tech
Crosstalk SolutionsUK-Ultra: The Swiss Army Knife of Access Points!
- The UK Ultra is a tiny, cheap, mount-anywhere access point. The first product in Ubiquiti's new Ultra line has an MSRP of $109 and is a bit bigger than a deck of cards. It ships with wall, ceiling and pole mounting. It has a built-in antenna plus two hidden RP-SMA connectors for external antennas.
- It is deliberately Wi-Fi 5, with very low power draw. It is 2x2 MIMO on 2.4 and 5 GHz, rated up to 866 Mbps on 5 GHz, with a gigabit PoE port. Its 8 W maximum is the lowest in Ubiquiti's access point lineup, and it is IPX6 weatherproof. Ubiquiti told the host the Ultra line is for low-cost, compact needs that do not require a Wi-Fi 6 4x4 access point.
- The host sees it as a spare and field-deployment tool. His uses are a spare in a technician's bag for client sites, disaster-response Wi-Fi (he volunteers with ITDRC), a portable "network in a box", solar-powered off-grid coverage, and international projects where cost matters more than speed. For home use with 4K streaming and many IoT devices, he would pick the U6 Plus or U6 Pro instead.
- His office tests found ample speed, but external antennas added nothing. A Pixel 8 got 450–550 Mbps both down and up. Antennas taken from an older mesh access point worked on the RP-SMA connectors but did not change bandwidth. He tested only bandwidth, not distance, and assumes a directional mesh antenna would also work for pointing the signal one way.
Technology and FriendsKevin Gates on Photography [EPISODE 783]
synopsis
Gates treats photography as getting technology to capture the picture he sees in his head. His position is that AI-assisted cameras and phones now carry much of the technical load, but that preparation, simple habits and a disciplined culling and editing process still decide the result.
Preparation and gear. For planned shoots he studies a venue in advance through online photos or virtual walkthroughs. His main camera, a Sony A7R V, uses AI subject recognition to keep focus on eyes from any angle. Giard, a Canon owner with a 10-year-old camera, says his lenses keep him on Canon. Gates recommends renting gear before buying.
Phones. Giard says phone cameras have improved faster than DSLRs. Gates agrees that the phone is often better for exposing every face, for panoramas and as a backup "safety shot", citing a 2019 iPhone panorama printed at room size.
Taking the shot. He suggests beginners start in aperture priority and learn focus first. His tips are mostly low-tech: wipe the lens every time, face the subject toward the light, separate the subject from the background, shoot at eye level, and try looking up, a favourite technique that newer cameras handle by capturing dark trees and bright sky together.
After the shot. He flags promising frames, compares favourites from the same scene and edits about 40 of a thousand. He then adjusts composition, straightness and colour and runs Lightroom's AI noise reduction. His Azure-hosted site uses an image service to scale 80 MB originals for display. He learns from YouTube channels such as Adorama and Tony and Chelsea Northrup.
- On-camera AI now anticipates the shot by tracking subjects from any angle. Gates's new primary camera, a Sony a7R V, recognizes people, birds and animals even from the side or behind, locking on a dog's head so focus jumps to the eye when it turns. He explains mirrorless bodies as sending the sensor image straight to an electronic viewfinder, which makes them smaller, and suggests renting gear from LensRentals (mostly seven-day rentals) before buying.
- The phone remains a working camera alongside the big one. Gates takes "safety shots" on his iPhone 15 because it exposes every face in the scene without lights, and relies on phones for panoramas: one taken on an iPhone X at North Avenue Beach in Chicago in 2019, the best of about 10 tries, still looks good blown up to room size. Giard adds his own view that phone cameras have advanced much faster than digital SLRs.
- Most of his shooting tips are low-tech habits. Gates wipes the lens every time he takes the phone out, turns the subject to face the light so a window behind it does not "photobomb" the shot, and shoots at the subject's eye level using a tilting screen. For background blur he combines a wide aperture (an f/1.4 lens) with distance between subject and background, and he tells beginners to start in aperture-priority mode; Giard's tip is to turn the phone upside down for shots near the ground.
- Culling happens in two passes before any editing. With roughly 80 MB files from the Sony, an M1 Mac, and Lightroom syncing originals to the cloud and keeping only thumbnails locally, Gates flags anything promising, then picks the best of each cluster, taking 1,000 shots to about 50 favourites and then about 40 to edit. Editing covers composition (rule of thirds, broken where it suits), straight lines and color, with AI tools such as Lightroom's noise reduction, which treats grain in water differently from grain on a suitcase.
- His photo site serves resized images from Azure blob storage. Gates has built his site for over 20 years and hosts it on Azure; he uploads to a blob storage account, and an image service (captioned "ImageX", apparently imgix) is pointed at that account and returns versions at the ratio and size requested in the URL, cropping tall images to the face. He recommends YouTube channels such as Adorama and Tony and Chelsea Northrup for learning.
Crosstalk SolutionsTravel Routers Improve Your Life! Beryl AX Complete Setup
- The host upgraded to the Beryl AX for its multi-gig WAN. He says the video is not sponsored and he paid for the unit himself. GL.iNet's two Wi-Fi 6 travel routers are similar, but the Slate AX has a 1 Gbps WAN and two 1 Gbps LAN ports, while the Beryl AX has one 1 Gbps LAN and a 2.5 Gbps WAN; about $120 MSRP, often under $100 on sale.
- A travel router's main payoff is convenience for many devices. All of the family's devices are preconfigured for the router's SSID, so the hotel captive portal is cleared once; a campground or in-flight plan limited to three devices sees just one; and casting to a Roku or printing works despite hotel Wi-Fi client isolation.
- Its own LAN adds privacy, at the cost of double NAT. Devices sit behind the router's firewall and use DNS the user chooses (built-in AdGuard Home or filtering DNS) rather than the hotel's. Double NAT is fine for browsing and streaming but may trouble VoIP; one VPN client on the router (OpenVPN to Private Internet Access, or WireGuard home) covers every device and avoids per-device VPN limits.
- Setup pitfalls: separate radio edits, firmware, and AdGuard blocking. The admin page is at 192.168.8.1; the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz networks must be modified and applied one at a time, and the host advises upgrading firmware first. AdGuard Home blocked the Private Internet Access site until he disabled it. He mapped the side toggle switch to turn the OpenVPN client on and off.
- Wired WAN beats repeating hotel Wi-Fi. The host measured pings jumping between about 65 and 300 ms over the hotel Wi-Fi, then a steady 65–70 ms once he plugged the WAN into the room's Ethernet, which he says rarely has a captive portal. USB tethering to a phone or an LTE modem and multi-WAN failover or load balancing are the fallbacks.