Hi all - I need some help troubleshooting my internet and really don't feel like dealing w/ customer service reps. I don't consider myself a tech savvy person, so I'm wondering what this community might know..

I've been having issues with my internet for a while. we have xfinity with a plan that promises up to 1000mbps. I'm lucky if i get up to 250 on a good day. beyond that, we constantly lose connection, or get very slow connectivity. i'm using a Netgear c7000v2 as my modem/wifi router combo paired with a Google Nest Mesh router. My home is roughly 1000 sqft footprint split level. my computer is in a different room, but there's no doors between and about 600 ft from the modem/mesh routers.

i called xfinity to talk about the issue, they said that my modem likely needed to be replaced. the initial modem was also a Netgear c7000v2, but i figured maybe the hardware just burnt out(?) they sent me an xfinity modem, and everything seemed to work great (still not 1000mbps, but definitely better). when I realized they were charging me more than I was willing to pay monthly for a rental fee on the modem, i decided i'd go back out and buy a new modem. i bought a Netgear c7000v2 again, because it should be able to handle those speeds, and to my understanding is a decent enough modem. i also bought a new coaxial cable to double check. but after replacing, my internet is still spotty and constantly goes in and out.

i don't have any device to plug directly into the ethernet cable (because it's 2023...), so i can't pinpoint the issue through that. i haven't had an xfinity tech come out yet, because apparently that takes anywhere from 6-8 weeks to get a visit...

any ideas on what i should do? part of me is convinced that xfinity is throttling my internet because I'm not using their modem and paying them a rental fee, but i don't want to give into conspiratorial thinking...i'm about to file an FTC complaint on them because I'm just fed-up at this point.

For context I did not grow up reading books, came to it in my early twenties and found I preferred historical, academic or social books. Therefore reading really felt like a chore and I struggled.

Read what I would consider my first novel/story book last year which was The Iliad and found that I quite enjoyed it, decided I was going to try something else. The Lord of the rings came to mind as I have rewatched the movies countless times, I researched recommendations on editions and how to read, therefore I started with the Hobbit back in June.

I just finished reading the last book of the trilogy today, which compared to my previous reading habits is lightening fast. And I am a little sad, I will read the appendices but am uncertain what to do next. I'm thinking unfinished tales and then the silmarillion.

Wondering if anyone has any suggestions, also about any other series or universe to read about after these, preferably with movies that I can watch before hand as it helps me with imagining what I'm reading.

Edit:
First of all I wanted to thank everyone for sharing your ideas, it has been immensely insightful and I feel like there are a lot of possibilities for me to pursue even if not immediately but in the near future.

I've decided I'm not quite ready to leave middle earth yet and so I will be persuing the silmarillion, and then unfinished tales. Any thoughts on tom bombadil?

After this the following quite interested me:

• prince of nothing
• the resurrection OST
• dune

I feel like I might actually start with dune as it will be a foot in the door into sci-fi but let's see

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I am faced with an unusually busy year this year between work and school. I have one window for a vacation between December 27 and January 7. My planned travel companion can no longer come along. My ticket can be changed to most destinations worldwide.

Before I choose to go alone or to not travel this year, I decided to ask this community the following question. Is there anyone who lives on a continent I consider less risky to visit alone, who would be open to a meetup and provide some local travel advice? I understand that many people fiercely protect their anonymity and I am not trying to convince anyone. If no one responds, that is fine.

I also don't need or want handholding or babysitting. I am a middle aged, american married woman with some health issues. I am a moderately experienced traveler.

If you are open to discussing this possibility, please feel free to reply or message.

Apologies to my friends in South and Central America and in Africa. I need this trip to be relatively easy and to feel 99 percent safe while traveling alone.

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

The vaccine antigen technology, developed by the University of Cambridge and spin-out DIOSynVax in early 2020, provided protection against all known variants of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – as well as other major coronaviruses, including those that caused the first SARS epidemic in 2002.

The studies in mice, rabbits and guinea pigs [...] found that the vaccine candidate provided a strong immune response against a range of coronaviruses by targeting the parts of the virus that are required for replication.

Professor Jonathan Heeney from Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, who led the research, [said] “We wanted to come up with a vaccine that wouldn’t only protect against SARS-CoV-2, but all its relatives.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1002345

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-023-01094-2

I have Bipolar I with minor psychosis, CPTSD and OCD. I was born into an emotionally abusive family, and they are the only people i know, because i am also chronically alone and have dealt with feelings of loneliness on some level since i was a young kid. I had some online friends who helped me a lot with mental health issues but i lost access to them. The main reason im suicidal is because i feel like i have really bad luck. No matter what i do it ends up amounting to nothing. Everytime i start having hope i lose it because something bad happens to me again.
I hear about mental illness and people having a successful life despite it and despite feeling hopeless, but i just dont see that its possible to ever have a life worth living.
I really hope there are other people who relate, or maybe people who used to be that hopeless but ended up living a good life.

I've been climbing for about 2 years now and yesterday I was finally able to complete my most difficult route yet without stopping for a break! I've tried this 6C about 15 times or so and only finished it twice, but I usually fall or have to stop to rest in the middle, so I was really pleased I did it in one!

What about you guys?

(P.s apologies if this is the wrong place for this. At first I was going to post in ~sport but that looked more like pro sport news)

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

So the discussion at https://tildes.net/~movies/1ar2/martin_scorsese_says_fight_back_against_comic_book_movie_culture_by_supporting_directors_like made me think about mainstream Hollywood way of movies versus - well everyone else? I am not even sure I like the term "arthouse" movies, because movies are movies regardless of the boxes we put them in, but for the sake of the argument movies that don't fall in the category of traditional mainstream storytelling. Is it just French artsy fartsy pretentious weirdness or is (quote) real cinema (unquote)?

I think my movie habits have been pretty average. I am not American, but most of what I have watched during my lifetime have been Hollywood productions. By a huge margin. In recent years I found myself going more and more bored with both movies and tv series from whatever the algorithms at the streaming services were pushing to me. Not that it was bad, just felt more and more like a product designed after a specific set of criteria aimed at my taste demographic. So I forced myself to break out of the bubble and watched movies totally outside my comfort zone with something I am sure the algorithms would never have recommended me. Started with movies by Kieslowski and Wong Kar-wai. And since then I feel like a whole new world of movies has opened up for me. Not that everything is magically great. There are still pretentious French movies that make me roll my eyes, but most of all it is something different. Story telling rules I thought couldn't be broken are thrown in the air and something completely unexpected appears on screen instead.

It takes some getting used to. I really struggled with a good deal of self-doubt whether I could actually understand these movies, because I have studied film theory or went to art school. At the end of the day it is really just about watching things intuitively and trying not to analyze everything or thinking about what things are supposed to mean, and be curious to why the movie does things that maybe the complete opposite of the film techniques I was used to from more mainstream movies.

This is not to bash at the Hollywood blockbuster way of filmmaking, because when that formula works - it really damn well works. But so can something completely different like Hlynur Pálmason's Godland, Haneke's Funny Games or Bujalski's Computer Chess - just to name a few of my recent very compelling movie experiences.

I've taken on the monumental task of scanning my family photo albums in and saving them to a NAS (plus cloud, of course). 1000+ photos in, and I had the great idea of also banging through the images with AI to clean them. Anyone who plays with AI knows it can be a little hit-and-miss. The tool of choice was GFPGAN and in some images it cleaned them lovely, others, not so much.

To help sort this out I'm looking for a side-by-side image viewer, similar to something simple like Gwenview, that allows me to look at the files and simply pick the better image. I'm not sure this software even exists after the exhaustive time I've been looking for it. I'm on Linux, so that may be the hindrance here. Brownie points if I can pick the better image, and it copies the file to a new folder to allow building out a mixed bunch of files from the two source folders.

Absolute worst case, I'm willing to put some money in a pot for someone to develop this very needed tool. Best case, if the software doesn't exist and they build it for timasomo.

Note: Tried XNView but it won't compare across folders.