Random household issues -- questions asked and answered here

tim1_2 wrote:Cayman Island Coconut K-cups are also quite delicious.  Sorry Ev, no baconator flavour.

I actually don't care for flavoured coffee and brew some French Vanilla to scent the house from time to time.

SeawaySensFan wrote:

tim1_2 wrote:Cayman Island Coconut K-cups are also quite delicious.  Sorry Ev, no baconator flavour.

I actually don't care for flavoured coffee and brew some French Vanilla to scent the house from time to time.

W.P. "Penny-pincher" Prager would tell you that their are cheaper ways to scent your house. Like farts.

tim1_2 wrote:

SeawaySensFan wrote:

tim1_2 wrote:Cayman Island Coconut K-cups are also quite delicious.  Sorry Ev, no baconator flavour.

I actually don't care for flavoured coffee and brew some French Vanilla to scent the house from time to time.

W.P. "Penny-pincher" Prager would tell you that their are cheaper ways to scent your house.  Like farts.

The amount of vanilla biscotti you'd have to eat to have vanilla-scented farts make it a prohibitive way to freshen your house.

Just pour vanilla extract into your beans.

tim1_2 wrote:Just pour vanilla extract into your beans.

Vanilla is a bean.

What's the best bang for the buck Reuter out there?

Router? I have a D-Link DIR-655. It has served me really well. If I were to buy one now, I'd get the same thing...

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833127215

Shabbs recommended on in another thread.  And about a day later at work someone also spoke highly of the same model (it was weird -- I didn't ask, it just randomly came up in a conversation).

EDIT:
http://www.gmhockey.com/t6054-laptop-won-t-connect-to-new-router#372761

shabbs wrote:
The only router I'd recommend these days is the ASUS "Dark Knight" RT-N66U. Rock solid.

The one I recommended was the Asus RT-N66U Dark Knight. It'll run ya $150. Not sure if that fits your budget. Amazon may have some better deals. I use it at home for my wireless network.

http://www.asus.com/ca-en/Networking/RTN66U/

It's an N900 Router so it's not the latest and greatest (ie: not AC) but it is rock solid. I also have an Asus RT-N56U on my home network but only for wired connections.

A list of wireless router review options here:

http://www.techradar.com/news/networking/routers-storage/best-router-9-top-wireless-routers-on-test-1090523

http://geekstopten.com/top-10-best-wireless-routers-buy-2014/

Sounds good, thanks.

If you are with Rogers and have the second from the bottom wireless package, the modem they should give you also serves as a router.

Problem is the wireless router on the Rogers modems sucks. When I first got it I read up on digitalhome.ca and everyone basically said disable the wireless part and continue using your own.

Back to my Bell router issue -- I read on another form how you should not place the wireless transmitter (the one for the "wireless TV" -- it's not the same as the wireless router part) within 2 feet of the modem and its built-in wireless router). In my case it was within 2 inches. The RJ45 cable between the two was rolled up in a loop with a twist-tie by the installer and he left it like that. So I took off the twist-tie, unrolled the cable and placed the wireless transmitter on the floor (the modem is on the TV table). Hopefully this helps.

I had also read of someone having issues with their WLAN when they were watching one HD show and recording another. Bell says that internet access and TV streams each have dedicated b/w so there shouldn't be a bottleneck on the access side. If wonder if the modem simply doesn't have the horsepower to process two HD streams and also perform WiFi routing.

Oh, and it's well known that the Sagemcom has a very weak signal. My desktop PC upstairs (on a Rockfish wireless dongle) frequently loses internet connection -- the wifi signal alternates between "very good" to "weak".

I think I need to disable the wireless on the Sagemcom, plug in my old Cisco and restore my old wifi network.

Downloaded this Android app called Netalyzr. It runs a fairly comprehensive set of tests on your network. Unfortunately it only runs on-demand and takes quite a bit of time (like 5 minutes or longer), so catching short-ish periods of "bad network" is not easy. Every time I've run it it lists a different set of issues, but quite often it lists issues with DNS. There are standard ones which sound like a normal thing Bell would do (block certain traffic type to standard ports on the DNS server) but then there are the others like DNS taking too long to respond.

Also it complains about excessive buffering in both up and downstream directions. For example right now there is a *red* report stating that my uplink has an estimated 1300 ms of of buffering -- "... this is quite high, and you may experience substantive disruption to your network performance when performing interactive tasks such as web-surfing while simultaneously conducting large uploads..."

Now, I don't typically do "large uploads" but with three Android tablets and two iPods, I wonder. I made sure to disable "cloud" access on the iPods back when I didn't have unlimited internet, but I never looked into the same for the Android tablets. I never signed up for Google plus but I think the girls did (e.g. a lot of my daughter's stuff she thought she lost when her tablet was broken she managed to recover because it was backed up automatically).

So, since I have unlimited internet I don't really mind them to have these backups. However in light of the Netalyzr report, maybe this is part of what's causing the intermittent issues? Any idea where this buffering is taking place? If it's in my modem, I should be able to find it and fix it, but I suspect it's further upstream.

P.S. The downlink buffering is estimated at 690 ms which is high-enough to give it an "orange" report in Netalyzr. The uplink buffering is the only "red" one right now.

Prags...I don't have a clue what the issue could be. Sorry!

I will download Netalyzr on my Android tablet and see what results I get.

Last night, watching something I'd downloaded. Using BubbleUPnP. Everything was fine until around 11:15, then it started stuttering every few seconds. At this point I'm just using the WiFi. Girls and my oldest were on bed, only my second oldest was watching some game videos on that site that Google just bought. He is on his laptop upstairs, I'm downstairs where the modem and router are. The TV I'm streaming to is quite into the router, so it's just Wi-Fi from the tablet to the router. Figure with better budding in the router for the external stuff and shaping the traffic to his laptop we should both be able to have glitch-free viewing. Just strange.

But usually it's the internet access.

Sorry Grammer-Lammer-Ding Dong, I forgot to download that Netalyzr app last night. Had to take the little one to soccer practice and then watched Anchorman with m'Lady. T'was a fine evening.