKER- It's faster than that,

00:52SPEAKERbut it's like hundreds of milliseconds.

00:54SPEAKERIt's not like 60 frames a second, yeah.

00:56SPEAKER- So my question is,

00:57SPEAKERis that due to the slow processing of a Kindle

01:00SPEAKERor is that a feature,

01:01SPEAKERis that a limitation of an E Ink screen?

01:04SPEAKER- Oh, it's because the E Ink screens are mechanical.

01:09SPEAKERSo there's little balls inside them

01:11SPEAKERthat float from the bottom to the top of a liquid.

01:14SPEAKER- There's locomotion in there.

01:16SPEAKER- Yeah, things are moving.

01:17SPEAKERThey're very small things, but yeah.

01:19SPEAKER- Well, with that established then, yeah,

01:21SPEAKERI guess you wouldn't be able to be distracted much

01:22SPEAKERby an E Ink phone because it would take forever

01:24SPEAKERto do anything.

01:26SPEAKER- Well, you say that, but like I'm just as easy to do.

01:29SPEAKERLike I can distract myself just as effectively with a book

01:31SPEAKERas I can with say a, you know, a video probably more so.

01:37SPEAKERSo.

01:38SPEAKER- I guess, you know, I guess you could scroll Twitter.

01:40SPEAKER- Yeah.

01:41SPEAKER- Are there color E Ink screens

01:42SPEAKERthat are ubiquitous at this point?

01:44SPEAKER- You can get color E Ink,

01:45SPEAKERbut you lose a lot of the benefits and they're still slow.

01:48SPEAKERAnd they don't, it's not like they're vibrant and look good.

01:51SPEAKER- I bet an E Ink phone lasts forever, battery wise.

01:55SPEAKERI mean.

01:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm looking at some right now.

01:58SPEAKERThere's the Boox Poke 5.

01:59SPEAKER- I'm sorry, the what?

02:00SPEAKER- The Boox Poke 5.

02:02SPEAKER- Boox.

02:03SPEAKER- B-O-O-X, I think that's how you say it, Boox.

02:05SPEAKER- Boox.

02:06SPEAKER- Oh, so there's the Boox Palma.

02:09SPEAKER- Might just be Boox.

02:10SPEAKER- Well, why would they have two O's if it's just,

02:12SPEAKERwhy don't they spell it B-O-O-K-S instead of B-O-O-X.

02:15SPEAKERIt's not boo, it's not.

02:18SPEAKER- Something you can trademark.

02:19SPEAKER- I mean, you think it's just books?

02:23SPEAKERI'm sad now.

02:24SPEAKER- Boox.

02:25SPEAKER- I'm going with Boox.

02:25SPEAKER- Boox Palma.

02:26SPEAKER- I suppose Boox is a bit more memorable.

02:28SPEAKER- Boox Palma might be the name

02:29SPEAKERof my Dragon's Dogma character.

02:31SPEAKERThat's a good one right there.

02:34SPEAKEROkay, sorry, I didn't realize that the character

02:39SPEAKERthat I made testing out Dragon's Dogma last night

02:42SPEAKERwas gonna be the character that I had forever

02:43SPEAKER'cause you can't delete and change your characters.

02:46SPEAKER- That's weird, you, me, and I think Vinny

02:48SPEAKERall have made characters in Dragon's Dogma initially

02:50SPEAKERthat we did not intend to keep as our characters.

02:52SPEAKER- My guy, I always do that.

02:54SPEAKERThat's like my MO for--

02:55SPEAKER- Oh, really?

02:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I usually start and play just a little bit

02:58SPEAKERof these games to try the different classes,

03:00SPEAKERand I realize that there's multi-classing,

03:01SPEAKERbut I also usually Monster Factory up the first one

03:04SPEAKERjust on general principle.

03:05SPEAKERSo now, I'm gonna go and tell you,

03:07SPEAKERmy guy has an enormous body and a very, very, very small head

03:11SPEAKERand a very long neck, and it's not,

03:14SPEAKERnow I have to look at it for a long, long time,

03:15SPEAKERand I'm like, I think they might get $2 out of me

03:19SPEAKERto add another character, which also feels kind of icky.

03:21SPEAKER- Wait, do they have that?

03:23SPEAKER- You can pay two bucks and get another character slot.

03:24SPEAKER- That's not great.

03:25SPEAKER- It's not good.

03:26SPEAKER- That's not great. - It's a bad look.

03:27SPEAKER- I saw that you can also spend $3

03:29SPEAKERfor a fast travel crystal, which I believe is single use.

03:32SPEAKER- What?

03:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, to be fair,

03:34SPEAKERI think it's part of the philosophy of this game

03:35SPEAKERthat you should not fast travel.

03:36SPEAKERLike, they want you to travel and run everywhere,

03:39SPEAKERso you can run into situations and find things.

03:42SPEAKER- I like that, I'm into that.

03:44SPEAKER- You can find those crystals in the game,

03:45SPEAKERbut I think I read one reviewer found

03:47SPEAKERthree fast travel crystals their entire playthrough

03:49SPEAKERor something, or you could just spend money

03:51SPEAKERif you want to fast travel more.

03:53SPEAKER- Well, time matters in that game in a weird way, right?

03:56SPEAKERLike, your quest can expire, food goes out of date, like-

04:00SPEAKER- Some things I think you can only do at night,

04:01SPEAKERet cetera, et cetera.

04:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:04SPEAKER- There's gotta be save files you can just delete

04:06SPEAKERand start over.

04:07SPEAKER- They're stored on the server.

04:08SPEAKERI already looked it up.

04:09SPEAKER- Wait, really?

04:10SPEAKER- Yep.

04:11SPEAKER- Huh.

04:11SPEAKER- I'm not super enthusiastic,

04:13SPEAKERI'm less enthusiastic than I was expecting.

04:17SPEAKERSo this Boox Palma is 279 bucks.

04:21SPEAKER- Okay.

04:22SPEAKER- I'm kinda interested to explore.

04:24SPEAKERIt's basically an Android tablet that's phone size

04:28SPEAKERand fits in your hand.

04:29SPEAKER- Do they list a battery life?

04:31SPEAKER- They do not, because I think that,

04:33SPEAKERI think a lot of times people don't put a number on that,

04:36SPEAKERbecause if you're a small company,

04:37SPEAKERthat causes you some problems in the EU

04:41SPEAKERif your thing doesn't live up to it

04:43SPEAKERand there, you know, people complain.

04:45SPEAKER- Oh man, this thing looks cool.

04:48SPEAKER- I'm sure it's gonna annoy me.

04:49SPEAKER- Yeah, there's something really neat looking

04:51SPEAKERabout this interface.

04:52SPEAKERI mean, it looks kind of like a smartphone home screen,

04:55SPEAKERbut in E Ink.

04:56SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:57SPEAKER- There's something very like original Macintosh about it.

04:59SPEAKERIt's, you know, it's a gooey, but black and white.

05:02SPEAKER- Yeah, it has, look, the whole thing has good vibes,

05:06SPEAKERI'm gonna say.

05:06SPEAKER- You know what, I could use more good vibes

05:08SPEAKERin my consumer electronics.

05:10SPEAKER- Yeah.

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05:40SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad Will Made a Tech Pod."

05:42SPEAKERI'm Will.

05:43SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.

05:44SPEAKER- Ahoy, ahoy.

05:45SPEAKER- That was high.

05:46SPEAKERI went for a slightly more theatrical presentation this week

05:49SPEAKER- It was pretty good.

05:50SPEAKERIt was high energy for morning.

05:51SPEAKERI was impressed.

05:54SPEAKERThis week, it's GDC week.

05:56SPEAKER- Yeah, how was GDC?

05:59SPEAKER- You know, it seems like things may be changing,

06:02SPEAKERgetting, I mean, it's part like developer rage fest

06:06SPEAKERand part everybody's like doing business again.

06:09SPEAKERSo, I don't know.

06:10SPEAKERI don't know how many people are doing business,

06:12SPEAKERbut I did hear people say that they were doing business, so.

06:15SPEAKER- I mean, it's been like, what, not six weeks since DICE

06:17SPEAKERand things were very dire.

06:19SPEAKER- A dire DICE?

06:20SPEAKER- It's definitely quieter than previous GDC.

06:25SPEAKERLike, I don't know, like GDC is always weird

06:28SPEAKERbecause there's like three GDCs, right?

06:29SPEAKERThere's like the trade show floor where everybody's down

06:31SPEAKERtrying to sell you middleware and crap.

06:33SPEAKERThere's all the different tracks where you go to learn stuff

06:38SPEAKERwhether it's business stuff or developing stuff,

06:40SPEAKERor like there was a thing about new DirectX,

06:43SPEAKERlike DirectX 12 API features

06:46SPEAKERand like the whole brunt of that was, yo,

06:51SPEAKERthe GPU could do a bunch of stuff without the CPU now.

06:54SPEAKER- Like what?

06:55SPEAKER- Like access memory and like it was like,

06:57SPEAKERyou don't need the CPU to set up a bunch of stuff now

07:00SPEAKERin DirectX 12.2.6 or something, I guess.

07:04SPEAKERThe one that dropped like last week.

07:06SPEAKER- Are they ever gonna rev the major DirectX number again?

07:09SPEAKER- I don't know that it makes sense to.

07:13SPEAKERLike, I feel like maybe, I don't know, maybe.

07:16SPEAKERMaybe next Xbox.

07:19SPEAKERSo, and then there's also the Yerba Buena Gardens GDC

07:26SPEAKERwhich is like all of, like people just chilling in the,

07:29SPEAKERlike people come up after they've been locked

07:32SPEAKERin the downstairs for a long time

07:33SPEAKERand they lay down on the grass or sit on the benches.

07:36SPEAKERLike there's a lot of, oddly, a lot of business

07:39SPEAKERthat happens around the fountains.

07:42SPEAKERAnd like if you sit down there long enough,

07:43SPEAKERyou just hear people talking about all sorts of secret shit.

07:46SPEAKERSo it's a, yeah.

07:47SPEAKER- Really?

07:48SPEAKER- Yeah, you bump into people.

07:49SPEAKERI saw a friend of the show, Danny Baranowski,

07:51SPEAKERbut I bumped into a bunch of friends.

07:52SPEAKERIt was lovely walking around.

07:54SPEAKERSo, yeah.

07:55SPEAKER- Could you surreptitiously hang out out there

07:56SPEAKERwith one of those directed long range listening devices?

08:00SPEAKERI'm not saying you should actually listen.

08:02SPEAKER- I'm gonna go and tell you, you wouldn't have to do that.

08:03SPEAKERYou just have to sit down on a bench and listen

08:05SPEAKERbecause people will sit down three feet away from you

08:07SPEAKERand immediately start talking about super proprietary shit

08:10SPEAKERall day long.

08:11SPEAKER- Ooh. - Yeah.

08:12SPEAKERAnyway, this week we're not talking about GDC.

08:15SPEAKERWe are gonna talk about kind of home networking basics.

08:19SPEAKERWe realized we hadn't really dug into this.

08:21SPEAKERWe've talked about networking stuff.

08:22SPEAKERWe've talked about like difference in wifi standards.

08:24SPEAKERWe've talked about routers and modems

08:27SPEAKERand all this stuff individually.

08:28SPEAKERBut we had a question in the Discord that was,

08:33SPEAKERhey, I just got a house

08:34SPEAKERand I don't know how to do the networking stuff.

08:36SPEAKERAnd I'd like to know,

08:38SPEAKERlike I don't understand a lot of these terms

08:39SPEAKERand I don't understand what the strategy should be.

08:41SPEAKERSo.

08:42SPEAKER- Yeah, if anything, I would say

08:44SPEAKERthat this is one of the,

08:46SPEAKERprobably the most asked question on the Discord.

08:48SPEAKERLike just if I had to pick one thing

08:50SPEAKERthat people show up saying like,

08:51SPEAKERhey, I could do some help with blank.

08:53SPEAKERIt's almost, it's majority of the time

08:56SPEAKERis some kind of home networking thing.

08:58SPEAKER- So this is a complicated topic

09:00SPEAKERin that there are a lot of choices to make

09:03SPEAKERand there's not necessarily a right choice

09:06SPEAKERfor any everyone, right?

09:07SPEAKERLike Brad's right choice and my right choice

09:09SPEAKERand like your parents' right choice

09:12SPEAKERand somebody living on a farm's right choice

09:14SPEAKERare probably all different.

09:16SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, and I'll say there are more choices

09:19SPEAKERsince, you know, we may have covered this

09:21SPEAKERat least piecemeal in the past,

09:22SPEAKERbut since we did that last,

09:24SPEAKERthere are even more choices

09:25SPEAKERthan there have ever been before

09:26SPEAKERbecause like new categories and segments

09:29SPEAKERof the market keep emerging that are, you know,

09:30SPEAKERlike things that you used to only see in data centers

09:33SPEAKERare now available for 70 bucks in the home type stuff.

09:36SPEAKERSo there's more to cover than there has ever been before.

09:39SPEAKER- And it's also worth saying this isn't a product

09:42SPEAKERrecommendation show, right?

09:44SPEAKERSo we're not, we don't, by nature of our lives,

09:48SPEAKERwe only test the stuff that we use.

09:50SPEAKER- Right, we're not in a position

09:51SPEAKERto try 12 different routers or anything.

09:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, look, we could, but that's a different,

09:56SPEAKERwe have to add a new patron tier for that problem.

09:58SPEAKER- It's becoming a very different show

09:59SPEAKERand lifestyle at that point.

10:01SPEAKER- Yeah, my wife will be pretty upset

10:02SPEAKERif I start bringing in a bazillion routers.

10:05SPEAKERSo with all that aside,

10:08SPEAKERlet's start with some definitions.

10:10SPEAKER- Yes.

10:11SPEAKER- So there's a box that often your ISP will give you,

10:15SPEAKERbut sometimes you can provide yourself.

10:17SPEAKER- Yes, or in fact, in the early days,

10:19SPEAKERand by early, I mean like mid 2000s,

10:21SPEAKEReverybody kind of had to provide for themselves, right?

10:23SPEAKERI think ISP is giving routers

10:25SPEAKERas a somewhat more recent phenomenon,

10:26SPEAKERlike the classic Linksys WRT 54G, you know,

10:30SPEAKEReverybody bought one of those.

10:32SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's actually an interesting example

10:35SPEAKERbecause this has become a combo device.

10:38SPEAKERLike if you subscribe to Comcast or AT,

10:41SPEAKERlike I have an AT&T fiber connection

10:43SPEAKERand I get a box from AT&T that has a router,

10:46SPEAKERa modem, a firewall, and a wifi access point all in it.

10:51SPEAKERAnd what those different things are is the modem,

10:53SPEAKERit takes the signal from the fiber network

10:57SPEAKERand basically talks to this other box on the wall

11:00SPEAKERthat we'll talk about in a minute called an ONT

11:02SPEAKERthat you don't have to worry about

11:03SPEAKERbecause your provider always gives you that if you need it

11:06SPEAKERor sometimes you don't even need it.

11:08SPEAKERAnd then that modem converts that into just ethernet.

11:12SPEAKERSo there's like a one ethernet port

11:14SPEAKERusually coming out of your modem

11:15SPEAKERand like a cable line or fiber connection

11:18SPEAKERor something else comes into that modem.

11:22SPEAKER- I assume that's common to all cable connections.

11:24SPEAKERI haven't been on Comcast since 2016.

11:26SPEAKERAnd even then, I don't believe

11:28SPEAKERthey were offering all-in-one.

11:29SPEAKERLike you still would rent a standalone modem from them

11:32SPEAKERand plug that into a router.

11:34SPEAKER- They've shifted to all-in-one.

11:35SPEAKERSo now you get a box that gives you everything

11:39SPEAKERand includes, when they talk about

11:41SPEAKERthe 10 gigabit Xfinity network or whatever on their ads,

11:46SPEAKERthey're talking about an all-in-one router,

11:48SPEAKERmodem, wifi access point.

11:50SPEAKER- Are they, is Comcast actually doing 10 gigabit these days?

11:53SPEAKERI find that hard to believe. - On wifi, I think, yeah.

11:55SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

11:56SPEAKER- I think they're doing, 'cause they're doing wifi seven.

11:57SPEAKERSo they like, anyway, it doesn't matter.

12:00SPEAKEROkay, so along with that comes a firewall.

12:02SPEAKERSo what that router does is it takes

12:05SPEAKERone IP address that your ISP gives you,

12:07SPEAKERand that's basically one point on the internet

12:09SPEAKERthat everyone can access, right?

12:11SPEAKERAnd then they spread that out across all the devices

12:13SPEAKERthat are inside your home network.

12:15SPEAKERSo your TV, your consoles, your iPad,

12:18SPEAKERyour phone, your watch, anything that connects to wifi,

12:22SPEAKERyour light bulbs, if you have wifi light bulbs,

12:24SPEAKERall get internal private IP addresses

12:27SPEAKERthat are assigned by that router.

12:29SPEAKERAnd the router says,

12:31SPEAKERthe router knows which device gets which traffic

12:34SPEAKERbased on this thing called network address translation

12:36SPEAKERwe don't need to get into.

12:37SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I think an easy way to think about it

12:39SPEAKERis the one major piece of functionality in a router

12:41SPEAKERis it's basically bridging two networks together.

12:43SPEAKERYou're actually, you're creating one network in your home

12:45SPEAKERbetween all your devices,

12:46SPEAKERand the entire internet is the other network.

12:49SPEAKERAnd the entire public internet is being bridged

12:52SPEAKERto your little private network at home by the router.

12:55SPEAKERYou'll also see the term gateway,

12:56SPEAKERwhich is basically what a gateway means.

12:59SPEAKERIt's just a device that bridges two networks together.

13:01SPEAKER- Yeah, and typically at home,

13:04SPEAKERyou have a private network and a public network.

13:06SPEAKERA gateway can do private to private or public to public

13:09SPEAKERas well as private to public.

13:11SPEAKERSo, okay, so we have modems, we have routers,

13:13SPEAKERwe have firewalls.

13:14SPEAKERThe firewall is a thing that basically controls access

13:17SPEAKERacross and says, hey, traffic can go out,

13:20SPEAKERbut it can't come in for the most part

13:21SPEAKERunless it's requested.

13:23SPEAKERThat's a basic security thing.

13:25SPEAKERYou wanna leave your firewall on on your router,

13:27SPEAKERbut this is generally just, like in the old days,

13:29SPEAKERthere might've been a box there that was a firewall.

13:31SPEAKERYou can do that if you're in a corporate network.

13:34SPEAKERAt home, it's probably just a piece of software

13:36SPEAKERthat runs on your router.

13:37SPEAKER- Yeah, and generally out of the box,

13:39SPEAKERthat's not something you're going to have to touch.

13:40SPEAKERAnd if you need to touch it,

13:42SPEAKERyou probably already know why and what you need to do.

13:45SPEAKERIf you have to open a gap in it for some device

13:47SPEAKERto get unfettered access to the internet,

13:49SPEAKERyou're probably gonna know why you need to do that and how,

13:52SPEAKERbut firewall not really something you have to worry about.

13:55SPEAKER- Yeah, generally these days, even games,

13:56SPEAKERwhich were the kind of last firewall thing

13:59SPEAKERare a little bit more forgiving.

14:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I always find it funny.

14:02SPEAKERIf you ever get down in the weeds with firewalls though,

14:04SPEAKERand like look at how the rules are defined

14:06SPEAKERor like configuring one manually or whatever,

14:07SPEAKERlike how simple it is, not simple to set up.

14:10SPEAKERLike the rules, every time I've like tried

14:12SPEAKERto write firewall rules, it's very complicated.

14:14SPEAKERThere's a lot of syntax depending on what kind of firewall.

14:16SPEAKERBut I guess what I'm saying is like how fundamental

14:19SPEAKERor rudimentary it is for the thing to just say nah

14:22SPEAKERwhen a packet comes in from an outside source

14:25SPEAKERthat is like potentially doing something nefarious or not,

14:28SPEAKERit could be totally benign,

14:29SPEAKERbut like all it is is dropping packets.

14:31SPEAKERAll it is is the firewall is like all the packets

14:33SPEAKERare running through the firewall.

14:34SPEAKERAnd if it comes from anywhere that it shouldn't,

14:37SPEAKERthe firewall just says nah,

14:39SPEAKERand then it doesn't go through, you know what I mean?

14:40SPEAKERThere's not like some,

14:41SPEAKERthere's not some like advanced hardened technology

14:43SPEAKERgoing on there.

14:44SPEAKERIt's literally just saying like, yeah, you can come in.

14:46SPEAKERNo, you can't, and that's it.

14:47SPEAKERAnd there's nothing anybody can do about it.

14:49SPEAKER- Well, I mean, and that's the beauty of the firewall

14:52SPEAKERis it's stupid, right?

14:53SPEAKERIt just says, hey, don't accept any traffic on this port

14:55SPEAKERfrom anywhere.

14:57SPEAKERAccess points, this is the next thing.

14:59SPEAKERThe access point typically is also built

15:01SPEAKERinto this router box.

15:03SPEAKERIt's the thing that turns your network wireless.

15:05SPEAKERSo where you can plug an ethernet plug in

15:08SPEAKERon the back of your firewall and wire in,

15:11SPEAKERthis just basically says, hey,

15:13SPEAKERI'm gonna let you set up a name and settings and SSID,

15:17SPEAKERwhich is the name of the network and WPA password,

15:20SPEAKERwhich is the kind of security thing you type in

15:22SPEAKERwhen you try to log out on your phone

15:23SPEAKERor your laptop or whatever.

15:25SPEAKERAnd yeah, that's it.

15:27SPEAKERIt makes your network wireless.

15:29SPEAKERGenerally speaking, the network will be strongest

15:33SPEAKERnext to your router or your access point,

15:36SPEAKERand it'll be weakest the furthest away

15:37SPEAKERfrom your access point.

15:38SPEAKERSo if you have one of these,

15:40SPEAKERyou want to put it in the center of your house

15:41SPEAKERsomewhere, ideally.

15:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I hope one of the things we'll demystify

15:45SPEAKERover the course of this episode

15:46SPEAKERis that the access point is technically

15:48SPEAKERlike separate functionality.

15:49SPEAKERAnd in a lot of cases these days is a separate device now,

15:52SPEAKERlike I say that because a lot of people

15:55SPEAKERstill just interchangeably use the word router

15:57SPEAKERfor all of these things.

15:59SPEAKERAnd I think in some cases, definitely not all,

16:02SPEAKERbut in some cases it actually is beneficial

16:04SPEAKERto buy a separate access point

16:05SPEAKERand put it somewhere else than the router is.

16:07SPEAKERSo hopefully that's something more people will realize

16:10SPEAKERis that the router is technically separate

16:11SPEAKERand you can separate those if necessary.

16:13SPEAKER- Well, and the other benefit to having separate routers

16:16SPEAKERand access points, and again, this isn't for everyone,

16:18SPEAKERbut the other benefit is it's like

16:21SPEAKERwhen you bought an old TV VCR combo, right?

16:24SPEAKERIf the VCR and the TV VCR combo broke,

16:27SPEAKERthen suddenly your TV was much less useful

16:29SPEAKER'cause you probably didn't have the right plugs

16:30SPEAKERto plug in another VCR on it.

16:32SPEAKERIt's the same situation with a router.

16:34SPEAKERIf like once the super VCR came out,

16:37SPEAKERyou couldn't upgrade to that as easily either.

16:40SPEAKERAnd wifi standards spin every three or four years generally.

16:44SPEAKER- Also, if your VCR broke, you're without a TV

16:47SPEAKERwhile your TV is in the shop getting the VCR.

16:50SPEAKERThat is the exact example my dad gave me

16:52SPEAKERto convince me not to buy a TV VCR combo

16:55SPEAKERin 1993 when I went to college.

16:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I kinda, I like piecemeal or modular everything.

17:00SPEAKERI think it's usually helpful to separate stuff out

17:03SPEAKERas much as you can.

17:05SPEAKER- Yeah, so, okay.

17:06SPEAKERSo we have that.

17:07SPEAKERThere's a bunch of different wifi standards.

17:09SPEAKERThey used to have confusing,

17:10SPEAKERlike they weren't that confusing,

17:12SPEAKERbut it was like numbers like 80211B, 80211G, 80211N.

17:16SPEAKERA few years ago, they retconned that naming scheme

17:20SPEAKERto start with wifi one and go up to,

17:22SPEAKERI think we're on wifi seven now,

17:24SPEAKERwhich is not quite out yet, but it's getting close.

17:27SPEAKER- I think there might be some wifi seven stuff

17:29SPEAKERon the market.

17:30SPEAKERI don't know if these are that much less confusing

17:32SPEAKER'cause they also snuck wifi 6E in there after six

17:35SPEAKERand I was never clear what the difference was.

17:37SPEAKER- It's extreme, Brad.

17:38SPEAKER- Oh, of course.

17:39SPEAKER- The wifi standards,

17:41SPEAKERoftentimes you'll see hardware shipping

17:42SPEAKERbefore the standards are actually finalized.

17:45SPEAKERThat means that the hardware spec is finished,

17:46SPEAKERbut the software is still being locked down

17:49SPEAKERand there'll be a software update

17:50SPEAKERthat brings you to final spec.

17:52SPEAKERI find that to be a little riskier

17:53SPEAKERthan I like to live on my network infrastructure.

17:56SPEAKERBut the basic gist is if you have wifi six or newer,

18:00SPEAKERyou're pretty good.

18:01SPEAKERThe newer standards get better in higher congestion areas.

18:04SPEAKERSo six and 6E are better than five for high congestion.

18:09SPEAKERLike if you're, and by high congestion, I don't mean,

18:11SPEAKERhey, you can see your neighbor

18:12SPEAKERon either side of your house's wifi access points.

18:14SPEAKERI mean, you live in an apartment in New York city

18:17SPEAKERor Chicago or San Francisco where the density is really high

18:20SPEAKERand you open up the wifi finder on your laptop

18:23SPEAKERand there's a hundred things there.

18:25SPEAKERSo.

18:26SPEAKER- Sounds very familiar to me.

18:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you're living that life.

18:30SPEAKEROkay, a couple other things.

18:31SPEAKERSwitches, network switches.

18:33SPEAKERNetwork switch sometimes called a hub.

18:35SPEAKERNobody really makes hubs anymore.

18:37SPEAKER- I don't think you can,

18:38SPEAKERcan you even buy a network hub at this point?

18:40SPEAKER- 100% sure you could buy a hub still,

18:42SPEAKERbut you absolutely should not.

18:43SPEAKERYou should always buy a switch.

18:45SPEAKER- Yes, switches are now very, very cheap.

18:47SPEAKER- Yeah, basically a switch lets you turn one ethernet port

18:51SPEAKERinto like up to 24 or 48 ethernet ports if you want.

18:54SPEAKER- Yeah, or you know, a lot of the common ones,

18:56SPEAKERlike the cheaper ones from TP-Link and Netgear,

18:58SPEAKERyou'll see are like four ports or eight ports.

19:00SPEAKERLike I guess if you're really not super familiar

19:02SPEAKERwith networking stuff,

19:03SPEAKERit's basically like an ethernet switch box or switcher

19:06SPEAKERor not switcher, there was like a multiplexer.

19:08SPEAKERIt's basically you plug one.

19:10SPEAKER- It's like a power strip for network.

19:12SPEAKER- Yeah, kinda, basically you're just adding

19:13SPEAKERa bunch of extra ports to an existing network

19:15SPEAKERand then anything you plug in there

19:16SPEAKERis just immediately on the network.

19:18SPEAKER- People often ask if there's a downside to using those.

19:21SPEAKERThere really isn't unless you're in some kind of high,

19:25SPEAKERreally high specific traffic,

19:26SPEAKERspecific high traffic networking situations.

19:29SPEAKER- Yeah, you're not losing any real speed or latency.

19:32SPEAKERYou know, they've got special hardware in them

19:34SPEAKERthat makes them, you know,

19:35SPEAKERroute stuff back and forth very quickly.

19:36SPEAKER- Yeah, the only place that there's a potential problem

19:39SPEAKERis if you're going, you're putting enough traffic

19:41SPEAKERon that one cable that goes to the next switch

19:44SPEAKERto kind of clog up the infrastructure there.

19:47SPEAKER- That is something to think about, absolutely.

19:49SPEAKERLike the way I've got things run to the living room,

19:51SPEAKERlike I have one long cable run down the hall

19:54SPEAKERand now there's like, gosh, there's the switch, PS5,

19:58SPEAKERseries X, like I don't even know what a Roku,

20:01SPEAKERa bunch of stuff, you know,

20:01SPEAKERand everything on the other end of that connection,

20:04SPEAKEReverything on that switch down there is all limited

20:06SPEAKERto the speed of one cable going to it, right?

20:09SPEAKERLike everything has to share bandwidth

20:10SPEAKERbetween the one gigabit cable that's running to that switch.

20:13SPEAKER- But at the same time,

20:15SPEAKERthe things that you have at the other end of that,

20:17SPEAKERlike you're talking about consumer devices

20:19SPEAKERthat are not gonna saturate a gigabit connection

20:21SPEAKERfor the most part.

20:23SPEAKERThe consoles might now, for a long time, they wouldn't.

20:25SPEAKER- Yeah, when you download a game,

20:27SPEAKERyou kind of, you do get fairly close to that these days,

20:29SPEAKERbut not enough to like, you know,

20:31SPEAKERnot enough that you can't also like stream YouTube

20:33SPEAKERor Netflix at the same time you're downloading a game.

20:36SPEAKER- The last one we have on the list to define

20:38SPEAKERis power over ethernet.

20:40SPEAKERSo this is a high-end,

20:42SPEAKERusually more commercial install setting,

20:46SPEAKERbut it's coming to home stuff now,

20:49SPEAKERor to prosumer home stuff now,

20:52SPEAKERthat basically lets you from a switch,

20:54SPEAKERfrom a network switch,

20:56SPEAKERand use, you know, the network cable that's used

21:00SPEAKERfor ethernet is called cat something usually,

21:04SPEAKERI think it goes up to eight now.

21:06SPEAKERYeah, there's four cables in there

21:10SPEAKERthat carry data and then there's four wires

21:12SPEAKERthat just do nothing generally.

21:14SPEAKERSo you actually can run power over some of the extra cables.

21:20SPEAKERSo you can run low voltage or low power devices

21:23SPEAKERlike access points and switches and stuff like that

21:25SPEAKERover that.

21:26SPEAKER- Security cameras in some cases.

21:27SPEAKER- Yeah, security cameras, doorbells, whatever,

21:30SPEAKERall sorts of different kinds of things.

21:32SPEAKERAnd the upshot is when you run, say,

21:36SPEAKERa access point to your ceiling or security camera

21:39SPEAKERto your ceiling someplace, you only have to run one cable.

21:42SPEAKERSo you can put the power in at the switch end

21:44SPEAKERand then run everything else out over the ethernet

21:47SPEAKERand it'll just work when you plug it in,

21:49SPEAKERwhich is really nice.

21:50SPEAKER- Yeah, did you, I don't know if you mentioned

21:52SPEAKERyou have to get a switch that explicitly supports PoE.

21:55SPEAKER- You either need a switch that supports PoE

21:57SPEAKERor you need what's called a PoE injector

21:59SPEAKERthat lives on the switch side that you plug in.

22:01SPEAKERYou plug a wall wart into the wall

22:03SPEAKERand then you plug a short ethernet run

22:05SPEAKERfrom the switch into this

22:06SPEAKERand then the long one goes into the other end.

22:09SPEAKERIf you're looking, we'll talk about when this makes sense.

22:13SPEAKERThere's specific, really specific instances where it does

22:17SPEAKERand most people aren't gonna have to worry about it.

22:19SPEAKER- Yeah, one other quick thing to mention about switches

22:21SPEAKERbefore we move on, if you go to buy a switch,

22:23SPEAKERyou might see what's called a managed switch.

22:25SPEAKER- Yes.

22:26SPEAKER- You probably don't need that

22:28SPEAKERunless you know you need that.

22:29SPEAKERA regular unmanaged switch is perfectly fine

22:32SPEAKERfor most home applications if you just need like,

22:34SPEAKERif you just need, hey, I need eight more ports in this room.

22:38SPEAKERA regular 20, $30 TP link or neck gear switch

22:40SPEAKERoff of Amazon is perfectly fine.

22:42SPEAKERManaged switches have a lot more capabilities

22:45SPEAKERthat again, you know if you need those already.

22:48SPEAKER- I put managed switches in.

22:50SPEAKEROften if you're gonna do PoE stuff out of the switch,

22:52SPEAKERyou're gonna end up with managed switches, it turns out.

22:54SPEAKERThe managed switches are nice

22:55SPEAKER'cause you can see what stuff is connected

22:57SPEAKERto each port individually.

22:59SPEAKERYou can turn things off and on.

23:00SPEAKERYou can do, you have an app or a web interface

23:03SPEAKERor something like that to configure and control them,

23:05SPEAKERwhich is convenient, it turns out.

23:07SPEAKER- Yes, but they are quite a bit more expensive.

23:08SPEAKER- They are a lot more expensive,

23:09SPEAKERespecially at the high port counts.

23:12SPEAKERSo, okay, so starting with wired.

23:14SPEAKERIf you have a, if you've bought a house

23:16SPEAKERand you can knock holes in the walls

23:17SPEAKERand you can do things like access the crawl space

23:21SPEAKERor the attic or whatever safely,

23:25SPEAKERthen you can pretty easily run ethernet.

23:28SPEAKERLike ethernet's not particularly hard to run.

23:30SPEAKERA big spool of cat six or cat seven

23:33SPEAKERwill cost 150 bucks, 200 bucks.

23:36SPEAKERAnd if you buy a, you need a saw to cut holes

23:42SPEAKERin your wall, in your drywall,

23:44SPEAKERI wouldn't advise doing this if you have plaster and lathe,

23:46SPEAKERif you live in a really, really old house,

23:47SPEAKER'cause it's much harder to fix and make look right.

23:52SPEAKERGet somebody who knows what they're doing to do that.

23:54SPEAKERDon't figure that out

23:55SPEAKER'cause plaster's really a pain to fix.

23:58SPEAKERThe, the knocking, cutting a hole in the wall

24:03SPEAKERand then you can get a drill on a big six foot long shaft,

24:08SPEAKERbendy shaft and aim it down

24:10SPEAKERand shoot that drill down into the crawl space.

24:14SPEAKERAnd then ideally you have two people working on this.

24:15SPEAKERSo then the person in the crawl space gets in there

24:17SPEAKERand ties a string up to the bottom of the drill

24:20SPEAKER'cause there's always a hole in the bottom of these,

24:22SPEAKERof these, of these fishing drill bits.

24:24SPEAKERAnd they, you pull the string back up

24:26SPEAKERand then you just tie your cable up to the string

24:28SPEAKERand you can run cable all through your house pretty easily.

24:31SPEAKERIt's, it's like, it took me about six hours

24:35SPEAKERto run ethernet to every room in my house.

24:37SPEAKER- Oh, that's not bad.

24:38SPEAKER- Small one story with crawl space access,

24:41SPEAKERlike not a big crawl, not like it was a,

24:44SPEAKERit's a belly crawling crawl space,

24:45SPEAKERbut I still was able to get it done.

24:47SPEAKERThe hardest thing was actually drilling

24:49SPEAKERthrough the concrete foundation,

24:51SPEAKERwhich involved some rebar

24:53SPEAKERand I burned out a concrete bit doing that.

24:56SPEAKERBut, but I have a hole into the garage.

24:58SPEAKERSo that's all that mattered.

24:59SPEAKER- Yes.

25:01SPEAKERWould you say, would you say like cutting into that?

25:02SPEAKERI mean, I've never owned a home, maybe someday.

25:05SPEAKERLike just the, the general,

25:06SPEAKERlike the basic cutting into a wall

25:07SPEAKERand installing a wall plate.

25:09SPEAKERIs that, is that something that you would say

25:11SPEAKERkind of anybody can do that has next to no experience

25:13SPEAKERwith like construction or modification?

25:17SPEAKER- Well, so it's pretty easy.

25:18SPEAKERYeah. Like there's a bunch of different kinds of mounts

25:21SPEAKERthat you can use to hook those wall plates into.

25:24SPEAKERThat you can get cheap little,

25:25SPEAKERthey're basically like a plastic ring.

25:27SPEAKERIt's just, it's a rectangular ring that goes into the wall

25:30SPEAKERand makes a wall plate sized hole.

25:33SPEAKERAnd then it has flaps that,

25:35SPEAKERthat when you twist the screws in it,

25:37SPEAKERit pulls it up against the backside of the drywall.

25:40SPEAKERIf you can find the studs easily,

25:42SPEAKERwhich is a little fraught,

25:43SPEAKERcause sometimes the studs have power running next to them

25:46SPEAKERand you want to kind of be aware of that.

25:47SPEAKERBut if you can find the studs easily,

25:48SPEAKERyou cut your holes there and you can,

25:50SPEAKERyou can even nail diagonally into the studs.

25:52SPEAKERSo you have a really nice secure thing.

25:54SPEAKERBasically what you want is a gang box on the back

25:57SPEAKERso that there's something for your stuff to fall into.

26:01SPEAKER- Okay. I guess,

26:02SPEAKERI guess the distinction I was wondering about is

26:03SPEAKERif this is something you might need a professional for,

26:05SPEAKERor if you could just watch a YouTube video

26:07SPEAKERand make a quick trip to Home Depot and be good to go.

26:09SPEAKER- I mean, I don't think you should buy your stuff

26:11SPEAKERat Home Depot cause it's pretty expensive there generally.

26:13SPEAKERAlthough actually I say that it's a lot better now

26:16SPEAKERthan it used to be.

26:17SPEAKERIt's you pay a little bit of a premium.

26:18SPEAKERNow it used to be you paid to two and a half times premium

26:21SPEAKERat Home Depot for network stuff.

26:23SPEAKER- Well, you know, name your basic or your favorite source

26:25SPEAKERof basic home construction goods or whatever,

26:27SPEAKERbut you know what I mean?

26:28SPEAKERLike if it's something you can just get the stuff yourself

26:30SPEAKERand do with a little bit of research online.

26:32SPEAKER- I think if the house is simple, it's relatively easy.

26:35SPEAKERIf you have easy crawl space access,

26:37SPEAKERyou have easy attic access.

26:39SPEAKERIf there's, if you,

26:40SPEAKERif you don't need to take out big chunks of the wall

26:43SPEAKERto do a run, to home run everything,

26:46SPEAKERthen absolutely you should be able to do this yourself.

26:49SPEAKERObviously look at your local code.

26:51SPEAKEREverybody, everywhere is a little bit different.

26:53SPEAKERSome people require it.

26:54SPEAKERSome places require different, different things.

26:57SPEAKERSome places require conduit.

26:59SPEAKERSome places don't.

27:00SPEAKERA conduit makes it a little bit more difficult, but yeah.

27:04SPEAKERSo the basic gist is you, you drop into your crawl space,

27:06SPEAKERyou lift into your attic.

27:07SPEAKERYou, for a wired network,

27:10SPEAKERyou want what's called a star topology.

27:11SPEAKERSo everything starts at a home run,

27:14SPEAKERa center place where your router and main switch

27:16SPEAKERand all of your other stuff are.

27:18SPEAKERAnd then you can,

27:18SPEAKERthen you branch out to the other rooms from there.

27:20SPEAKERSo everything comes back to this one place,

27:23SPEAKERbut then you can, you can also add switches.

27:25SPEAKERSo for example, there's a switch in my entertainment center,

27:28SPEAKERand that is where the, the consoles and the Apple TV

27:33SPEAKERand all of the stuff in there are plugged in.

27:35SPEAKERI also, so I have the,

27:38SPEAKERI have a big switch in the garage,

27:40SPEAKERand then I have a smaller one in the hall closet,

27:43SPEAKERjust because that's where my, like there's a,

27:46SPEAKERbasically it was easier for me to run a couple of cables

27:49SPEAKERout to the garage,

27:51SPEAKERwhich is where the router and the fiber modem

27:54SPEAKERand the O and T and all that stuff are.

27:56SPEAKERBut then actually run everything out of that central closet

28:01SPEAKER'cause that was way more central

28:03SPEAKERand it meant I didn't have to crawl back and forth

28:06SPEAKERacross the house on my belly 50 times

28:08SPEAKERto get the cables there.

28:10SPEAKERThe last thing is once you have the cables up,

28:12SPEAKERyou do need to secure them.

28:13SPEAKERYou don't want to leave them just flapping.

28:15SPEAKERAnd you don't want to like be aggressive about stapling

28:18SPEAKER'cause cat five or ethernet cable is a little delicate.

28:23SPEAKERSo you want to do like,

28:27SPEAKERyou can buy whatever cable clips

28:29SPEAKERthat are like basically two nail clamps

28:33SPEAKERthat don't apply any pressure to the cable,

28:34SPEAKERbut will hold it and keep it from falling from,

28:37SPEAKERfrom being slack.

28:39SPEAKERYou can, you can use zip ties on nails

28:42SPEAKERand just not cinch the zip ties down super tight.

28:45SPEAKERLike there's a bunch of different options,

28:46SPEAKERbut know that if you actually crimp or do real hard bends

28:51SPEAKERor like right angle bends or stuff like that on the cat five,

28:53SPEAKERyou can impact your performance, which you don't want.

28:57SPEAKERAnd then the last thing is

29:03SPEAKERyou're going to have to choose

29:06SPEAKERwhether you want to crimp plugs on the ends of the cables

29:09SPEAKERor you want to put the ends of the cables into jacks

29:11SPEAKERand mount them in the wall.

29:12SPEAKERIf you've gone through the trouble of drilling holes,

29:15SPEAKERit's better to put the jacks on the walls.

29:18SPEAKERIt's super easy to do.

29:20SPEAKERYou can like Leviton,

29:22SPEAKERa bunch of different companies sell them.

29:23SPEAKERYou can buy these at Home Depot.

29:24SPEAKERThey're a little bit more expensive there

29:25SPEAKERthan if you get them at like an electronic supply place.

29:28SPEAKERBut the ability to go out and get new wall plates and stuff

29:32SPEAKERis probably worth buying at Home Depot

29:34SPEAKERversus getting the cheaper deal.

29:36SPEAKERAnd the neat thing is they're coated.

29:38SPEAKERSo when you're doing the stamping to,

29:42SPEAKERbasically when you open up the back of one of these jacks,

29:44SPEAKERthere's going to be eight slots

29:47SPEAKERthat have little cable grabbers on them.

29:50SPEAKERAnd you have a little push down tool.

29:51SPEAKERYou can get a cheap plastic one

29:54SPEAKERthat comes with every one of the jacks.

29:56SPEAKERYou can also buy one for like 40 bucks

29:58SPEAKERthat will apply the right pressure and stamp it in place

30:00SPEAKERand lock the, chunk the ends off and make it nice and tidy.

30:05SPEAKERIt's called a punch down tool.

30:07SPEAKERAnd as long as you do this,

30:09SPEAKERthere's two color schemes that are appropriate,

30:11SPEAKERthat are allowed in the ethernet world.

30:14SPEAKERA and B, just make sure you do the same one on all of them.

30:17SPEAKERAnd the jacks are color coded.

30:19SPEAKERSo it'll be like, okay,

30:20SPEAKERthe orange cable goes in the first slot.

30:22SPEAKERThe orange white goes in the second slot.

30:23SPEAKERThe green goes in the third slot.

30:25SPEAKERThe blue goes in the fourth slot.

30:27SPEAKERThe blue white goes in the fifth slot.

30:29SPEAKERThe green white goes in the sixth, seventh slot.

30:32SPEAKERAnd so on and so forth.

30:33SPEAKER- Yeah, if you Google like ethernet Keystone Jack,

30:35SPEAKERyou'll see pictures of exactly what you're talking about.

30:38SPEAKER- Yeah, the nice thing about doing this is

30:41SPEAKERif you mess up and like grab something that's plugged in

30:44SPEAKERand yank the end of the cable off,

30:46SPEAKERwhich can happen, especially on home crimped cable,

30:48SPEAKERhome crimped plugs, cable ends,

30:52SPEAKERyou, it's not a huge pain in the,

30:54SPEAKERlike you just replace your patch cable

30:56SPEAKERinstead of having to like redo this long run

30:59SPEAKERthat every time it gets shorter, you're a little,

31:01SPEAKERyour stuff has to be a little bit closer to the wall.

31:04SPEAKERSo I always recommend doing plugs

31:07SPEAKERand like buying patch cables.

31:09SPEAKER'Cause it's, while you can get good at crimping cables,

31:12SPEAKERit's much harder to do than doing the punch downs

31:14SPEAKERon the plugs, on the sockets.

31:19SPEAKERAnd then, okay, so two other things.

31:21SPEAKERPeople talk about plenum a lot.

31:23SPEAKERPlenum is a special kind of cable that doesn't burn as fast.

31:27SPEAKERSo if you're in a fire situation.

31:29SPEAKER- Yes, I've heard, yes.

31:30SPEAKER- Yeah, like the internet grognards like to complain

31:33SPEAKERabout people not putting plenum in.

31:35SPEAKERThe rules, generally speaking,

31:36SPEAKERare that you have to put plenum

31:38SPEAKERany place that there's return air flow.

31:40SPEAKERSo like in office buildings where the return,

31:45SPEAKERwhere there's negative pressure and like a drop ceiling,

31:48SPEAKERso that sucks all the return air in for the HVAC system,

31:52SPEAKERyou have to run plenum.

31:53SPEAKERA lot of commercial installations

31:55SPEAKERjust use plenum everywhere

31:56SPEAKER'cause it's easier to keep track of,

31:58SPEAKERit's more expensive but it's not that much more expensive

32:01SPEAKERand it's easier to keep track of,

32:03SPEAKEReasier to just run plenum everywhere

32:05SPEAKERthan to keep track of what gets plenum and what doesn't.

32:08SPEAKERMost places don't require plenum for home.

32:13SPEAKERMy understanding is that in the types of fires

32:15SPEAKERyou're likely to see in a home,

32:16SPEAKERplenum isn't gonna make a difference one way or the other,

32:19SPEAKERbut your mileage may vary.

32:20SPEAKERAnd like I said, it's not much more expensive.

32:22SPEAKERIt's not more difficult to run.

32:23SPEAKERThere's nothing about it that makes it harder.

32:25SPEAKERIt's just the cables made,

32:27SPEAKERthe casing is made of different materials

32:29SPEAKERso it doesn't burn quite as quickly

32:31SPEAKERand doesn't release toxic smoke.

32:33SPEAKER- I was gonna ask what the end goal was there

32:34SPEAKERif it was release of unpleasant substances.

32:37SPEAKERWhat was the main one?

32:38SPEAKER- I believe it's about the smoke

32:40SPEAKERbut I'm not an expert in that space.

32:42SPEAKERAll I know is that when I looked at it,

32:43SPEAKERit was like 10 bucks more, 20 bucks more

32:45SPEAKERfor the plenum spool of, I guess, 5E

32:47SPEAKERwhen I was doing my house.

32:49SPEAKERI just put the plenum in.

32:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:55SPEAKER- The other thing is about the number,

32:57SPEAKERwhich cat number to buy.

32:59SPEAKERFive was really, really popular for a long, long time.

33:02SPEAKERWhen I did my house, six was just getting to the point

33:05SPEAKERthat it was a viable price for a home install.

33:10SPEAKERBut I did 5E, it's been fine.

33:13SPEAKERWe've been on gigabit ethernet for 20 years now almost.

33:18SPEAKER- Yeah, well, that's changing pretty rapidly.

33:20SPEAKERI believe regular cat five will go up

33:22SPEAKERto 2.5 gigabit ethernet or if it's a short enough run,

33:26SPEAKERI don't have the exact run limitation

33:28SPEAKERin front of me right now.

33:29SPEAKER- I should test that 'cause I have

33:30SPEAKERabout a 40 foot cat 5E run in my house.

33:32SPEAKER- But 5E, I believe 5E will go up to 10 gigabits.

33:35SPEAKERI think it's regular five.

33:36SPEAKERRegular five will go up to 2.5,

33:38SPEAKERwhich even that is fairly respectable.

33:40SPEAKERBut also if you're buying now, I mean, cat six is dirt cheap.

33:42SPEAKERLike that's the default thing you should get.

33:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I think the cat, what was the cat eight story?

33:48SPEAKERIs that a real thing?

33:49SPEAKER- I'm not sure about seven and eight.

33:52SPEAKEREvery time I've ever heard cat seven or eight

33:54SPEAKERreferred to people treat it like it's not a real thing.

33:56SPEAKERIt's like a mythical non-standard.

34:00SPEAKERI don't know.

34:01SPEAKER- I kind of feel like if you're gonna,

34:03SPEAKERmy feeling, and this is more of a vibe

34:05SPEAKERthan anything based on actual data,

34:09SPEAKERis that if you're looking at better than cat six,

34:14SPEAKERyou probably should just run fiber

34:15SPEAKERfor those runs that you care about.

34:17SPEAKER- Yeah, so we should talk about types of cables here.

34:19SPEAKERCat six will do 10 gigabits up to 165 feet in which-

34:22SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

34:23SPEAKER- That's, I'm trying to think

34:24SPEAKERwhat an average house looks like.

34:26SPEAKERThat probably should cover just about all.

34:27SPEAKER- I could wrap that around my house all the way, yeah.

34:30SPEAKERSo if you think 10 gigabits quite a bit,

34:33SPEAKERlike if you think you're gonna be good with that

34:35SPEAKERfor from now on, then cat six is perfectly fine.

34:39SPEAKERI'm trying to think what is in megabytes per second,

34:41SPEAKER10 gig is like, it's roughly a gigabyte a second.

34:44SPEAKERI mean, the math doesn't quite work that way,

34:45SPEAKERbut that's a good ballpark way to think about it.

34:47SPEAKER- It's whatever 10 divided by eight is.

34:49SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

34:50SPEAKERSo it's, but there's also network overhead to think about,

34:52SPEAKERso it's not quite exact, but-

34:54SPEAKER- So it's gonna be a gigabyte per second.

34:56SPEAKER- Yeah, roughly.

34:58SPEAKERBut yes, there's also fiber now,

34:59SPEAKERwhich is getting much, much cheaper

35:01SPEAKERand way more reasonable.

35:03SPEAKER- I was gonna say-

35:04SPEAKER- I started to say practical,

35:05SPEAKERbut my understanding about running fiber

35:07SPEAKERis it's quite delicate

35:08SPEAKERand you might actually need help doing that correctly.

35:12SPEAKER- So I was at Central Computer the other day

35:14SPEAKERand they have pre-terminated fiber

35:17SPEAKERand the cables up to like 30 meters, I think,

35:21SPEAKERthat were like 50 bucks.

35:22SPEAKERIt was pretty cheap.

35:23SPEAKER- Yeah, it's pretty cheap.

35:24SPEAKERThere are, I wish I can throw out a bunch of fiber terms.

35:28SPEAKERI can't define them well.

35:29SPEAKERLike I think you want multimode fiber.

35:31SPEAKERThere's like OM3 and OM4 are the standards

35:33SPEAKERyou need to look at

35:34SPEAKERfor what you'd be putting in a home, I believe.

35:36SPEAKER- Is that for bi-directional, bi-directionality or something?

35:39SPEAKER- I think it might pertain to distance or something.

35:42SPEAKERI forget exactly what the difference is there.

35:44SPEAKER- Well, the other thing is there's different terminators,

35:46SPEAKERright?

35:47SPEAKERSo there's like that long rectangular one

35:48SPEAKERthat's on most switches, it seems like,

35:50SPEAKERand then there's some other stuff that I don't know about.

35:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

35:53SPEAKER- It seems like to me, if you were into fiber, consider,

35:56SPEAKERlike the other thing is when they have the terminators

35:58SPEAKERon the ends,

35:59SPEAKERit's gonna be hard to run them through small holes,

36:00SPEAKERrun the fiber through small holes, which is what you need.

36:03SPEAKER- You can get Keystone jacks for fiber now.

36:05SPEAKERYou can just get straight up wall plates

36:06SPEAKERthat you can run one end of the fiber

36:08SPEAKERinto the back of the plate

36:08SPEAKERand do a little patch fiber out the other end,

36:11SPEAKERwhich I assume those are fairly reliable.

36:14SPEAKER- Yeah, once the patches are fine, I'm sure.

36:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I feel like there's a couple more terms

36:19SPEAKERwe should throw out just 'cause you might come across them.

36:21SPEAKER- Okay.

36:22SPEAKER- RJ45 is the actual, like the specification

36:25SPEAKERor the descriptor for the physical,

36:27SPEAKERlike what you think of as an ethernet cable.

36:28SPEAKER- For the plug in the socket, it's for the connector, yeah.

36:31SPEAKER- Like the connector or the port that you see

36:33SPEAKERon your motherboard or the back of the PlayStation

36:35SPEAKERor whatever, that's RJ45.

36:37SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:38SPEAKER- I meant to look this up

36:39SPEAKERand I didn't quite get a proper sense.

36:41SPEAKERI think ethernet is more a standard.

36:43SPEAKERThe ethernet is not a physical port

36:44SPEAKER'cause ethernet can also run over other types of ports.

36:47SPEAKERIt's not just that particular plug that you see everywhere.

36:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:51SPEAKER- That's RJ45, just in case you hear that said,

36:54SPEAKERthat's describing that exact plug.

36:55SPEAKERAnd twisted pair I think is also just kind of a generic term

36:58SPEAKERthat you might see for ethernet cable, for cat, whatever.

37:01SPEAKER- Well, the twisted pair, inside the ethernet cable,

37:04SPEAKEReach of the four, there's four pairs of wires

37:07SPEAKERand each pair is twisted at a different amount per foot.

37:12SPEAKERSo it minimizes interference across them

37:14SPEAKERor they cancel each other out.

37:15SPEAKERSo there's some electrical engineering nonsense in there

37:17SPEAKERthat I don't really understand.

37:18SPEAKER- Yeah, you don't have to worry about that.

37:19SPEAKERThe point is though, sometimes just colloquially,

37:21SPEAKERespecially old network nerds will refer to cat five

37:24SPEAKERor cat six as twisted pair.

37:26SPEAKER- It is worth mentioning if you untwist the pairs

37:28SPEAKERinside an ethernet cable, they don't work right.

37:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe that.

37:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

37:34SPEAKER- Just because we'll address it later

37:35SPEAKER'cause this stuff is getting rapidly, dramatically cheaper

37:38SPEAKERis SFP is another, is the other big form factor plug

37:42SPEAKERyou're seeing in home network networking these days.

37:45SPEAKER- What is this?

37:45SPEAKER- It's the boxier looking plug.

37:48SPEAKERYou've probably seen it on some stuff.

37:50SPEAKERTrying to think how to explain it.

37:51SPEAKERIt stands for small form factor pluggable

37:53SPEAKERand that's exactly what it is.

37:54SPEAKERIt's a bigger port that accepts what is called

37:57SPEAKERthe transceiver that gives you the actual port

37:59SPEAKERyou're plugging the cable into.

38:01SPEAKER- Oh, this is for fiber.

38:02SPEAKER- Well, not just fiber.

38:03SPEAKERSo you can have an SFP port that you plug

38:05SPEAKERan RJ45 transceiver into and then plug

38:08SPEAKERany old ethernet cable into that.

38:09SPEAKER- Oh.

38:10SPEAKER- That's why it's pluggable and modular.

38:11SPEAKERYou can, it's a port that you can turn

38:13SPEAKERinto any other network port, essentially.

38:15SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.

38:16SPEAKER- Which requires you and that's what I use here

38:17SPEAKERbetween my NAS and my PC.

38:19SPEAKERThat requires you to buy a transceiver

38:21SPEAKERon each end of each cable you're going to run.

38:23SPEAKERSo that does get a little more expensive,

38:25SPEAKERbut it gives you huge flexibility

38:27SPEAKERand it also goes up a way higher speeds,

38:28SPEAKERwhich is where we're actually going with this.

38:30SPEAKERBut it gives you tons of flexibility.

38:32SPEAKERLike right now I'm running a direct attached copper cable

38:35SPEAKERbetween my PC and NAS.

38:37SPEAKERBut if I say moved into a house

38:39SPEAKERand I want to put the NAS in the basement,

38:41SPEAKERI can keep the same network cards with SFP plugs.

38:43SPEAKERIn this case, it's two SFP plus.

38:46SPEAKERSFP does up to one gigabit.

38:48SPEAKERSFP plus does up to 10 gigabits.

38:50SPEAKERTwo SFP plus does 40.

38:52SPEAKERAnd it actually goes way higher than that.

38:54SPEAKERFiber can easily go up to like a hundred gigabits per second.

38:56SPEAKERLike it's kind of insane.

38:58SPEAKERBut the point I'm making is I can keep

39:00SPEAKERthese same network cards I have

39:01SPEAKERand just pull this direct attached copper cable out

39:04SPEAKERand buy fiber transceivers

39:05SPEAKERand just plug those into these same ports.

39:08SPEAKERAnd then I can run fiber over a much longer distance

39:10SPEAKERthrough the house, through the walls,

39:12SPEAKERlike up from the basement to an office

39:13SPEAKERor something like that.

39:16SPEAKERAnd again, again, all these SFP ports

39:18SPEAKERare something that were only in data centers

39:20SPEAKERuntil like five, six years ago.

39:22SPEAKERBut if you keep up with the like kind of

39:24SPEAKERhardcore enthusiast, like home lab scene,

39:27SPEAKERyou're starting to see like very cheap switches,

39:30SPEAKERmostly coming out of places like Shenzhen

39:32SPEAKERthat are coming with both RJ45 and SFP plus on them.

39:36SPEAKERWe'll get into that a little bit more later,

39:37SPEAKERbut this stuff is being democratized

39:39SPEAKERand like made available for the home

39:41SPEAKERin a way that it wasn't even like three, four years ago.

39:45SPEAKER- I was gonna say, yeah, the stuff is getting,

39:49SPEAKERit's much less expensive.

39:50SPEAKERThe thing I'll say is I don't think,

39:55SPEAKERunless you specifically need faster than gigabit,

39:58SPEAKERlike you have a faster than gigabit connection

40:00SPEAKERcoming into your house,

40:02SPEAKERwhich is still pretty rare, at least in the US,

40:05SPEAKERI don't, I think you're fine running cat six, right?

40:09SPEAKER- Like cat six, like we said,

40:11SPEAKERwill go up to 10 gigabits and even that is pretty good.

40:14SPEAKEREven if you have some like central file store,

40:16SPEAKERlike an ass that you need to access things quickly on,

40:18SPEAKERlike roughly a gigabit, or sorry,

40:20SPEAKERa gigabyte a second is still pretty good for that.

40:23SPEAKER- It's hard to build a NAS for your house

40:25SPEAKERthat's gonna do, that's gonna saturate

40:27SPEAKERmore than a gigabit connection,

40:30SPEAKERat least until SSTs get a lot cheaper.

40:32SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think the stuff's gotten better for a while,

40:35SPEAKER10 gigabit over RJ45 was like kind of problematic,

40:39SPEAKERlike there were heat issues,

40:41SPEAKERlike it used a ton of electricity,

40:42SPEAKERbut I'm guessing that stuff has gotten better,

40:45SPEAKER'cause you're starting to see it on like

40:46SPEAKERjust motherboards now, you know,

40:47SPEAKERlike the high-end like workstation and creator motherboards

40:50SPEAKERare starting to ship with 10 gigabit RJ45 ports.

40:54SPEAKERSo I think it's catching on in a way

40:56SPEAKERthat it has not for several years.

40:57SPEAKER- And a lot of boards are shipping with just 2.5 gig,

41:00SPEAKERlike high-end boards are shipping with 2.5 gigabit ports

41:03SPEAKERas standard now too.

41:04SPEAKER- Yeah.

41:05SPEAKER- So yeah, okay, so that's, I feel like that's why,

41:07SPEAKERthat's kind of the state of wired.

41:09SPEAKERA couple other wildcards here is that if you don't,

41:12SPEAKERif you live in a position where you can't run ethernet

41:14SPEAKERin your house, or if you, like the thing that you do

41:18SPEAKERis run it around the trim of your house,

41:20SPEAKERlike you run a long run around like trim and wall trim

41:23SPEAKERand stuff like that in your apartment

41:24SPEAKERin a way that's not destructive.

41:26SPEAKER- Yeah, that's, you know, that's 'cause A,

41:27SPEAKERthere's an absurd amount of wifi interference in here,

41:30SPEAKERB, you know, like for my job,

41:31SPEAKERit is good to have wired consoles

41:33SPEAKERthat can download games very quickly

41:34SPEAKERand like get the best online play and stuff.

41:37SPEAKER- Yeah, but there's also a Powerline and Mocha.

41:41SPEAKERSo Powerline and Mocha use existing cables

41:43SPEAKERthat are in a lot of houses.

41:44SPEAKERMocha is for cable, for like cable TV cables.

41:47SPEAKERPowerline obviously runs across the power wires.

41:51SPEAKERThere are varying levels of performance.

41:53SPEAKERThere's a bunch of wildcards about how they work.

41:57SPEAKERBoth go up to a gigabit theoretically.

42:00SPEAKERIn practice, that number varies wildly.

42:02SPEAKERAnd you know, for example,

42:05SPEAKERif you have ground fault circuits in your house,

42:08SPEAKERor you don't have control wires everywhere in your house,

42:10SPEAKERor neutral wires everywhere in your house,

42:13SPEAKERthen your Powerline network stuff

42:14SPEAKERis going to be less effective.

42:17SPEAKERIf you have a lot of splitters

42:23SPEAKERthat potentially filter out frequencies

42:25SPEAKERthat the Mocha adapters are using,

42:27SPEAKERyour performance there will be dramatically reduced.

42:29SPEAKERSo you might have to dig around in walls,

42:31SPEAKERor crawl spaces, or attics, or garages, or wherever,

42:34SPEAKERand do some rewiring for your cable network

42:38SPEAKERif you're not getting Mocha speeds that you would expect.

42:41SPEAKERBut it's a pretty good alternative

42:43SPEAKERif you don't want to do,

42:44SPEAKERfor stuff you don't want to do on wireless, basically.

42:46SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, just one data point.

42:49SPEAKERThis is not universal.

42:50SPEAKERLike you said, everybody's setup

42:51SPEAKERis subject to a bunch of different variables,

42:53SPEAKERbut just this very morning on the Discord,

42:55SPEAKERWildfire popped into the network channel

42:57SPEAKERand posted some benchmarks, I guess,

42:59SPEAKERthat they had been using Powerline previously.

43:03SPEAKERThey were getting about 130 megabits up and down

43:06SPEAKERthrough their Powerline adapters.

43:07SPEAKERThey just switched to Mocha over the coax,

43:09SPEAKERand that is now 800 down and 670 up.

43:12SPEAKERSo...

43:14SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

43:15SPEAKER- Yeah, my general impression is that Mocha is better

43:19SPEAKERif you have the option.

43:21SPEAKER- Assuming you don't have cables from like the '80s, yeah.

43:25SPEAKERIf you have relatively modern coax cables, yeah.

43:33SPEAKERThere are security issues with both of those

43:34SPEAKER'cause they do tend to leak out of your house,

43:37SPEAKERespecially if you live really close to other people.

43:39SPEAKERSo pay attention to that when you're setting it up

43:41SPEAKERand any of that stuff I would buy

43:44SPEAKERfrom someplace you can return it.

43:45SPEAKERGenerally speaking, if you're concerned about latency,

43:49SPEAKERwhich is the amount of time it takes stuff

43:50SPEAKERto traverse the network, not the speed at which it goes,

43:53SPEAKERMocha and Powerline are both better than WiFi

43:57SPEAKERand worse than regular, traditional wired ethernet.

44:00SPEAKERSo it is nice if you play games

44:03SPEAKERand care about stuff like that, then that matters.

44:06SPEAKERSo, okay, so that's wired.

44:08SPEAKERWireless is, there's multiple editions options

44:13SPEAKERto add wireless to your network.

44:14SPEAKERYou could take the box that your ISP provides

44:16SPEAKERand it's probably gonna be okay.

44:18SPEAKERThey almost certainly charge you per month for it.

44:20SPEAKERAlthough, actually this is true,

44:22SPEAKERyour cable provider almost certainly charges you

44:24SPEAKERper month for it.

44:25SPEAKERYour fiber provider may or may not charge you per month.

44:28SPEAKERLike I have AT&T fiber, they provide a box

44:30SPEAKERthat I have to use.

44:31SPEAKERThey don't charge me for it because I have to use it.

44:33SPEAKERSo I think that's nice.

44:36SPEAKER- Yeah, when I, Sonic gave me a router ages ago

44:39SPEAKERand I had to, I actually had to like call their support

44:41SPEAKERwhen I sent it back to them and get them

44:43SPEAKERto knock the whatever a month off.

44:45SPEAKER- Oh really, they were charging you?

44:47SPEAKER- It was not much, but yes.

44:49SPEAKER- So when you're talking about adding wireless

44:51SPEAKERto your network, there's a few different ways to do it.

44:54SPEAKERThere's using, the thing that your ISP provides,

44:57SPEAKERthere's using a single box that's like the thing

45:00SPEAKERyour ISP provides, but is the WiFi, the router,

45:04SPEAKERand the firewall and everything all in one box.

45:06SPEAKERThis is-- - Yeah, the classic Linksys.

45:09SPEAKER- Yeah, the Linksys-- - All I'm up to today.

45:10SPEAKER- Yeah, if you look at the thing at Best Buy

45:13SPEAKERthat has, from Asus, that has 35 antennas on the outside,

45:16SPEAKERthat's what we're talking about.

45:17SPEAKER- Yes, the crown of Sauron.

45:19SPEAKER- Yeah, the people in the Discord

45:21SPEAKERlike TP-Link Archers a lot.

45:23SPEAKER- That's been the recommendation for years now

45:26SPEAKERfrom everything from like small net builder

45:28SPEAKERto a wire cutter to you name it,

45:31SPEAKERlike kind of always the baseline

45:34SPEAKERthat I see is the $85 TP-Link Archer.

45:37SPEAKER- My last non-ISP provided router

45:41SPEAKERwas a TP-Link router and it was great.

45:44SPEAKERIt was really nice.

45:45SPEAKERIt was like 10 years ago at this point.

45:46SPEAKER- Yeah, you can spend dramatically more.

45:48SPEAKERI mean, like this category of router

45:50SPEAKEReasily goes up to like three, $400 now.

45:53SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think if you're buying entry level,

45:55SPEAKERthis is a good place to be.

45:57SPEAKERI think if you're gonna spend more money,

45:58SPEAKERthere's probably better options for you is where I end up.

46:02SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause this is gonna limit you

46:03SPEAKERto a single like kind of radio points.

46:05SPEAKERYou know, like all your wifi

46:06SPEAKERis gonna emanate from this one box

46:07SPEAKERand depending on your layout of your house

46:09SPEAKERor interference or like the thickness of walls.

46:11SPEAKER- Where the refrigerator is.

46:13SPEAKER- Right, like that may not be ideal

46:14SPEAKERfor signal strength everywhere you need it.

46:17SPEAKER- Think about your wifi router

46:19SPEAKERas creating a donut of good internet around it.

46:21SPEAKERAnd the further you get from the center of the donut,

46:24SPEAKERfrom the hole, the worse your internet's gonna be.

46:26SPEAKER- Yes, I think we can all agree

46:28SPEAKERthat several donuts is better than one donut.

46:30SPEAKER- I like having multiple donuts.

46:31SPEAKER- Okay, so the one router is one option.

46:33SPEAKERMesh networks are a relatively new addition.

46:37SPEAKERThey've been good for a good five years at this point.

46:41SPEAKERBut they are basically little boxes

46:43SPEAKERthat you typically buy a three-pack of them.

46:45SPEAKERYou plug one into your router,

46:47SPEAKERand then the other two,

46:48SPEAKERyou put around the house in different places.

46:51SPEAKERYou can wire them in

46:52SPEAKERif you have ethernet running in your house.

46:54SPEAKERSo like, for example, at my parents' house,

46:57SPEAKERthey ran ethernet along in their basement

47:01SPEAKERon the exposed ceiling,

47:03SPEAKERand then just tacked up mesh nodes

47:07SPEAKERunder the different areas of the house

47:09SPEAKERwhere they wanted better internet.

47:10SPEAKERThat worked great.

47:11SPEAKER- So if you're wiring every, I've never used a mesh.

47:14SPEAKERAnd I've kind of been curious,

47:15SPEAKERjust like in a signal sense, like what they're doing.

47:17SPEAKERLike if you're wiring every mesh node,

47:20SPEAKERthey're not talking to each other wirelessly as well, right?

47:23SPEAKER- No, they do not.

47:24SPEAKER- Okay.

47:25SPEAKER- I mean, you want them to be close enough

47:27SPEAKERso that you get a gentle handoff.

47:29SPEAKERYou don't want there to be a dead zone between them, ideally.

47:32SPEAKERBut yeah, no, they basically like,

47:36SPEAKERand the neat thing about this is say,

47:37SPEAKERif you live on a farm and you have a barn

47:39SPEAKERthat you want to have internet in

47:40SPEAKERand you have ethernet running to it,

47:42SPEAKERand you only need two mesh nodes to cover your house,

47:44SPEAKERyou could put the third one in the barn.

47:45SPEAKERYou just have the same wifi in your barn

47:47SPEAKERwhen you get there, which is, it turns out pretty nice.

47:49SPEAKER- Right.

47:50SPEAKERThe reason I ask about that distinction

47:51SPEAKERis 'cause not everybody is going to be able to

47:53SPEAKERor want to run an ethernet cable

47:55SPEAKERto every little mesh thing

47:56SPEAKERthat they've got around, so I'm curious.

47:58SPEAKERI'm curious what's going on in a wifi radio sense

48:00SPEAKERonce you have a bunch of mesh nodes up

48:02SPEAKERthat are all just wireless.

48:04SPEAKER- So the reason these mesh nodes got good five years ago

48:07SPEAKERis that radios got cheap.

48:08SPEAKERAnd they went, in the old days,

48:10SPEAKERa wifi to wifi repeater would time slice the radio,

48:13SPEAKERso it would say, okay, we have every 500 milliseconds,

48:17SPEAKERwe're gonna send on this channel,

48:19SPEAKERand then we're gonna switch to receive for 500 milliseconds,

48:23SPEAKERand it would increase the latency dramatically,

48:25SPEAKERand it would slow the throughput

48:26SPEAKERacross each repeater that you used.

48:28SPEAKERSo they were bad, old wifi repeaters are bad.

48:32SPEAKERMesh networks have multiple radios in them,

48:34SPEAKERso each node will maintain a dedicated link

48:39SPEAKERto at least one other node that's wireless,

48:43SPEAKERand then have another radio for connecting devices

48:46SPEAKERthat are connected to that particular node.

48:49SPEAKERNow, that only works if you can get the mesh nodes

48:50SPEAKERclose enough to each other that they have

48:52SPEAKERgood signal strength, which is important.

48:54SPEAKERThere's tools that come with all of these mesh nodes

48:56SPEAKERthat help you figure out, they'll say,

48:59SPEAKERhey, mesh router three is not in a good spot,

49:03SPEAKERyou need to move it and find a better spot for it.

49:05SPEAKERAnd because all they need to connect is power,

49:08SPEAKERyou basically can just pick it up

49:09SPEAKERand move it to another power plug,

49:10SPEAKERor even rotate it 90 degrees on the shelf that it's on,

49:13SPEAKERor move it someplace else,

49:14SPEAKERsee if it gets a better signal.

49:17SPEAKERAnd most of those come with software

49:20SPEAKERthat will help you work through that.

49:22SPEAKER- That's cool.

49:23SPEAKER- They're fine, so like all WiFi stuff,

49:26SPEAKERthe latency isn't the best it can be for games,

49:29SPEAKERbut I play competitive multiplayer games

49:32SPEAKERwith people that are on mesh WiFi networks, and it's fine.

49:35SPEAKER- Yeah, it is doable, although I find it funny.

49:38SPEAKERDo they still do this in shooters?

49:39SPEAKERThey definitely do in the fighting game space.

49:41SPEAKERThey generally will expose what kind of connection

49:43SPEAKEReach player is on as you matchmake with them.

49:45SPEAKER- So they don't expose it, but like Fortnite says,

49:48SPEAKERhey, your network connection will be better

49:50SPEAKERif you're on wired than WiFi.

49:52SPEAKER- Okay, okay, there's definitely a bit of a stigma

49:55SPEAKERin some multiplayer communities when you're able to see

49:58SPEAKERif your opponent is on WiFi or not.

50:00SPEAKER- Well, so the other thing about meshes

50:02SPEAKERis you don't necessarily, like there's an ethernet port

50:06SPEAKERon each of these mesh nodes,

50:08SPEAKERand if you're on a WiFi-connected node

50:10SPEAKERand you plug a switch into that ethernet port,

50:13SPEAKERthen everything downstream of it's gonna think it's on wired

50:16SPEAKEReven though it's on a WiFi mesh

50:17SPEAKERthat's kind of permanently connected.

50:19SPEAKERSo it's a little bit of a weird situation.

50:21SPEAKERIt's, I quite like mesh networks

50:25SPEAKERfor people who are non-technical, especially.

50:28SPEAKER- It seems like the middle ground

50:29SPEAKERbetween just the one single router access point box

50:33SPEAKERand the like going nuts on hardcore network stuff,

50:36SPEAKERwhich we're about to get into,

50:36SPEAKERbut like the, you want better and bigger WiFi coverage,

50:40SPEAKERbut without having to like do a bunch of network topology

50:43SPEAKERand routing stuff yourself.

50:45SPEAKER- Yeah, if you don't wanna have to think about it too hard

50:48SPEAKERand you don't do big file transfers

50:50SPEAKERor aren't a competitive game player,

50:54SPEAKERyeah, there's nothing wrong with mesh.

50:56SPEAKERAnd by nothing wrong with mesh,

50:59SPEAKERI mean, hey, mesh is good enough

51:02SPEAKERfor like 95% of the market, right?

51:04SPEAKERA massive percentage of the market.

51:05SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems very commonly used

51:07SPEAKERjust anecdotally looking at people talking about stuff,

51:09SPEAKERand there's also a ton of brands

51:11SPEAKERdoing pretty solid mesh stuff from what I can tell.

51:14SPEAKER- Yeah, Amazon does Eero stuff.

51:17SPEAKERTP-Link has a whole sub-brand that's mesh,

51:20SPEAKERmesh nodes.

51:21SPEAKER- Negi or Orbi I see talked about a lot.

51:23SPEAKER- Yeah, and the nice thing about them

51:24SPEAKERis that they come with apps so that you don't have to do,

51:27SPEAKERlike you don't have to understand

51:28SPEAKERhow to go to 192.168.0.1 to set the whole thing up.

51:32SPEAKERYou just kind of plug it into your network

51:34SPEAKERand then the app says, hey, connect to this AP

51:37SPEAKERand then you connect to this AP

51:38SPEAKERand you go through the whole setup process.

51:40SPEAKERAnd it's designed for people who don't need to

51:44SPEAKERand don't know how networking stuff works, which is good.

51:47SPEAKER- Yeah, ASUS, Google Nest,

51:49SPEAKERI'm just looking at lists.

51:51SPEAKERThere are a lot of options for meshes.

51:52SPEAKER- So yeah, the ones that I see recommended most often

51:55SPEAKERare the TP-Link, the Google Nest, and the Netgear Orbies.

52:00SPEAKERAmazon bought my favorite company

52:01SPEAKERand I wouldn't recommend that you give Amazon access

52:04SPEAKERto your DNS information and your network usage.

52:07SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a personal choice.

52:08SPEAKER- That's Eero, Eero for the record.

52:10SPEAKEROkay, so the last one is to separate out

52:13SPEAKERall of these into separate boxes,

52:15SPEAKERwhich seems like it's more expensive at first

52:18SPEAKERright up until the point that you get a new Wi-Fi standard

52:21SPEAKERand you're like, shoot, I wanna upgrade my Wi-Fi.

52:24SPEAKERAnd then instead of replacing three boxes,

52:26SPEAKERyou replace one or two.

52:28SPEAKER- Yes, it's basically a slightly higher

52:31SPEAKERinitial outlay of cash.

52:33SPEAKER- Maybe.

52:35SPEAKER- Not even that much, like maybe an extra 100 bucks or two,

52:38SPEAKERbut then down the line, it's going to save you.

52:40SPEAKER- Yeah, so in this case, the nice thing about this

52:45SPEAKERis you don't have to replace the router all the time, right?

52:47SPEAKERSo you replace the thing that requires

52:48SPEAKERthe least configuration when you update to a new Wi-Fi spec

52:52SPEAKERand you leave the router in place

52:53SPEAKERfor years on end in some cases.

52:59SPEAKEROften the access points will be things

53:02SPEAKERthat you can mount high up on a wall

53:03SPEAKERor in the ceiling or whatever.

53:05SPEAKERThey often are power over ethernet

53:06SPEAKERinstead of a thing that you plug into the wall

53:09SPEAKERto the point that I think Ubiquiti

53:10SPEAKERdoesn't even ship power bricks with theirs.

53:12SPEAKERI think you have to buy the power bricks separately

53:13SPEAKERif you're not gonna use power over ethernet.

53:16SPEAKER- The Unifi I got, I mean, this was six, five,

53:19SPEAKERsix years ago, came with a PoE injector.

53:21SPEAKERI don't know if they still pack them in or not.

53:23SPEAKER- I think that's an option when you buy the kit,

53:26SPEAKERyou choose whether you want the PoE injector one

53:28SPEAKERor if you don't.

53:30SPEAKERIn the interest of reducing e-waste,

53:32SPEAKERif you have PoE switches and they just give you

53:35SPEAKERthe option to buy it without the injector.

53:37SPEAKER- Okay, for people who aren't familiar with this category,

53:39SPEAKERif you've worked in a big office,

53:41SPEAKERyou might have seen these stuck to the ceiling

53:43SPEAKERof your office.

53:44SPEAKERThey're basically big white either like disks or pucks,

53:47SPEAKERlike rectangular.

53:49SPEAKER- Yeah, often there's a blue light.

53:50SPEAKER- They'll often say Cisco or Juniper or Aruba

53:54SPEAKERon them or something.

53:55SPEAKERUntil recently, those were like corporate level,

53:57SPEAKERlike big area access points to serve

54:00SPEAKERlike big office type settings.

54:01SPEAKERBut they have started trickling, like a lot of this stuff,

54:04SPEAKERthey've started trickling into the home.

54:05SPEAKER- Yeah, and I think, I mean, for me, it was about price.

54:09SPEAKERLike I was always interested in them,

54:10SPEAKERbut they used to be very expensive

54:12SPEAKERand the last five, six years,

54:14SPEAKERthey've gone from being a three times multiplier

54:18SPEAKERon price compared to like a commercial consumer access point

54:23SPEAKERto being cheaper in some cases.

54:24SPEAKERLike when I bought my 6E stuff, WiFi 6E stuff,

54:27SPEAKERit was 120 bucks per access point,

54:31SPEAKERwhich was cheaper than buying two mesh nodes

54:33SPEAKERto put in my house, so.

54:35SPEAKER- And again, to reiterate, I mean, like in my case,

54:37SPEAKERfor example, my access point is not only is a WiFi,

54:41SPEAKERis WiFi five AC?

54:43SPEAKER- AC is five, yeah.

54:44SPEAKER- I think that was the point

54:45SPEAKERwhere they made the branding change.

54:46SPEAKERSo I've got a WiFi five access point in here

54:50SPEAKERand not even like a high-end one.

54:51SPEAKERIt was kind of one of the mid range

54:52SPEAKERor lower end unifies at the time.

54:55SPEAKERI could just get rid of that thing

54:56SPEAKERand get a WiFi seven access point next year

54:58SPEAKERor in a few months and not even touch my router,

55:01SPEAKERwhich is nice for all kinds of reasons.

55:03SPEAKERA, you don't have to replace it from a monetary standpoint.

55:05SPEAKERB, you don't have to reconfigure a new device

55:07SPEAKERjust because you want a new WiFi, right?

55:09SPEAKER- Yeah, the reconfiguring, not having to reconfigure

55:11SPEAKERthe router is, it turns out, an important part

55:13SPEAKERof this whole thing for me.

55:15SPEAKERThe other nice thing about buying the separate access points

55:18SPEAKERis you can buy versions of the access point

55:21SPEAKERthat have antenna infrastructure tuned for your use case.

55:25SPEAKERSo for example, you don't need these at home,

55:28SPEAKERbut they sell ones that are designed

55:29SPEAKERfor like conference centers that are designed

55:31SPEAKERto have hundreds or thousands of people connected

55:33SPEAKERto them at a time.

55:34SPEAKERThey do sell, and this may be interesting for home,

55:37SPEAKERif you especially live someplace rural,

55:40SPEAKERantennas that are designed for high coverage areas

55:42SPEAKERand low congestion areas.

55:43SPEAKERSo you can put an access point up on the side of your house

55:47SPEAKERthat will give you coverage over three acres

55:50SPEAKERor 10, eight acres of your farm or something.

55:52SPEAKER- Yeah, some of them are designated

55:53SPEAKERas long-range access points.

55:55SPEAKER- They will sell you weatherproof ones

55:57SPEAKERthat you can put up outside if that's a thing

55:59SPEAKERthat's of interest to you.

56:02SPEAKERAnd yeah, so basically you have more flexibility

56:06SPEAKERwhen you're setting up your network to tune it

56:08SPEAKERfor how you use your stuff.

56:11SPEAKERYou can even buy, we talked about this

56:13SPEAKERon a Q&A episode a few months ago,

56:14SPEAKERbut you can buy point-to-point antennas

56:17SPEAKERthat will let you put a wireless downlink

56:19SPEAKERbetween like a house and a barn or something like that

56:21SPEAKERif you wanna have like cameras set up

56:23SPEAKERfor your folding shed or whatever.

56:26SPEAKER- Yeah, you can also, I don't think we've mentioned this,

56:28SPEAKERyou can also mount multiple access points

56:30SPEAKERin a way that gives you somewhat of a mesh-like setup

56:33SPEAKERexcept that they all have to be on wired internet

56:35SPEAKERor wired network, like they have to run network cables

56:38SPEAKERto all of them, they can't-

56:39SPEAKER- You can get mesh ones now, but yeah.

56:41SPEAKER- But it's kinda like the same concept

56:43SPEAKERwhere your device would hopefully just gracefully hand off

56:47SPEAKERfrom one access point to the next as you move around,

56:49SPEAKERbut that's device dependent, right?

56:51SPEAKER- So assuming you have,

56:53SPEAKERassuming you set up the same SSID and passwords

56:56SPEAKERand the same basic configuration stuff

56:59SPEAKERlike which version of WPA use,

57:01SPEAKERhow many channels you're binding,

57:03SPEAKERlike whether you're doing dual channel or single channel,

57:05SPEAKERstuff like that, it should just gracefully hand off.

57:08SPEAKERAnd that's what I do in my house.

57:10SPEAKERIt works flawlessly with everything

57:13SPEAKERall the way back to like a 3DS.

57:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that it does come down

57:17SPEAKERto the device's internal logic

57:18SPEAKERfor like detecting signal strength

57:20SPEAKERand deciding which one it should be connected to, I believe.

57:23SPEAKERAnother thing to note here is that generally

57:25SPEAKERyou can't administrate these access points

57:27SPEAKERon the access point, you usually have to run

57:29SPEAKERsome kind of software externally to provision them,

57:33SPEAKERwhich is basically like sending settings to them

57:35SPEAKERand telling them what to do.

57:36SPEAKERUsually like in the case of Ubiquities Unify stuff,

57:39SPEAKERyou can just run that software on your PC if you want.

57:41SPEAKER- Yeah, so I actually have the software running on my NAS,

57:43SPEAKERI think in a Docker container or something,

57:45SPEAKERbut yeah, it is a little more involved

57:49SPEAKERsetting up and running, but you can do things like,

57:52SPEAKERfor example, I have all the lights in my office,

57:54SPEAKERwhich are sitting right next to an access point

57:57SPEAKERlocked in the software to only be able to connect

57:59SPEAKERto this access point.

58:01SPEAKERThe other access point in the garage will reject them.

58:03SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool. - Which is nice.

58:04SPEAKER- Yeah, another thing to note,

58:06SPEAKERthe reason I bring up that central controller software

58:08SPEAKERthat you have to run is, for example,

58:09SPEAKERif you bought like three access points

58:11SPEAKERthat you want to deploy around a larger house,

58:13SPEAKERlike you said, they all need to be on the same SSID,

58:15SPEAKERsame security and password stuff.

58:17SPEAKERGenerally that central software will let you just deploy

58:20SPEAKERthose settings to all those access points

58:22SPEAKERwith like one click, basically.

58:23SPEAKERLike say, hey, I want all of these to be configured

58:26SPEAKERthe same way, and it'll just do that.

58:27SPEAKER- And that is one of the, like, yeah,

58:30SPEAKERI have multiple wifi configurations.

58:33SPEAKERI have one for like guests,

58:35SPEAKERlike when we have a babysitter or something,

58:36SPEAKERand then I have one that's for everybody else to use,

58:40SPEAKERand you can deploy them, like you said,

58:43SPEAKERyou can just say, hey, put this on all the access points.

58:45SPEAKER- Yeah, the last piece of good news I'll throw out there,

58:48SPEAKERif you're interested in this separate access point setup,

58:50SPEAKERis you don't even need to buy a new router to do this.

58:52SPEAKERIf you have a router, even if it's like one of those

58:54SPEAKERTP links or something low end that you're happy with.

58:56SPEAKER- I'm using the one that came with my AT&T fiber connection.

58:59SPEAKER- Right, like all you have to do is disable the wifi

59:01SPEAKERon your integrated router and buy an access point

59:03SPEAKERand plug it into your router, and you're good, basically.

59:06SPEAKERI mean, you still have to set up the access point, of course,

59:07SPEAKERbut like you can just turn off,

59:09SPEAKERand you should turn off the wifi.

59:11SPEAKERYou don't want clashing wifi networks with your old router,

59:15SPEAKERbut like the point is like a wifi router

59:18SPEAKERcan still just be a wired router without wifi

59:20SPEAKERif you just want to turn that off

59:22SPEAKERand buy a newer access point.

59:23SPEAKERYou don't need to go get some fancy, you know,

59:26SPEAKERSOHO or prosumer routers to run one of these things.

59:29SPEAKER- No, and it's often overkill for home users.

59:33SPEAKERSo yeah, and then the, okay, so that's that.

59:38SPEAKERThe last thing is that routers are more open now

59:43SPEAKERthan they have been kind of ever before.

59:46SPEAKER- Yes.

59:47SPEAKER- There's multiple competing operating systems

59:50SPEAKERout there for router.

59:52SPEAKER- A lot of stuff you can do.

59:53SPEAKER- Real quick, I'll just, I'm just gonna rattle off

59:54SPEAKERas we move on into rolling your own router.

59:57SPEAKERSome of the big brands and access points,

59:59SPEAKERif you're just curious, like Ubiquiti's Unifi

1:00:02SPEAKERis quite popular.

1:00:04SPEAKERThe TP-Link-Omata stuff seems to be pretty well liked

1:00:06SPEAKERon our Discord.

1:00:08SPEAKERIt looks like, like when you search for access point now,

1:00:10SPEAKERlike Netgear has some, Linksys has some.

1:00:12SPEAKERIt seems like companies are rapidly getting into that space

1:00:14SPEAKERand rolling their own out.

1:00:16SPEAKERSo there's a lot of options.

1:00:18SPEAKER- If you have a house that was built in the last 20 years,

1:00:20SPEAKERit probably has ethernet in the walls.

1:00:22SPEAKERAnd then that puts you firmly in,

1:00:25SPEAKERmaybe I should just plug an access point in

1:00:26SPEAKERinstead of using these mesh networks.

1:00:28SPEAKERThe benefit of the access point over the mesh network

1:00:31SPEAKERis that the access points are generally way cheaper.

1:00:33SPEAKERThe mesh networks are three to $500 for a three pack,

1:00:37SPEAKERdepending on which version of WiFi you get,

1:00:40SPEAKERthe access points will be a hundred bucks each

1:00:42SPEAKERfor the latest hot shit WiFi.

1:00:44SPEAKERSo yeah.

1:00:45SPEAKER- And you may not need more than one access point

1:00:47SPEAKERdepending on the size of your house.

1:00:50SPEAKER- So yeah, you can also just kind of roll your own router

1:00:52SPEAKERnow and it's getting easier than it's ever been.

1:00:55SPEAKERWe did, we did an episode ages ago

1:00:57SPEAKERwith a friend of the show West Finland.

1:00:58SPEAKERRemember he came on and talked about PF Sense?

1:01:00SPEAKER- Yeah, that was the first time I heard about PF Sense,

1:01:03SPEAKERI think probably.

1:01:04SPEAKER- Yeah, but so at the time he was running that on,

1:01:06SPEAKERif you remember like his old PC, like a full size box

1:01:10SPEAKERand that's not great from a power consumption standpoint,

1:01:12SPEAKERobviously for something you're gonna leave running 24/7.

1:01:15SPEAKERHardware has never, I mean,

1:01:17SPEAKERstop me if you've heard this one before,

1:01:18SPEAKERhardware has never gotten smaller and cheaper

1:01:20SPEAKERand more power efficient and faster than it is right now.

1:01:24SPEAKERLike we're in like this kind of golden age

1:01:26SPEAKERof tiny little x86 boxes

1:01:29SPEAKERwith a bunch of network ports on them for cheap

1:01:30SPEAKERthat are very fast

1:01:31SPEAKERand actually don't use that much power at all.

1:01:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:01:34SPEAKER- But you know, there are Celeron and Pentium options

1:01:36SPEAKERthat have been out there for ages,

1:01:37SPEAKERbut the Alder Lake N100 boxes in particular

1:01:41SPEAKERin the last year or two are super popular

1:01:43SPEAKERand incredibly fast.

1:01:44SPEAKERYou can get a, you can get a quad core N100

1:01:47SPEAKERand to be clear, the cores on these things,

1:01:49SPEAKERthey're single core, they're not hyper-threaded,

1:01:52SPEAKERbut a quad core that is faster than like a 6700K,

1:01:55SPEAKERfor example, like the cores on these things are faster

1:01:57SPEAKERthan the big CPU, desktop CPUs of eight years ago

1:02:01SPEAKERor whatever, like they're very fast

1:02:02SPEAKERand they use like 30 Watts max,

1:02:04SPEAKERlike 20, 20 Watts, something like that.

1:02:06SPEAKER- Well, in most of the commercial routers you buy

1:02:07SPEAKERare using ARM or even MIPS chips.

1:02:09SPEAKERSo it's not like routing is,

1:02:12SPEAKERuntil you get above a gigabit,

1:02:13SPEAKERrouting isn't like a massively CPU dependent kind of task.

1:02:17SPEAKER- Not hugely, no, but these are pretty cheap.

1:02:20SPEAKERLike you can get an unconfigured ones,

1:02:21SPEAKERlike 150 bucks or something, you know,

1:02:23SPEAKERyou might have to add like RAM and storage, but,

1:02:26SPEAKERand these little boxes, a lot of them are fanless.

1:02:28SPEAKERA lot of them have, most of them have like 2.5 gig

1:02:33SPEAKERRJ45 ports on them.

1:02:34SPEAKERSome of them are also starting to ship with SFP plus ports.

1:02:38SPEAKERSo you can do 10 gig and fiber

1:02:40SPEAKERand that sort of thing on them.

1:02:41SPEAKERThere's a lot of options out there.

1:02:42SPEAKERYou know, you can go to serve the home

1:02:43SPEAKERif you want to read more stuff about this,

1:02:45SPEAKERservethehome.com is a good place to look at reviews

1:02:47SPEAKERof a lot of this like commodity,

1:02:49SPEAKERbut high-end network hardware

1:02:50SPEAKERthat's been hitting at like a very rapid pace

1:02:52SPEAKERand network switches are also starting to show up with,

1:02:55SPEAKERyou'll see a lot of combo switches now

1:02:57SPEAKERthat are like a bunch of 2.5 gig ports

1:02:59SPEAKERand like two to four SFP plus ports as well

1:03:02SPEAKERfor like a hundred bucks or less.

1:03:04SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I was going to say like,

1:03:06SPEAKERif you don't mind buying from AliExpress,

1:03:08SPEAKERyou can buy a N100 based,

1:03:13SPEAKERlike built for PF sense computer

1:03:16SPEAKERwith four 2.5 gigabit LAN ports on it for like 130 bucks.

1:03:22SPEAKER- Yeah, it's crazy.

1:03:23SPEAKERYou can get slightly like more reputable

1:03:26SPEAKERor like brand names you've heard of boxes domestically

1:03:29SPEAKERif you prefer.

1:03:30SPEAKERBut yeah, a lot of people just get stuff

1:03:31SPEAKERoff of AliExpress these days.

1:03:33SPEAKERAnd crucially, you know, like we said

1:03:36SPEAKERin that episode with Wes,

1:03:37SPEAKERyou're installing your own OS on it.

1:03:39SPEAKERYou know, you're not dependent on some software

1:03:41SPEAKERthat is shipped from a vendor

1:03:42SPEAKERthat you need to worry about being updated regularly

1:03:45SPEAKERor secure or whatever.

1:03:47SPEAKERProbably PF sense or open.

1:03:48SPEAKERI would lean toward open sense these days,

1:03:50SPEAKERwhich is a fork of PF sense

1:03:52SPEAKERthat I think is a little more modern.

1:03:53SPEAKERAnd also the people who run it are cooler.

1:03:57SPEAKERSome of the PF sense people we've talked about in the past

1:03:59SPEAKERor have not been great.

1:04:00SPEAKER- The scene drama.

1:04:01SPEAKER- A lot of scene drama there.

1:04:03SPEAKERBut both of those give you a web GUI

1:04:05SPEAKERjust like you would get on any traditional router.

1:04:08SPEAKERSo even if you don't have a lot of network experience

1:04:10SPEAKERor even like experience messing with little embedded devices

1:04:13SPEAKERlike this, you can get instructions quite easily

1:04:16SPEAKERto install PF sense or open sense on this box.

1:04:19SPEAKERAnd once you've got that up and running, like I said,

1:04:21SPEAKERit's got a web GUI just like,

1:04:22SPEAKERjust like your integrated consumer router would.

1:04:25SPEAKERAnd you know, you log into that

1:04:26SPEAKERand walk through the setup steps

1:04:28SPEAKERin the same way that you would anything else.

1:04:31SPEAKER- So when you do that,

1:04:33SPEAKERthere's a responsibility towards security

1:04:36SPEAKERthat you don't have necessarily

1:04:37SPEAKERwith like your ISP provided router?

1:04:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I'd say anything connected to the open NRS

1:04:43SPEAKERshould be updated regularly, let's say.

1:04:45SPEAKER- Right, I guess what I'm saying is

1:04:47SPEAKERit's up to you as a user to pay attention

1:04:49SPEAKERto security updates and to patch frequently and fast

1:04:54SPEAKERbecause often like an exploit will land

1:04:56SPEAKERand you'll have two weeks

1:04:59SPEAKERbefore something starts infecting your router,

1:05:02SPEAKERwhich once you've infected your router,

1:05:04SPEAKERit's bad news for everything on your network.

1:05:06SPEAKERYou don't want that.

1:05:07SPEAKER- True, I mean, I think out of the box,

1:05:09SPEAKERthese are probably more secure

1:05:11SPEAKERthan what you would get from a vendor

1:05:13SPEAKERthat is not that aggressive about patching stuff.

1:05:16SPEAKER- Oh, no doubt.

1:05:18SPEAKER- But yeah, you would want to keep an eye

1:05:20SPEAKERon updates for these.

1:05:21SPEAKER- I'm just saying it's not a thing

1:05:22SPEAKERyou want to set up in your closet

1:05:24SPEAKERand then never look at the UI again.

1:05:26SPEAKERYou need to either set it to automatically update

1:05:28SPEAKERwhen updates land or stay on top of it.

1:05:33SPEAKERFor example, if you don't update

1:05:36SPEAKERyour home assistant install for two years,

1:05:38SPEAKERprobably not that big a deal.

1:05:40SPEAKERIf you don't update your OpenSense install for two years,

1:05:44SPEAKERyou're being a bad citizen of the internet.

1:05:46SPEAKER- But again, I'd say that for every router,

1:05:48SPEAKERlike you should update your router.

1:05:49SPEAKERJust the thing that protects you

1:05:51SPEAKERfrom any nefarious activity out there on the internet,

1:05:53SPEAKERyou should absolutely make sure you update

1:05:55SPEAKERon a regular basis.

1:05:56SPEAKER- Agreed.

1:05:57SPEAKER- There's also, I'll throw it out there.

1:05:58SPEAKERThere's also ViOS for people who really want to get nuts,

1:06:01SPEAKERwhich is command line only.

1:06:02SPEAKER- What is ViOS? Oh, no, thank you.

1:06:04SPEAKER- V-Y-O-S, it's Linux based.

1:06:06SPEAKERThe other two are FreeBSD based.

1:06:07SPEAKERSo like ViOS has some more robust capabilities, let's say,

1:06:11SPEAKERbut it does not have a web GUI.

1:06:12SPEAKERSo if you really want to get nuts with networking,

1:06:15SPEAKERit will do more,

1:06:16SPEAKERbut you have to configure it all from command line.

1:06:18SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds like it's for people

1:06:20SPEAKERwho really like pain and suffering.

1:06:22SPEAKER- Reporting for duty.

1:06:23SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

1:06:24SPEAKEROkay, I know where you're going with this.

1:06:25SPEAKERMaybe I'll do a PF sense or an OpenSense one

1:06:27SPEAKERlater this year.

1:06:28SPEAKER- To be clear, if I, and this is where I intend to go.

1:06:31SPEAKERI'm still on a Ubiquiti Edge router,

1:06:33SPEAKERwhich they have basically unceremoniously dropped support for

1:06:37SPEAKERso at some point I'm gonna have to get off that thing

1:06:39SPEAKER'cause it's basically unmaintained now.

1:06:40SPEAKERAnd this is absolutely what I'm doing from now on

1:06:42SPEAKERis rolling my own and running one of these OSs

1:06:45SPEAKERbecause these things get updated constantly.

1:06:47SPEAKER- Well, I'll send you a link to this AliExpress thing.

1:06:50SPEAKERYou can put that on, I'm sure it's probably fine.

1:06:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:53SPEAKER- It'll be fun, it'll be an adventure.

1:06:55SPEAKERBut I guess that's as good a place as any

1:06:56SPEAKERto wrap it up for us this week.

1:06:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I think so.

1:06:59SPEAKER- Thanks to, this was a fun chat.

1:07:02SPEAKERIf people have questions, please send them in.

1:07:04SPEAKERWe're doing a question episode next week,

1:07:05SPEAKERso it's a good time for it.

1:07:06SPEAKERThe email address is techpod@content.town.

1:07:09SPEAKERIt's techpod@content.town.

1:07:12SPEAKERAnd this is also the part of the show

1:07:13SPEAKERwhere I remind everybody that we are

1:07:15SPEAKERa 100% listener-supported show,

1:07:17SPEAKERso we wouldn't be here without the generosity

1:07:19SPEAKERof our listeners and patrons, so thank you all so, so much.

1:07:23SPEAKER- Yes, thank you.

1:07:24SPEAKER- If you would like to find out how to support the show,

1:07:26SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod.

1:07:29SPEAKERAgain, that's patreon.com/techpod,

1:07:32SPEAKERwhere for five bucks a month you get access to the Discord

1:07:35SPEAKERwhere you can get in and watch people asking questions

1:07:37SPEAKERin the networking channel all the time.

1:07:39SPEAKERYou can talk about your gun plus stuff.

1:07:42SPEAKERYou can post a bunch of food pictures.

1:07:44SPEAKERYou can share pictures of your cats

1:07:45SPEAKERand dogs and desks and other pets.

1:07:49SPEAKEROr you can just hang out and have a nice time

1:07:51SPEAKERand make some friends who have similar interests to you.

1:07:55SPEAKERYou also get access to the Patreon exclusive episode,

1:07:57SPEAKERwhich will go up next week sometime,

1:07:59SPEAKERor maybe the week after because it's only the 22nd

1:08:01SPEAKERas I'm looking at the calendar now.

1:08:03SPEAKERThere's one day the week after,

1:08:05SPEAKERso it'll probably be next week or the week after,

1:08:08SPEAKERwhere we talk about kind of projects that we're working on,

1:08:10SPEAKERthings that are front of mind

1:08:12SPEAKERbut maybe not worth a full episode.

1:08:16SPEAKERAs always, a very special thank you goes out

1:08:19SPEAKERto our executive producer tier patrons,

1:08:21SPEAKERincluding Paddle Creek Games, Makers of Fractured Veil,

1:08:24SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Jerk.

1:08:27SPEAKERWhoa, I know, I feel like something happened there.

1:08:29SPEAKERJust Wedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie,

1:08:32SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Kamik, and Pantheon,

1:08:35SPEAKERMakers of the HS3 High Speed 3D Printer.

1:08:37SPEAKERThank you all so much.

1:08:39SPEAKER- Thank you.

1:08:39SPEAKER- And I guess that'll do it for us this week.

1:08:41SPEAKERWe'll be back next week with another episode of the Tech Pod.

1:08:43SPEAKERIt's question time, so get those questions in.

1:08:45SPEAKERWe will answer them.

1:08:46SPEAKERWe will turn the Qs into As when we see you next week.

1:08:51SPEAKERBye, everybody.