Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries

2017-08-04 · open the original ↗

• About 50 watts of panel suffices for one NanoStation. The host runs a 45 W Harbor Freight kit (three 15 W panels, roughly $129–$149) on about 6 hours of sun a day and recommends 50 W or more. He would not buy that kit again, because a plastic support post has already snapped, and suggests two 25 W panels instead. The parts list in the description uses Amazon affiliate links, which he discloses.
• A charge controller with USB output is the key part. Two wires go in from the panel and two out to a single 12 V battery, which sits in a weather-resistant vented battery box. The controller's USB port powers a Ubiquiti airGateway Installer, a USB-powered 24 V passive PoE injector, which feeds the NanoStation. The host notes that alligator clips on the battery are not fit for a permanent install, and says he is new to solar himself.
• Three days in, the battery has spare overnight capacity. It falls from full to about three of five bars each night and recharges in daytime, and the host wants that headroom to last more than 24 hours through cloudy or rainy days. The solar-side link shows -38 dBm signal, 99% airMAX quality and capacity, an estimated 300 Mbps, and 1–2 ms ping over about 50 ft of clear line of sight.
• A week without dropouts will prove the design. The host graphs traffic and ping latency for the solar-side NanoStation in Cacti, running on a Raspberry Pi 2, so an overnight battery failure would show up as a gap. If the link holds for about a week, he will treat panel and battery as sufficient for one NanoStation.
• Adding a camera over PoE passthrough failed. With 24 V passive PoE passthrough enabled on the NanoStation M5's secondary port, a UniFi Video camera rebooted about every 30 seconds. The host suspects the airGateway Installer cannot supply enough power for both devices. Part 2 will report the uptime and test an inverter on the charge controller driving a standard Ubiquiti PoE injector.

2017-07-20 · open the original ↗

• Run the UniFi controller on a dedicated Cloud Key, not a PC. The controller software is free for Mac, Windows and Linux and has to be running to adopt and configure the access points. Because people replace computers every two or three years, the host prefers the Cloud Key, which is the same controller on a PoE-powered stick. He says the video's equipment links are Amazon affiliate links.
• The UAP-AC-Lite is enough for an average home. The host means 1,000–2,500 sq ft with 10–20 Wi-Fi devices, and he ran one centrally placed in his own home for over a year with no coverage problems. Ubiquiti's specs: indoor, 2x2 MIMO on both bands, 300 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and 867 Mbps at 5 GHz, rated to 122 m (about 400 ft) in ideal conditions, powered by 24V passive PoE. The single unit (about $79) includes a PoE injector; the five-pack (about $335) is cheaper per unit but comes without injectors.
• The host thinks the long-range UAP-AC-LR is mostly marketing fluff. Ubiquiti credits an "innovative antenna design" for its 183 m (about 600 ft) rating. The host asks why that design isn't in every model, and points out that a phone's small antenna may see the network at that distance but fail to send data back. He has never deployed one in production. The one use he suggests is a pair of LRs as a wired AP plus a distant repeater.
• The UAP-AC-Pro is the host's default access point for business. It is his best seller, used for offices, restaurants and hotels with roughly 100–150 clients per coverage area; he has used it in hotels by mounting one in the ceiling between rows of rooms. Specs: indoor/outdoor, 3x3 MIMO, 450 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and 1,300 Mbps at 5 GHz, 400 ft range, 802.3af/at PoE. A second, pass-through Ethernet port can feed a switch or camera. He finds the UAP-AC-EDU loudspeaker variant's software not yet usable.
• The UAP-AC-HD suits dense venues, not homes. Ubiquiti rates it at 4x4 MU-MIMO, 800 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and 1,733 Mbps at 5 GHz, on 802.3at PoE+ only. It publishes no range figure; the host assumes it matches the Pro, and says you buy it for throughput. He reserves it for stadiums, auditoriums and theaters with hundreds of devices, or as the wired uplink for a mesh deployment such as a campground. For a home he recommends one or more AC-Pros instead. At recording, the five-pack ($1,475, $295 per unit) cost more than five singles ($293.04 each, with injectors).

2017-07-14 · open the original ↗

• The Deluxe Audio Strap should have been the Vive's default. Hanselman calls it "highly recommended, worth the money" and a must-have for anyone interested in VR. It replaces the velcro strap that ships with the original HTC Vive, which he calls "pretty much garbage", and he expects it to become standard equipment.
• First-generation Vive owners need the three-in-one cable first. The strap will not work with the older cable, which has to thread through the strap and its velcro. He has a first-generation Vive; he says current Vives already ship with the right cable.
• A rear knob makes the headset easier to fit and remove. Turning the knob tightens or loosens the fit, so the headset goes on and off with less hassle than the original strap. The headphone cable threads through the top so a single cable runs out the back, and the headphones click in and out and slide up and down a side rail.
• The built-in headphones sound good but feel cheap. He is "not 100% sold" on what he calls "cheap squishy airplane headphones", though he says they sound "pretty darn good". He can picture an aftermarket replacement that plugs other headphones in their place.

2017-06-29 · open the original ↗

• The host calls the Call Recording Reports module essential for recording users. The FreePBX commercial module lists at $99 MSRP; the host says it is a little cheaper on the Crosstalk Solutions web store, which he runs, and that it is also included in the System Builder Plus commercial-module bundle.
• It puts all recordings in one browsable, permissioned interface. Under Reports > Call Recordings, filtered by year and month, each call shows type (inbound, outbound, on-demand), source and destination, timestamp and duration, and can be played in the browser, downloaded as a WAV file or deleted; FreePBX lets you grant access to users who check recordings regularly.
• Its archive feature keeps recordings from filling the PBX disk. An archive limit zips every recording older than a set number of months (the host's is three years) into a Recording Archives tab and emails the administrator, who must log in, download the zip and store it somewhere safe off the server.

2017-06-28 · open the original ↗

• WSL runs real Ubuntu binaries on the Windows kernel. Hanselman enables developer mode and the Windows Subsystem for Linux feature, then shows lsb_release reporting Ubuntu 16.04; he stresses these are the genuine Linux user-mode ELF binaries, not Cygwin, with no Linux kernel underneath — file-system syscalls are handled by the Windows kernel, and the processes show up in Task Manager beside Windows ones.
• Never touch the Linux file system from Windows apps. The Linux home folder lives hidden under AppData\Local, and Microsoft's article warns in red not to create or modify Linux files with Windows apps; Hanselman calls that warning "a little bit heavy-handed" and says it needs updating, because the real rule is to keep your work on the Windows drives under /mnt/c (or /mnt/d), using aliases such as desktop or github to jump there.
• Rails development on Windows gets easier because it isn't Windows. He followed the standard Ubuntu Rails setup (about 30 minutes, "tedious"), then runs rails new, rake db:create and rails server with Linux Ruby; the server answers on localhost port 3000 because the Linux subsystem shares ports with Windows — "this is not a virtual machine."
• Edit those files with any Windows editor safely. From the /mnt/c project folder he types code . to open Visual Studio Code on Windows beside bash, with its Ruby and CSS tooling working, and says the same approach suits Node or C++ work as long as it stays on the C drive.

2017-06-27 · open the original ↗

• A VoIP door station's relay simply interrupts the door strike's power. The host, who says he is not an electrician, explains that a device such as the Axis A8105 network video door station or a CyberData keypad unit opens a door or gate by closing a circuit when a DTMF code is dialled from the phone that answers its call button.
• Whether a strike locks or unlocks without power decides the wiring. Strikes are rated NO (normally open, unlocked without power) or NC (normally closed, locked without power), and some can be toggled; the host's NC strike stays unlocked only while power is applied, which he demonstrates by touching the red lead on and off.
• Splice the relay's CO and NO/NC contacts into one power lead. He cuts the red wire from a plain wall power adapter, splices it to light doorbell wire running into one relay contact, and runs the other contact back to the strike, leaving the black wire direct; he thinks it does not matter which of the two contacts is used. Disconnect power and PoE before wiring.
• The relay holds the door open only for a short timer. In his demo, dialling 99 (his usual code) unlocks the strike for about seven seconds before it relocks; he says five or seven seconds is typical, and that the same green relay terminal block appears on other CyberData gear such as the SIP paging server, equipment he says he sells to customers regularly.

2017-06-23 · open the original ↗

• Mantis is a tap-to-pair Bluetooth sensor kit for classrooms. Walker of HipScience, met by Hanselman at a conference break in Atlanta, describes it as a Bluetooth Low Energy IoT platform for education with a cross-platform app; he pairs a climate sensor by tapping it and shows light, temperature and humidity updating in real time as he covers the light sensor.
• It is a family of interoperating sensors, not one device. He demos a motion device reading gyro, accelerometer, velocity and real-time distance from a wall "like a ruler", and a general-purpose sensor whose plug-in probes cover temperature (shown climbing from 24 as he holds it), pH, conductivity, turbidity, soil moisture and current, with what he calls a very fast sampling rate.
• A mesh gateway relays the data to Azure without the tablet. Per Walker, the devices form a Bluetooth 4 mesh network whose wall-powered gateway speaks MQTT bidirectionally to Azure IoT Hub, feeding Power BI and Stream Analytics dashboards; the app runs on iPad, Android and Windows, including a Universal Windows app using Windows 10's tap-to-pair. He points viewers to mantisopenstem.com.

2017-06-13 · open the original ↗

• The EdgeRouter Lite's weak point is its USB-stick operating system storage. The host, who rates the roughly $91–92 router one of his favourite firewalls, says corruption is not common but not unheard of; the one he recovers was a client's, corrupted in an electrical storm. EdgeOS lives on a removable USB stick inside, reached by removing two case screws.
• Recovery starts from the serial console and a TFTP server. He connects a USB-to-RJ45 console cable (the kind shipped with FreePBX systems), finds its COM port in Device Manager and opens PuTTY at 115200 baud; the three files of Ubiquiti's "last resort recovery" EMRK image go on any TFTP server on the network, in his case his FreePBX system.
• Without DHCP option 66, point U-Boot at the TFTP server by hand. With a cable in eth0, he runs dhcp (or sets a static IP and netmask), then sets the server IP and the EMRK .bin boot file name, runs tftpboot, then bootoctlinux $loadaddr; the documented one-line command works only if DHCP hands out option 66.
• The reinstall must fetch EdgeOS over plain HTTP, not HTTPS. In the recovery software, emrk-reinstall reformats the USB stick and asks for an image URL; he copies the download link for his model from Ubiquiti's site and changes https to http. The download and processing took about 60 seconds before a reboot to a ubnt/ubnt login.
• Protect the router from power events once it is restored. After re-running the setup wizard from the default 192.168.1.1 and moving the LAN off that range, the host recommends a surge protector, battery backup if possible, and the rear grounding screw. He links an Amazon affiliate link for buying one, which he says earns him a referral fee.

2017-05-30 · open the original ↗

• The UAP-AC-HD is Ubiquiti's access point for very dense environments. Against the UAP-AC Pro's 3x3 single-user MIMO (802.11ac Wave 1), the HD has 4x4 multi-user MIMO (Wave 2); the host found the box and the downloaded data sheet disagree on radio rates (800 vs 600 Mbps on 2.4 GHz, 3.4 Gbps vs 1,733 Mbps on 5 GHz), and he could not say which is right.
• Size the HD by Ubiquiti's recommended user limits, not theoretical ones. The HD is rated for 500 users theoretical and 250 recommended, the Pro 200 and 70; MSRP is $349 against $149. The host would put one HD per movie theatre and use HDs in a football stadium, but expects AC Pros to suffice for a hotel. He links Amazon affiliate listings for the units.
• The HD also suits a mesh uplink serving several mesh APs. The host says its 4x4 MU-MIMO can handle several larger mesh access points uplinking wirelessly through it at once, giving far more total throughput than an AC Pro in that role.
• Wave 2 MU-MIMO serves clients simultaneously; Wave 1 serves them in turn. The host's analogy: spatial streams are highway lanes and devices are cars of 1x1 to 4x4 width; under Wave 1, even a 3x3 AP sends to one device at a time, whereas the HD's four lanes can carry, say, four 1x1 phones, two 2x2s, or one 4x4 uplink simultaneously.
• Adoption needed a manual set-inform over SSH to a cloud controller. The discovery tool would not send set-inform to the host's Amazon-hosted controller, so he SSHed in with default ubnt/ubnt credentials and ran set-inform http://<controller>:8080/inform twice. He runs controller 5.4.14 against the latest stable 5.4.16, staying a version or two behind to protect live clients; the HD drew 6.61 W idle, and he did not throughput-test it, lacking dense-client test gear.

2017-04-27 · open the original ↗

• Paging Pro adds features; basic paging is already free. Standard FreePBX lets you create unlimited page groups without the commercial module. The host puts Paging Pro at $95 for a licence covering the whole server, plus, he thinks, annual maintenance of around 10–15% of that price to keep receiving updates, and he judges it good value for what it adds.
• Busy page groups queue pages through valet-style record-then-play paging. The caller records the page and hangs up before it plays, as in noisy airport terminals, which avoids feedback. It can be set to always use valet or only when the page group is already in use, playing the queued page when the current one ends; a page announcement (e.g. "attention everyone") can be prepended.
• Multicast is the module's most important feature. Without it, paging 50 phones means 50 separate calls, which taxes the PBX CPU and can degrade call quality on calls in progress. Multicast sends one stream to an IP address that all the phones listen on, and the host's rule of thumb is to buy Paging Pro once a page group exceeds about 10 phones, depending on server size.
• The scheduler turns the paging system into a school bell. It sets a date range, days of the week, times and excluded dates such as holidays, and plays an announcement file (e.g. a buzzer) at each interval. Standard FreePBX paging does not include it.
• Dialling a chosen outbound route can trigger a page. The example is an emergency route: a 911 call from a warehouse phone goes through while supervisors' phones are paged with an announcement that someone dialled 911. The host says he has never used this feature himself.

2017-04-20 · open the original ↗

• Judge critical decisions through the whole company's eyes. Horowitz's single lesson is that a decision must be weighed from the viewpoint of everyone it touches, including people not in the room. He calls it the mistake CEOs make most consistently at every stage. His advice under pressure is to pause and say you will come back once you have thought it through.
• Demoting an outside executive usually fails the company's sense of fairness. In a case he advised on, a hard-working but out-of-depth sales head held 1.5% equity against engineers' 0.1–0.2%. Demoting him would leave that stake intact or force taking it back, and would cost him the team's respect. When firing, he says, be honest that hiring was the mismatch, and keep the person's dignity, a lesson he credits to Bill Campbell.
• Grant raises through a formal periodic process, never on request. Giving a raise because a good employee asked signals to quieter, possibly better performers that only askers get paid. It also makes asking feel like a duty to one's family. His fix is a review every six months or quarter that gathers everyone's input, with no off-cycle changes and no lobbying afterwards.
• Ten-year option exercise windows deserve reconsideration, not universal adoption. He traces the 90-day window to accounting rule APB 25, replaced in 2004, under which long windows made earnings unforecastable. Weighing about 10% attrition, 6–10% annual dilution and the reward owed to stayers, he rejects Sam Altman's call for every startup to adopt Adam D'Angelo's policy. Either generosity or explicit reward for staying is defensible, if stated up front.
• Toussaint Louverture mastered this by considering even his enemies' views. Horowitz says Louverture made the best officers of defeated British, Spanish and French forces generals, a tactic he says came from Julius Caesar. He let planters keep their land but pay their workers, offset by lower taxes. Horowitz calls it history's only successful slave revolution and claims Haiti then out-exported the US.

2017-04-18 · open the original ↗

• Mesh suits many unwired access points across a large area. The host's example is a stadium with internet at one end and access points dotted around it; a small business usually does fine with a repeater or a standard UniFi access point in isolated mode. A mesh access point wired into the network is just an access point, gaining no mesh capability unless others chain off it.
• The AC Mesh takes external antennas; the AC Mesh Pro does not. Per the boxes, the UAP-AC-M is 2x2 MIMO, 867 Mbps on 5 GHz and 300 Mbps on 2.4 GHz, 183 m (600 ft) range, 802.3af PoE, and accepts any Ubiquiti 5 GHz antenna. The UAP-AC-M-Pro is 3x3 MIMO with the same range, 1,300 plus 450 Mbps, two gigabit ports and a 48 V injector; the host calls its combined "1,750 Mbps" figure misleading for any single device.
• Size the wired uplink access point so it doesn't bottleneck the mesh. His UAP-AC-Pro uplink matches one AC Mesh Pro's 1,300/450 Mbps, which is fine for one but not several. He suggests a UAP-AC-HD (800 Mbps on 2.4 GHz, 1,733 Mbps on 5 GHz) or other antennas, feeding a star of AC Mesh Pros with smaller AC Mesh satellites around them.
• Three wireless hops still delivered about 20 Mbps, which the host deems adequate. He measured 20.8 Mbps on iPerf3 and about 21 Mbps on speedtest.net, through trees at low signal, and calls the results anecdotal. That suits guest Wi-Fi, which he would cap at 2–5 Mbps, or a barn or boathouse; for more bandwidth he recommends a point-to-point bridge, which can do 400–500 Mbps or more.
• Self-healing failover must be switched on; it is off by default. The UniFi setting "enable automatic uplink failover" lets the controller pick a new uplink when one goes offline. When he powered down the AC Mesh Pro, the far AC Mesh went isolated and, after about five minutes, re-linked to the window AC Pro at 17% signal.

2017-04-07 · open the original ↗

• The US-8-60W is a cheap PoE gigabit switch for small deployments. At around $99 it has four standard gigabit ports and four PoE ports sharing a 60 W budget, which the host calls a lot of power for four ports, since by his estimate UniFi access points draw 2–3 W and a standard PoE phone about 5–6 W. The host links it via an Amazon affiliate link.
• Its PoE ports are 802.3af only, with no 24 V passive. Ubiquiti gear powered by 24 V passive, such as NanoStations, some cameras and lower-end access points like the UAP-AC-Lite, needs Ubiquiti's 802.3af-to-24 V passive adapter. The rear also has a grounding point, which the host recommends using.
• Adoption was automatic because the switch shared the controller's network. Otherwise the host says you must find its IP address and run set-inform, or use a Ubiquiti device-discovery tool on the same network. After adoption he upgraded it to firmware 3.7.49 on a 5.4-series UniFi controller running on a Cloud Key.
• The host traced a slow iPerf result to screen-recording overhead. An iPerf3 test to his laptop over a USB 3 network adapter gave about 866 Mbps while he recorded his screen and 941 Mbps without recording, repeatably; he suspects the disk writes from recording and is satisfied the switch delivers gigabit.

2017-03-15 · open the original ↗

• Header editing is a separate mode, and people get lost in it. Hanselman shows that inside the header the body text goes gray and the Header & Footer Tools tab appears only there; even Ctrl+A selects only the header's contents. Double-clicking moves in and out of the mode, and he says turning on paragraph marks helps you see where you are.
• A header is a live template shared by every page. Typing, changing case to uppercase or making text bold in one header changes it on all eight pages of his demo document at once.
• Position header items with tab stops, not by spacing. The blank three-column header uses a left, a center and a right tab; he says you will "never be precise" nudging text with spaces. Because the stops are part of the template, after switching to landscape he drags the center tab once and every header follows.
• Odd, even and first pages can each get their own header. The "different odd and even pages" and "different first page" checkboxes on the Design tab let him lay out book-style page numbers on alternating sides. He inserts page numbers at "current position", because the "top of page" option replaced the header customization he had already done. Footers work the same way.