The host likes the RT6600ax overall, objecting only to its antennas. It lists at $299.99, went on sale in the US on 11 May 2022 and was due in Europe the following month. Its web interface was snappy on what the datasheet gives as a quad-core 1.8 GHz CPU with 1 GB of DDR3. Beyond one Wi-Fi 6 phone test he did little: 630 Mbps down and about 20 Mbps up, which maxed out his 600/20 internet line.
The ports suit dual-WAN homes and faster-than-gigabit internet. It has a 1 Gb WAN port, three 1 Gb LAN ports and a 2.5 Gb WAN/LAN combo port, enabling failover or load balancing, which the host did not test. The USB 3.2 port takes storage for SMB, FTP or Time Machine, or tethers a phone as the internet connection. He dislikes the physical power switch because it is easy to hit.
Inter-network firewalling is simple but aimed at home users, not IT pros. New networks are isolated by default; to open access you uncheck isolation and write ordered source/destination allow or deny rules. The host's example blocks IoT and the main LAN both ways, then allows an NVR at 192.168.10.10 with a rule placed above the blocks. Networks bind to physical ports, with no VLAN tagging exposed.
Safe Access gives granular parental and guest controls. Profiles apply per network or per user, with devices assigned to each family member. They combine web-filter presets (child, employee, guest, custom), schedules, a daily time quota such as 3 hours 30 minutes, and SafeSearch for Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and YouTube. The host thinks, unsure, that Google needs an API key. Logs show which device tried which blocked site.
Add-on packages make it a VPN server, IPS and more. Like Synology's NAS, it installs packages such as DNS server, Download Station, media server, RADIUS and Threat Prevention (IPS/IDS). VPN Plus offers clientless web VPN, SSL VPN, remote desktop and site-to-site. A second unit can extend coverage in mesh mode. The host, a Synology NAS user, would like the router and NAS to integrate.
Polis Pandit$9 MORE Takeaways From Buffett and Munger — Part 2
Python is better supported than .NET in parts of Azure. Starnes, a technical author for Pluralsight and Real Python and a Microsoft MVP, names Azure Machine Learning and Azure Databricks, and ties it to Python's strength among data scientists, who he believes are "math geeks first, and software engineers second". He says someone who knows another language can become "dangerous in a weekend and useful in a week", and notes Microsoft sponsored and sent a speaker to a Python conference as early as 2011.
Few things are off-limits to Python on Azure. Asked for gaps, he names the SignalR service as ASP.NET-only and GUI applications as local-only, though he calls the latter a stretch since Windows GUI apps cannot run on Azure either outside a Windows VM. Everything he has needed to do, he says, he has been able to do.
Azure's free tier lets user-group members experiment at little cost. He started his "Taming Snakes in the Microsoft Cloud" talk about a year earlier, during the pandemic, to get speakers for his Python user group. He describes $200 for 30 days, a year of generous quotas for databases and VMs, then some services free forever, enough in theory to run small applications indefinitely.
VS Code's value is its extensions, led by Python ones. He calls it boring out of the box but counts over 30,000 extensions, with three of the top four Python-related: the Python extension at over 40 million downloads, Jupyter notebooks and Pylance. Extension sync carries his setup between Windows and Mac; WSL on Windows 11, which finally got him to upgrade about six weeks earlier, gives each Linux instance its own extension set to avoid conflicts; and a devcontainer.json file preconfigures a GitHub Codespace.
FastAPI is built for REST APIs, where Django's DRF is a bolt-on. He has just published a Real Python course on the framework, which he says dates from about 2018 and is async from the start. Django, by contrast, is opinionated toward forms-over-data applications, and DRF forces APIs into that style.
Starlink portability is a paid add-on, limited to one continent. According to Starlink's announcement email and FAQ, it costs $25 per month, is turned on from the account page, takes effect immediately and works anywhere on the same continent with active coverage. Each Starlink in an account needs its own portability purchase.
Billing is in whole months, so short trips cost $25. Starlink charges the full month on the next invoice with no proration; enable it on 12 March and you pay $25 on 1 April. Once disabled, it stays active until the cycle ends. The host reads this as $25 for a week's camping with internet, which he would gladly pay.
Portable users get best-effort, lower-priority service. Starlink says users at their registered address take priority, especially in waitlisted areas and at peak times. The host notes there is no data yet and suspects the slowdown will be modest, perhaps 70 Mbps where 150 Mbps was usual. He reads the policy mainly as a deterrent against people using portability to skip the waitlist.
No use in motion, and long stays require changing address. Starlink says in-motion use voids the limited warranty. More than two months in a foreign country requires moving the service address or buying another Starlink, and an unspecified "extended period" elsewhere also requires a change; the host guesses two to three months. He speculates that a separate dish, perhaps under a radome, will serve moving vehicles.
The host expects people to use portability to bypass the waitlist. In his scenario, someone in an available area orders the dish, the buyer turns on portability, takes it home, then changes the service address, at a likely cost of one month's $25. He sees nothing in the FAQ that prevents this, and says the new address would then get full priority.
Manually set channels; never leave channel selection on auto. The host calls this the most important and most overlooked step: survey neighbouring networks first (UniFi's Wi-Fi Insights, or the NetSpot app), then give each access point the clearest channel, as far from its neighbours as possible. With three wired APs he put 2.4 GHz on channels 1, 6 and 11, with 1 and 6 on the APs farthest apart.
On 5 GHz, avoid DFS channels and spread APs across the band. The host treats the DFS channels as reserved and not to be used, working only in 36–48 and 149–165. Neighbours crowded 36–44, so he chose 36 and 48 for the two farthest-apart APs and 165, which no neighbour used, for the one between them.
Use 20 MHz width on 2.4 GHz and 40 MHz on 5 GHz. Wider channels allow more bandwidth but are more prone to interference, and the host calls a 40 MHz 2.4 GHz channel rude in apartments, offices or neighbourhoods. He would use 40 MHz there only somewhere with no competing signals, such as a ranch; 40 MHz is his standard for 5 GHz, which has more spectrum.
Place APs centrally so their strong 5 GHz coverage barely overlaps. In the UniFi Design Center he modelled a generic 2,000 sq ft house with a U6 Lite, U6 LR and U6 Pro, drew in walls by material, and adjusted placement until the yellow (strong) 5 GHz zones just touched. He plans for 5 GHz because 2.4 GHz penetrates obstacles better; brick, concrete and metal such as fireplaces or stoves weaken signal.
Leave transmit power on auto unless APs share a channel. The host almost always does: lowering power matters only where two APs reuse a channel, for example a fourth AP sharing channel 1, so each covers only its own area. The advice assumes hardwired APs; he says mesh changes the channel picture and has a separate video on it. He applies it across vendors, demonstrated on a UDM SE.
The UniFi Dream Router is now generally available and in stock. The host says it went GA that day and is in stock for the first time he has seen in a long while, and points buyers to a link on his Twitter.
Workload Identity Federation removes the stored secret from outside-Azure deployments.
Kuehn, a senior program manager on Microsoft's identity advocacy team, says managed identities only help workloads hosted on Azure. With federation you tell the Azure application to trust an external system such as GitHub, so the repo holds only the client ID, subscription ID and tenant ID. Her case for it is that rotating a password or secret is what breaks automated workflows, and with no secret there is nothing to rotate.
Setup is a federated credential on the service principal.
She says you create the service principal in the portal or with the Azure CLI or PowerShell, then use a new Federated Identity section under its Secrets tab, scoped to a specific scenario such as a PR. The three IDs are then referenced from the GitHub Actions YAML. She points to an Azure CLI and GitHub CLI script by Microsoft engineer Jon Gallant that automates the whole trust setup, and to his video walking through the token flow.
It is a young preview with no known production users.
Kuehn says it reached public preview around late November and covers GitHub Actions, Google Cloud, Kubernetes and compute platforms outside Azure; she has worked mainly on the GitHub side. She does not know the GA date and guesses "probably this calendar year", without official knowledge.
She expects it to carry Azure identity security into hybrid and multi-cloud.
She reads the "compute platforms outside of Azure" support as implying on-premises use, but says she has not yet read that documentation closely. Her view is that because full cloud adoption is "a ways off", extending the same identity controls beyond Azure is what will help customers adopt it.
Pulsar is one platform for streaming, queuing and stream processing.
Grygleski, a streaming developer advocate at DataStax, describes Apache Pulsar as a unified, event-driven messaging platform that does pub/sub streaming and message queuing at once, plus message transformation and processing. She says Yahoo built it around 2014–2015 for workloads such as Yahoo Finance and Mail, donated it to the Apache Software Foundation in 2016, and it became a top-level project in 2018.
Its typical use is change data capture feeding a pipeline into sinks.
She describes Pulsar listening for database changes, transforming them and depositing them in a "sink" through connectors: Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Kafka, email, or back into a database. Her argument for the event-driven approach is that independent pieces hook together "like Lego pieces", and the broker-based pub/sub model scales easily across one-to-many and many-to-many flows.
It runs as a managed service or locally in Docker.
Grygleski, who says she does not mean to be marketing her employer, points to DataStax's Astra Streaming, with a free tier and $25 credit, hosted on Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, with more providers planned. The alternatives she gives are installing the binary and managing topics yourself, or running the Docker image.
Basic flows need no code; custom processing uses Pulsar Functions.
She says simple sinks and data flows can be configured in the cloud console, but filtering, transformation and external connectors use serverless Pulsar Functions written against its APIs. She lists Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Go, C++ and C# as supported, with community support for other JVM languages such as Scala.
Polis Pandit$Elon Musk and Twitter: Free Speech Is Not Free
FlaUI sees the app's real controls, which Appium could not.
Kunk, at a consulting company working on a client's commercial WPF application, says their first Appium-based tool saw only what was on screen, so data-grid rows that were off screen were invisible and the tests were fragile. FlaUI, an MIT-licensed NuGet library wrapping the Windows accessibility API, exposes native controls with click, type and expand commands, plus whether an element is visible or enabled. You install FlaUI.Core plus UIA2 (for WinForms) or UIA3 (for WPF and Store apps). He says it succeeds TestStack.White, deprecated in December 2019.
He writes every test by hand in C#, without a test framework.
The suite is a separate .NET Framework 4.7.2 project with no recorder: he finds each element's XPath with Microsoft's WinAppDriver UI Recorder (out since 2018) and codes against it. He skips NUnit for flexibility. Each test stages a preconfigured file, then repeats act, read back, fail immediately, because "a click doesn't tell me if it clicked".
Keep every test fully independent, even at the cost of duplication.
Kunk says having one test call another made failures too hard to untangle. Reuse now lives only in a shared library of "interactions" (one click or keystroke) and "actions" (a login made of several interactions). He calls timing his biggest challenge, such as logging in before the login screen appears. Nightly runs can take 30 minutes, but runs on his development machine must be faster.
Results come from parsing the log, plus screenshots and a tracking database.
Several dozen tests run nightly and log every step to a text file. A second pass parses that log to build the email to business users and developers, so the email is accurate because it comes from the log. A "test tracker database" records each test's duration and result for planned Power BI trend analysis, and Snagit takes a screenshot at the moment of any failure.
Manual testers now feed the suite, and a support tool is planned.
The roadmap so far has been silent install, builds pulled from an FTP server, happy-path tests, then regression tests that manual testers specify with staging files. He says automation "never completely eliminates manual testers and shouldn't." Still planned are DevOps pipeline integration and a developer smoke-test subset. The last goal is a tool where support staff pick a version and a test, and a server installs that version, runs the test and sends them a video.
GCastIngesting Into an ADX Table From an Azure Storage Blob [GCast 123]
One .ingest into table command loads a blob into ADX.
The syntax is .ingest into table <table name>, then a parenthesized list of blobs, each written h"<blob URL>?<SAS token>", with an optional with clause setting the format. Giard notes the full syntax is in the help under the ingest-into command.
The blob's columns must match the target table's structure.
His demo table, customers, has full name, last order date, sales, expenses, city and postal code. The comma-delimited .csv file he uploads to a blob container has about 10 rows in the same layout (a string, a date, then numbers), and he calls the match important.
Scope the SAS token narrowly: one container, read-only, short expiry.
He takes the blob URL from the file's Properties, then uses Generate SAS on the container rather than the storage account. He grants only read permission on the blobs and sets the token to expire in about an hour.
Several blobs can go in one command, but not a whole container.
Multiple blobs are listed comma-separated inside the parentheses. Giard says there is no command to ingest everything in a container, so each blob has to be listed individually.
The format clause is optional when the file extension shows it.
Rerunning the command without it still ingested the .csv, and the table went from 10 to 20 rows, the same rows repeated. He says to state the format explicitly when the extension does not make it obvious, and points to the ADX supported-formats documentation, which lists JSON, multi-JSON and Parquet among others.
A DHCP reservation pins a dynamically assigned address to one device. Without one, a device that is offline for a while, such as a phone off for a week, can come back to a different address after its old one goes to another client. The host reserves addresses for devices that apps must always find at the same IP, such as an OctoPrint Raspberry Pi and a Lutron hub.
Split a /24 into gateway, static range and DHCP pool. The host's example: 192.168.1.1 as gateway, .2–.50 set aside for manually assigned static addresses (switches, servers), and .51–.254 as the pool DHCP hands out automatically.
In UniFi, enable "Use fixed IP address" on the client. On a UDM Pro running 1.12.15, which the host says was current in April 2022, you open the client, go to settings, pick the network and keep or set the address. UniFi then stops handing that address to any other client.
In EdgeOS, map a lease to a static IP. On an EdgeRouter 4 running 2.0.9 hotfix 2, the host goes to Services, DHCP Server, opens View Leases on the network and uses Map Static IP, which ties the device's MAC address to the address. Existing mappings are listed, and can be deleted, under the Static MAC/IP Mapping tab.
The framework's value is completeness and a shared vocabulary with customers.
Tataran, whose company does Azure consulting and custom development, says it works as a template that forces you through every aspect so nothing is forgotten. Because it comes from Microsoft, it also ends arguments with clients over why his team does things a certain way. He uses the well-architected review as a conversation opener: expert on-premises IT staff who doubt his team answer "no" to many of its questions. He thinks it appeared about two years ago, and says a new version is due in a few months.
Reliability means choosing targets and trading them against cost.
His example is a multi-tenant ISV promising enterprise customers an RTO of one hour while standard customers get less. He tells clients that 99.95% availability with a good disaster-recovery procedure and small RTO and RPO is often enough, since beyond a point uptime costs too much for what it gains. Giard sums up the framework as asking the questions rather than giving the answers. Tataran adds that its docs separate cost-driven non-production environments from production.
Cost control is the problem his cloud-adopting customers most often lack.
He guesses cost is its own pillar because on-premises capex is fixed and known, while cloud self-service lets people create too many, too large or forgotten resources. Customers already in Azure, he says, can often see their costs but have no mechanism to bring them down. A prospective customer with 2,000 developers had a good operations manual written by on-premises experts, which lacked "the lens of cloud".
Operational excellence forces developers to think past deployment.
He says developers usually ignore how an app will be run in production. This pillar makes them consider updates, versioning and monolith versus microservices. It also covers modern CI/CD, automating deployments, failovers, backups and testing, Azure-specific monitoring, and above all infrastructure as code.
Every production workload should use it; only extreme urgency excuses skipping it.
Tataran says the motive for migrating decides which pillars matter: leaving a data centre whose contract is expiring calls for speed and a lift and shift, while a goal of faster time to market makes performance and scalability central. Teams in a rush may defer the framework but should come back to it. Sandboxes and proofs of concept are exempt. He would like the technology-specific guidance, such as for containers and AKS, to grow into decision trees across Azure's many hosting options.
Wyze's new handgun safe is sturdy and opens four ways. The host, who doesn't own a handgun, describes solid metal construction weighing about 20 pounds. It opens by code, fingerprint, key or the Wyze app, and has a USB-C auxiliary power connector so it can still be opened if the battery dies.
Episode 700 is a montage of guest clips, not an interview. Dozens of past guests, mostly unnamed in the captions, each give a short message on the show's title theme; most say the developer community is where they found their friends, and the clips span COVID lockdowns ("stuck at home", the "downward slide of the Omicron variant") through in-person KCDC and CodeMash.
During lockdown, guests credit technology with keeping friendships alive. Several describe reconnecting remotely, one with childhood friends, and missing conference hallway time. One speaker says they flew home from Europe on 13 March, two hours before the travel ban, and started a blog series on what technology meant in earlier decades as a lockdown project.
One guest argues technology helps friendship but cannot create it. The guest contrasts social-media "friends" never met with people who show up at 2 a.m. when the power is out, citing a friend who drove 45 minutes with a chainsaw to clear a fallen tree from the guest's driveway. Another guest says industry friendships are built on games, places and food away from the screen, not on shared technology.
Several guests turn "friends don't let friends" into technical advice. One says friends don't let friends right-click publish, whatever is being deployed: an application, a database or a predictive model. Another says friends don't let friends use slow Wi-Fi, and urges viewers to help friends set up good Wi-Fi remotely, not in person.
Some guests say technologists should build for, and do good by, people. One challenges developers to weigh their work's effect on humanity or seek side projects that do good; another asks the industry to make technology more equitable "for our friends that don't look like us". A third builds as if demoing to a friend, because friends will ask why a part is so complicated.