#63: Trouble with your network?

Posted on February 7, 2025 by ewand

We’ve all been there. Just when you need it to work, your home internet connection goes down or huffs off in go-slow mode. You’ll have seen others who, even 5 years after enforced home working, haven’t quite figured out how to make their networks, er, work. Or the colleague who always appears to be having trouble with their internet, so they can’t switch on the camera…?

What to do if your network appears to be up the swannee?

STEP ONE – THE THREE-FINGERED-SALUTE

If you’re lazy and uninterested in the root cause of a problem, then a quick way to resolution might be the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again trick. Most broadband routers have a button to reboot them, or even just pull the power for 10 seconds and then put it back in.

Sometimes, service providers will tell you to reboot your router if you are getting an error – streaming apps on smart TVs appear to be adept at this. Technology gurus will scoff that there’s no way that could be the problem, it must be something with the app provider (until they reboot the router as a last resort, and the app starts working).

The original “Three Fingered Salute” was a moniker applied to CTRL+ALT+DEL, the unmaskable hardware combination on early PCs which forced a reboot. Nowadays, Windows handles it with more grace.

STEP TWO – CAN YOU SEE OUTSIDE?

Once you’ve waited 5 minutes for your broadband router to restart (and assuming that hasn’t fixed the problem), the next thing to check is if your computer can talk to the outside world. If not, that means the problem is somewhere between your keyboard and the internet service provider that the modem connects to. Trying to log a fault with your provider’s support desk will generally mean they’ll make you try unplugging and restarting everything in your house first, so be prepared.

Make sure you’re actually connected to the network and have a valid address; in Windows 11, go to Settings / Network & Internet and look at Properties of whatever the connection is. You should see the local network address of your machine, and the gateway through which everything is sent and received. The format of the numbers might vary but should look something like:

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[If you’re getting a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address then something is going wrong with your computer and getting an IP address; if it’s in your house, try removing and replacing the network cable, or rebooting the PC and/or router. If it’s in a hotel or public wifi area, give up and set your phone up to do Tethering].

PING!

Now, fire up a command prompt (press WindowsKey+R then enter cmd) and enter ping 192.168.1.1 (or whatever address your default gateway is).

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The ping command literally bounces a short piece of data at the address you’re looking for; if that location is available (and not being blocked by some firewall or other) then it replies, and the fact that you got a response and the speed it took are displayed.

If you’re going to be playing with cables and stuff, you could enter ping -t 192.168.1.1 – the -t flag makes it continue pinging until you close the window or press CTRL+C. If you’re getting a reply at all, and the latency (time<1ms) is stable and low, then your connection to the router is just fine.

Latency is the enemy of a stable and reliable connection – when you see people having problems with Zoom/Teams meetings and their audio or video is garbled and choppy, that’s almost always a latency problem, either within their home network or somewhere further up the chain. Some networks suffer from it inherently – satellite connected, like in-flight WFi, are a good example – and anything that needs a stable, real-time connection (video calls, multiplayer gaming etc) is best avoided.

STEP TWOa – ARE YOU WIRELESS?

If you’re using a wireless network, it’s worth checking that something isn’t getting in the way unexpectedly. IT bods troubleshooting a problematic early business WiFi network found that it kept dropping out randomly, but more often around lunchtime – until they realised their neighbour in the office block had a kitchen on the other side of the wall, with a microwave oven that nuked their WiFi whenever it was used. Some home electronics could do the same, or even things like wood burning stoves.

Maybe your household is near other users who could be getting in the way? Try scaring them for a laugh but it’s also worth making sure your WiFi network isn’t clashing with theirs. It could be worth trying the ping -t trick above and move the machine around the place to see if there are some spots where you’re getting really high latency numbers, or to see if the ping reply doesn’t come back at all.

Try the WiFi Analyzer app from the Windows Store (if you’re on a PC; there are many others for iOS/Android and Mac):

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This app will show you all the neighbouring networks and which channel they’re operating on; if you’re sharing the spectrum with too many others then it might be worth reconfiguring your WiFi network to lock to a different channel; time to RTFM for the router.

An alternative to WiFi Analyzer is the long-established inSSider. The latest version needs you to register for an account, but the old one – which still gives a lot of useful info – is still available, if you’re careful to dodge the many links to other unwanted stuff:

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IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

If the internet connection is still not playing ball, but initial signs are that the local network is OK and you’re fairly confident you don’t have sporadic hardware problems or similar, then it’s pretty likely the fault lies elsewhere. Get ready to face the inertia of service provider helpdesks who will assume that the problem is at your end… to prevail, we must arm ourselves with evidence and above all, keep calm.

To avoid over-doing things, we’ll pick that one up next week.

#60: The problem with coupons

Posted on January 17, 2025 (Updated January 30, 2025) by ewand

Lots of online shops have promo codes that can be entered as part of the checkout process, to get a discount, free shipping or similar. Sign up to their newsletter and get 5% off your first/next order, they might say. It’s usually a reward for or enticement to repeat custom, or if you believe in more sinister motives, a ploy to get you to hand over your data and expose your very living soul.

Use one of the many “coupon lookup” sites and you could easily find codes that can save significant amounts of money, especially if you’re buying expensive stuff. To the end user, it looks like free money but there’s a deeper and darker subtext. As we’ll learn, there’s never really such a thing as free money.

Don’t click the bottom one…

Sites like Coupert, Vouchercodes and more sometimes tell you what special offer codes are currently active; be wary of any which offer to “automatically apply all codes” or you’ll end up installing a browser extension, which you almost certainly don’t want to do.

1^st party coupons

Microsoft has shoehorned “shopping” into Edge (similar to what Google does with Chrome, though Edge’s is a bit more internationally inclusive and somewhat easier to use), and has a Bing shopping site that’s similar to Google Shopping too.

If the feature is enabled in Edge, you’ll see a little shopping label icon in the address bar when you’re browsing something that the browser might have more insights on, and possibly be able to keep a track on the price too.

Both browser tools are convenient way to find coupons and codes, alongside price comparisons, price history etc, even if you could probably find keener deals and info by looking around yourself.

For vouchers and deals, the browser is basically scraping other sites which purport to offer them, though anyone who has tried such sites previously will probably find out many of the codes don’t work anymore.

Margins to share

Retailers typically have a high markup on stuff they sell, expressed often as a margin – if a clothing outlet sells a shirt for $100 and they are buying it from their supplier at $40, then they have a 60% gross margin. That seems a lot relative to the cost of the actual goods, but then the retailer has to run premises, pay staff, deal with returns and annoying customers – all of which will eat into that margin and give them a much lower %age of profit. So far, so good.

When dealing with online transactions, especially if the delivery cost is charged additionally, the overheads will be a lot lower and therefore the margin could afford to be less – that’s why many online-only retailers can sell the same things at a lower price than you’d find in the shops. But at least in trad. retail, customers might be browsing – they could be wandering through a mall and decide to drop in to a store and end up seeing something they didn’t know they wanted. In online retail, that’s so much less likely, therefore they try to attract buyers in other ways.

Online retailers find it sometimes helps to share the margin they make; hence the deals with cashback sites or credit cards, and by issuing voucher codes to incentivise customers to buy now while the deal is there. They may also have referral codes or links that give a small discount to the end purchaser and a kickback to the referring source as well.

Influencers and other “content creators” can earn money by talking about stuff and linking to places where you can buy it, potentially earning $thousands for driving extra buyers into the waiting arms of the online sellers. Sometimes they’ll have a voucher code that gets money off (and which the retailer can track so they know how much extra business is coming from that source). Sometimes the code is built into links on the blog or website, that when you click through (and subsequently buy), will share some margin back to the referrer.

Honey: The sweetest deal?

Along with the features browsers have built-in, there are loads of addins which can be used to help the shopping experience. Honey was a pioneer, so much so that PayPal shelled out a cool $4B a few year back.

Recent investigations have shown Honey’s business model to be on thin ice, though – ostensibly telling users that they can find the best deals with Honey, while getting retailers to pay them to offer only a limited set of the deals which might otherwise exist… so instead of Honey telling you of a sweet 10% deal you could get, they might be taking 2% off the retailer and showing you a 5% code.

Addins like Honey also sometimes pay to have their offering promoted – including paying money to influencers to have the Honey extension featured. To the chagrin of some – even leading to legal action – it appears that Honey has also been rewriting the referral links from other sites too.

So, Honey pays Spongebob Influencerpants to say nice things about them and feature on his site; all Sponge’s users run off and install Honey and are happy they’re getting something for little effort.

Later, when a user clicks on a link to buy some tat in the description text of Spongy’s latest video, instead of him getting the kickback from the retailer, the Honey addin is intercepting and rewriting the URL and pocketing the referral fee for itself.

Even if you think most influencers are gopping eejits, do check out Marques Brownlee – who is one of the smartest and most balanced of the oeuvre – and see what he says about the “Honey Scam”. Unsurprisingly, he recommends uninstalling the Honey addin with all speed.

Whatever the reality of this situation is, it’s certainly not cricket.

#59: Emulation of things past

Posted on January 10, 2025 by ewand

Many people of a certain age (men, mostly?) may have spent a good amount of time over the holiday season indulging in a recherche du temps perdu, harking back to their own childhood or teenage years. Late in 2024, a company called Retro Games brought out a faithful-looking £90 / $100 replica of the 1982 Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The “Speccy” was the first home computer in the UK to really take off; worldwide and across several iterations, it went on to sell 5 million units, way before the advent of home PCs or modern gaming consoles (apart from the earlier cartridge types like the Atari 2600). More importantly, the Spectrum was hugely influential in launching careers of thousands of technologists who got their first taste of the computing world at the hands of its dead-flesh rubbery keyboard. They even made a film about it.

This new machine dubbed “The Spectrum” differs from the original in a number of key ways – powered through a USB-C port and with HDMI output to a modern display in place of the old RF out to a portable telly, and it comes with 48 built-in, licensed original Spectrum games to enjoy. But it looks and feels very similar to the original – making erstwhile fans somewhat weak at the knees.

Pump the garish, blocky colours and frankly horrific opening-screen soundtrack to Manic Miner through a big TV and you might wonder what the fuss was all about, but persevere and you might recall just how fiendishly addictive and difficult some of these games were. There’s even a “CRT mode” to make the graphics a bit more blurry for extra vintage feel.

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You can add other games via the huge archive at World Of Spectrum, by copying them to a USB stick. Thankfully, most of the programs will start in a blink of an eye rather than the several tedious minutes of loading from a finicky tape player. It’s amazing what clever programmers could do in 48K of RAM; that the image of Eugene’s Lair above is 4 times the size of the whole of the Manic Miner game.

The Spectrum starts up in a kind of home screen allowing for easy selection of what you want to run, though for true Old Skool vibes, you can revert to the original blank screen / BASIC programming UI..

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Hardware

The original ZX Spectrum had a total of 64K of memory (16K reserved for the system, hence why 48K was available for use) and used an 8-bit Zilog Z80A processor running at 3.5MHz. The Spectrum is based around an ARM chip (isn’t everything?) and emulates the original Z80 and the custom silicon chip (the ULA) which hung it all together.

An emulator basically translates – in real time – between the environment the software thinks it should be running in, and the hardware which is actually available today. It’s not unlike reading a book in a foreign language, translating each word into English by looking it up in the dictionary then figuring out if the phrasing of the sentence needs to be rearranged… all in real time.

Emulation used to be seen as a poor way of building compatibility as it is quite expensive in compute terms, as the resulting programs will be slower than they would be otherwise. When Apple moved the Mac from its original Motorola 68000 architecture to PowerPC, a built-in emulator made sure that most old programs would still run, and even though they were slower than if they had been developed for PowerPC, the fact that the new machine was more powerful than the old, made up the difference. In this kind of instance, it is translating one radically different hardware architecture to another.

Another good example is how Microsoft allowed the Xbox One to be able to run Xbox 360 games, even though Xbox One was based on an Intel chip and Xbox 360 on PowerPC. Since the Xbox basically runs each game in a custom version of its own operating system, every “backward compatible” game needs to have a package built specifically to emulate not just the 360 hardware but the version of the OS that it would normally expect.

There are a list of Xbox 360 and even Xbox Original games (the OG ones are mostly Star Wars ones, tbf), and in some cases they have been enhanced to take advantage of later hardware; the game thinks it’s talking to an Xbox 360 and asking it to draw graphics at HD resolution, but on a Series X it could be up-frame-rated and upscaled to 4K.

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Run on your existing device

The romance of “The Spectrum” is really all in the classic package; in reality, you can run a free Spectrum emulator and all of its software on your phone, PC, Mac, build your own on a Raspberry Pi or even run in a browser.

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Since most of the games for early consoles and computers were either ripping off an arcade game (see Hungry Horace vs Pac-Man) or were licensed versions which were nothing like as capable, what about emulating the original arcade machines on modern hardware?

MAME

Originally “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator”, the MAME project set out to build an emulator platform that could take on any number of arcade machines from the 1970s – 90s and maybe beyond. Since arcade games were essentially bespoke hardware in the early days, there’s a lot to do to emulate whatever processor and other chips each one might have come with, but again, modern computing is way beyond what a mid-1980s arcade machine could muster. MAME is an open-source emulator platform which aims to be able to preserve any kind of old computer and its software.

Find out more about MAME; there are even ports to run in a browser too, so you can relive the original Space Invaders in your morning coffee break.

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#58: Tales of Yuletide cheer

Posted on December 20, 2024 (Updated December 19, 2024) by ewand

A tradition of Tip o’ // of the Week at the end of each year, has been to post some completely non-tech related stuff to help transition from “work” mode into the general lethargy of the festive season. Here’s something of a greatest hits, along with some new nonsense. Top tip if you’re reading this on LinkedIn: hold the CTRL key as you click on links, to pop them into a new tab rather than lose your place on this post.

Drink!

As if the festive season doesn’t present enough opportunities to over-indulge, making some cocktails to ease into the evening can be an effective way of doing it. Clearly, drinking responsibly is to be advised or you never know where that might lead.

One of the most popular of all Tips arrived 2 years back; it was certainly the most fun to write.

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662 – How to make the perfect martini

Some of the ingredients to the ideal martini might take a bit of sourcing, so you may need to stop reading this immediately and go shopping. Recommended gins include Berry Bros no 3 or Tanqueray 10, vodka is Grey Goose or Belvedere, use Dolin for vermouth or Lillet Blanc is you’re Vesper-ing (with a few drop of Angostura bitters too).

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The two brothers who took over the Angostura bitters company decided it was time to rebrand; one designed the bottle, the other the label. They didn’t think to consult each other and the label was too big. 150 years later, it still is.

For espresso martinis, fill a cocktail shaker of glass with ice cubes and add one measure of vodka (even cheaper stuff – save the Grey Goose for better cocktails), one measure of coffee liqueur (Kahlua is OK, if a bit sweet; make your own if you have time, or Mr Black’s if you can find it). Just before serving, add the same measure again of hot, strong espresso and shake it like crazy. Pour into waiting glasses to get a nice crema. Top with a few coffee beans (three: definitely not an even number).

For more cocktail related fun and games, check out Richard Godwin on Substack.

Eat!

For delicious snacks to go with your cocktails above, try roasting some spiced pecans – in fact, they make a great accompaniment to a small salad with pear and blue cheese.

Spiced pecans

Pre-heat oven to 200C / 400F / Gas Mark 6
In a bowl, mix up 1.5 tsp of salt, 3 decent pinches of cayenne pepper, 3 tsp of Worcestershire [pr. Wooster] sauce and a good slug or 3 of Tabasco.
Add 225g of pecans and toss them well with the mixed goo.
Pour onto a baking tray and arrange in a single layer
Bake for 5 or 6 minutes, turning halfway through so they don’t get burnt on one side
Try to not to eat them all before they’re cooled. Put what’s left in an airtight tub and they’ll keep until the New Year (hah).

The above also works well with almonds or a mixture of the two. That way, you can save the pecans for…

Maple roasted pecans

Pre-heat the oven to 160C / Gas 3 / 325F
Mix 170g pecans with 2 tablespoons of maple syrup and 1 tsp of almond essence
Pour onto a tray and arrange in a single layer
Bake for 12 minutes, turning halfway

Green soup

For something more healthy, perhaps a starter on a big-meal day or a quick turkey-free lunch before the port and cheese of betwixtmas, how about a simple 3-ingredient green soup from a blue-mouthed celebrity?