Starlink may be lying about speed.

Today I did a quick speed test. 

• The first was with the official Starlink App. 
• The second one was via my favorite speed test website from Cloudflare. 

Download speed: 224 vs. 45 mbps. Starlink reports 5X as high a speed. 

Upload speed: 15 VS. 12. Seems pretty honest reporting. 

Latency: 40 vs. 50,5 ms. Latency is very hard to compare moment to moment, so let's say they both report honestly in that moment. 

So how is it possible that Starlink reports soo much higher download speeds? 

My guess would be that the satellite(s) detect the download speed test and simply generate or send from on-device memory some data. This would explain why the speed is higher: it doesn't mimic real internet traffic. 

Cloudflare on the other hand needs to get data from a data center, into a nearby ground station and then have it bounce around the globe between Starlink satellites till it finds one that's above(ish) our location. 

Again, that is simply my guess for the big discrepancy. My advise: don't be bamboozled by Starlink's own speed claims but use your own tests. 

Update van mijn Meshtastic experiment

Ik heb mijn Meshtastic Seeed T-1000e nu een week of 6 en ik heb tot nu toe 246 andere actieve nodes ontdekt tussen Amsterdam en Luik.  

Dat klinkt misschien als veel, maar als je bedenkt dat in bebouwde gebieden (lees: Noord-west Europa) de 868mhz band met laag wattage maar 2-3km bereik bied, dan snap je wel dat we er veel meer nodig hebben. 

Het valt me verder op dat veel mensen deze alleen even aanzetten om te experimenteren en dan weer uit zetten. Dit betekend dat je dus voordat er een ramp gebeurd niet goed kunt oefenen om te zien of je over grotere afstanden berichten kunt uitwisselen. Jammer dit.

Een aantal oplossingen zouden zijn om deze T-1000e of vergelijkbare goedkope LoRa apparaten in een houder met zonnepaneel te steken en deze op hoge gebouwen te plaatsen. Wat vrienden die op de bovenste verdieping van een flat wonen overtuigen er een aan te zetten en aan te laten zou ook al veel doen voor stedelijke dekking. 

Heb je zin om mee te denken en mee te praten over Meshtastic gebruik in Zeeland, Brabant en Limburg? Meld je dan aan voor de zojuist door mij in het leven geroepen Signal praatgroep via deze link. 

Open for work, starting now.

I'm about to get married this autumn 🍂 😃 🥳 

So naturally most of my time was spend helping my girlfriend fiancé move her stuff to my house.  And basically make it our house. So, most of my furniture is gone. The walls have different colors. My books move an entire floor and the floors have all changed from carpet to PVC. 😅

Anyways. It's been about one year ago that decided to take a sabbatical. 

I'm open to work again. So if you know an opening in 

• general administration
•  (technical) writing
• writing (technical) quotes
• or oracle PL-SQL development 
• Or something that's I have never done yet but would love to learn like Microsoft Dynamics

… then, let me know 😊. 

I'm looking for roughly 2/3 days per week work. Remote or on-site close to Breda, NL. 

Your help is greatly appreciated 💕 

Adobe Project Indigo

This new app from Adobe is another take on the older photography apps that help your iPhone make better high dynamic range (HDR) photos. 

The point of this app is to make the photo look like it was made on a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. 

The thing that I feel is still missing on iPhone photos is the deep saturation and very wide color gamut that you get by using such a (much more expensive) SLR camera. If that gap can be partially filled by using this app on my trusted iPhone 15 Pro, good. 

I'll give it a swirl and report back to you my dear readers. 👍

Has Signal usage collapsed? It seems so.

For daily communications I use either iMessage or WhatsApp. I have other options installed in my phone, like the p2p Keet app and the totally off-grid Meshtastic app, but those are barely used. 

Now that WhatsApp is going to show adverts I guess I might see some friends hate it and switch to Signal like they did last time WhatsApp was in the news in a negative way. 

The problem I guess is that too many people use WA daily and don't care about meta data leaking (loss of privacy) and don't care about seeing adverts either. 

They will keep on using WhatsApp anyways. 😥 

To test if anyone who installed Signal is ever opening it, I posted a "status" (yes, Signal has those too).

This is a screenshot from my "add story" screen in Signal. The point is to show "216 kijkers (viewers)"

As you can see here, I have 216 'viewers' on Signal. That's only 10% of the total amount of contacts I have on WA. 

So, after almost 24 hours and potentially 214 viewers, I got exactly one viewer. 

My current analysis is that Signal is almost dead. 

Hopefully this will change permanently after ads are shown too often in WA. We will see. 

TIL Perplexity can also find cars based on license plates

I strolled past an interesting looking van today. Me and my buddy Peter wondered if we could find what brand, model and year the car would be from. 

My guess would be a Hanemag or Unimog car from the '80. Kentekencheck.nl came up blank. 

But Lo And Behold. Perplexity was able to identity the car as a recent Russian car made by Uaz. 

That is one more use case were I won't be needing special websites or Kagi or another search engine for. 

Is self-hosting a decentralized blog possible?

I recently wrote a blog post on the perils of finding good hosting solutions for my blogs. My private blog janromme.com, as well as Seriousaboutech are both hosted on Blogger.com.  The downside of Blogger is that it injects advertisements unto my pages. Also, I can’t really access my blog files. It’s all accessible only through a web portal. So I am currently in the market for a good and cheap hosting solution. 

This got me thinking. What if we are all are doing hosting wrong? 

Hosting made sense when most people didn’t own their own always-on, always-connected devices. What if instead of looking up to big companies to do the hosting for us, or falling behind on our dev-ops skills in trying to self-host on a VPS, we should instead use easy to use self-hosting apps on our smartphone and laptop? The limitations of a smartphone or a laptop as a hosting device are (among other things): 

• Limited battery
• Bandwidth restricted
• Spotty 5G or Wi-Fi coverage 
• No self-owned IP4/IP6 address
• Behind a NAT 
• Limited access to your own device (iOS App Store restrictions come to mind).

All of these limitations can be overcome if we think not of one smartphone or one laptop as the single hosting device, but instead of a pool or swarm of these devices, scattered all over the globe. A recent hosting solution that already uses this principle exists today: it’s called NOSTR, short for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”.  Every file, audio, video, Markdown text or whatever, is cryptographically signed by the user who posts it. This means it can’t be tempered with, and it can be identified on several different relays that host the file. 

The downside of the current system is that it relies on kind persons who get a warm and fussy feeling form playing dev-ops on a rented VPS or home server. This is not a sustainable business model. 

What if each of the readers of my blog posts or viewers of the video files that I share, would automatically become a hoster, let’s say for 3 months after viewing? This automatic hosting means my mother (she’s close to 80, bless her hart) can do it too. It should be seamless to set up and forget. A build in bonus is that a popular blog post will automatically be hosted by more and more relays, in the same way that a popular torrent file is automatically seeded by more users as well. 

Almost all the pieces exist today:

• Automatic seeding/hosting/relaying of a downloaded file exists in the torrent sphere: Webtorrent.io shows how hosting inside the browser works by using WASM, WebRTC and JavaScript. And hundreds of nostr relays are in operation today. You can push your data to all the free relays by using a tool like blastr. 
• Punching through a NAT or circumventing the problem of not having a static IP4/IP6 address has several working solutions today: Holepunch, IROH, libp2p and WireGuard come to mind.
• Finding a blob on Nostr and showing it as a webpage is done by for example Njump.me, Blogstack and NoteStack.
• Even a NOSTR-relay-on-WASM exists already called snort worker relay.

If anyone knows of a project that is (close to) achieving a combination of these goals, please let me know 😊.

If you want to comment on this blog post, you can do so via nostr here, or on Hacker News.