Banana spider 2022-11-01

They’re everywhere in the woods in the fall.

[About head height, of course]
About head height, of course

Also called golden orb spiders, Trichonephila clavipes.

Their venom is poisonous, but it doesn’t have much effect on humans, and I’ve never had one bite me despite frequently having them walk all over me when I’m in the woods on the tractor.

-jsq

Starlink Router inside 2022-01-10

The new Starlink kit with the square dish and router doesn’t come with an Ethernet port. That’s makes it difficult to connect to an existing multi-building Ethernet. But we found a way.

[Hub, Starlink router, BrosTrend RJ45 adapter; Speedtest.net]
Hub, Starlink router, BrosTrend RJ45 adapter; Speedtest.net

That’s the Starlink router on the left, and next to it a “BrosTrend Dual Band 1200Mbps WiFi Bridge, Convert Your Wired Device to Wireless Network, Works with Any Ethernet-Enabled Devices, WiFi to Ethernet Adapter with Standard RJ45 LAN Port, Easy Setup”. It cost $45.99. BrosTrend has various other models at lower or higher price that may or may not do the same job. We know this one works. Continue reading →

Starlink dish 2021-12-27

Update 2022-01-12: Starlink Router inside 2022-01-10.

Turns out Starlink doesn’t work too well during thunderstorms. Other than that, so far so good.

[Longleaf, solar panels, roof mount]
Longleaf, solar panels, roof mount

Also looks good against longleaf pine. Continue reading →

Starlink: 277 Mbps down, 14 Mbps up, 31 ms latency 2021-12-26

Update 2022-01-10: Starlink dish 2021-12-27.

Finally, real Internet access out here in the piney woods of south Georgia.

[Speedtest.net]
Speedtest.net

Those numbers are with speedtest.net. Starlink has its own speedtest, which shows similar numbers. The latency is sometimes higher, but so far never over 100 ms.

We did have to trim a few sweetgums, but now we’re getting almost no interruptions, unlike the frequent outages with either AT&T DSL or Verizon Home Fusion.

So no more oh, it’s out again, go do something else for awhile, or another spinner, or an error message because nobody in Silicon Valley designed anything for slow links.

Now: get software? Zip, it’s here. Put videos on YouTube? A minute or two instead of hours.

Starlink cost: $99/month.

Sure, that’s twice what I pay for AT&T’s alleged 3 Mbps DSL. But Starlink is 100 times as fast and, let’s see: it actually works.

-jsq