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    1. Dominic Cummings tells MPs: You've missed your chance to stop no-deal Brexit

      Here's the source article in the Daily Telegraph: Dominic Cummings tells MPs: you've missed your chance to stop no-deal Brexit However, that's locked behind a hard paywall. So, here's the Reuters...

      Here's the source article in the Daily Telegraph: Dominic Cummings tells MPs: you've missed your chance to stop no-deal Brexit

      However, that's locked behind a hard paywall. So, here's the Reuters article reporting what the Telegraph said: Johnson's top aide says lawmakers can't stop no-deal Brexit - Sunday Telegraph

      12 votes
    2. Accidentally Solving Access Point Roaming Issues.

      I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories! I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years...

      I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories!

      I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years now, and overall, they've worked very well. 3 APs giving near perfect 5GHz VHT80 coverage on DFS channels. LAN transfers are about 600-650mbit on laptops, which has proven to be plenty for wireless clients in my home. Keep in mind that this is a pretty basic setup... besides the APs, there's just the ISP provided GPON ONT which is also a typical all-in-one ISP solution (router, switch, AP, firewall, DHCP server...) with it's Wi-Fi turned off.

      As I said, I was pretty happy with the results, however there was one feature that I could never get to work just right; roaming. You could be walking around the house watching a live stream and the stream would pause for 5-8 seconds until the roaming transition was over. Strangely, with VoIP calls, roaming would be about 3-5 seconds. Even enabling fast roaming features (which I believe is simply 802.11r) on the AP's controller would not give the results I was looking for. After days of tweaking TX power settings, channel selection and trying to implement Minimum RSSI (which I ended up not using), I finally gave up and resigned myself to the 4-6 seconds (oh, the humanity) of roaming time.

      Fast forward to about two months ago and I added a new router to the setup (UBNT ER-4) and a switch (UBNT USW-24). Setup went smooth, already had some cat.6 cabling around the house, now it was time to actually use it. Had some fun setting up a guest Wi-Fi network on it's own VLAN, which was always a concern of mine; having "untrusted" devices connect to my network. The access points do client isolation on guest networks by default, but in my mind it wasn't enough as I have some file servers and time machines on the network.

      Anyways, a few days after doing the setup I'm walking around the house with a livestream on my mobile and suddenly realize that it's not losing the connection. I try with a VoIP call and it worked flawlessly. I start walking around faster and still, the phone is roaming without an issue. I was very excited!

      I'm thinking it must be the router that somehow solved the roaming issue. My first theory was that the DHCP server on the ER-4 was doing it's thing much faster than the ISP's device, allowing the wireless clients to actually roam faster. So I do a web search and I find some very relevant info. It was a thread on a forum and reddit thread with a sysadmin that was about to give up on the APs because of roaming issues. In both threads, there were replies about what switch were they using.

      Apparently, some switches (Cisco and HP were mentioned), have a "MAC aging" interval setting which is way too high by default, or they simply have bugged firmware that doesn't allow the switch to "re-learn" the MAC address of a device on a different switch port. I assume that ISP provided "el-cheapo" gear has similar issues.

      So, if you're having roaming issues with your wireless clients, check your switches!!!

      Anyways, just wanted to share this story. Thank you for reading. :-)

      10 votes
    3. Tildĩstas, what is your guilty pleasure food?

      we need more casual questions in here (there are 4 topics specifically tagged casual on the first page rn), so let me cast the first stone to that lot. bonus style points if you link to what the...

      we need more casual questions in here (there are 4 topics specifically tagged casual on the first page rn), so let me cast the first stone to that lot. bonus style points if you link to what the food is if it's country specific/kinda esoteric/something most people wouldn't know

      21 votes
    4. Recent updates - repost warning, topic-tagging improvements, group-specific search, markdown strikethrough formatting, wiki/docs updates

      There have been a number of updates over the last week or so, but I felt like none of them really warranted their own post individually: There's now a repost warning/confirmation if you try to...

      There have been a number of updates over the last week or so, but I felt like none of them really warranted their own post individually:

      • There's now a repost warning/confirmation if you try to submit a link that's been posted before. A list of the previous posts will be shown along with how old they are, and you have the option of re-posting anyway if you want to. Currently, this will warn you no matter how old the previous post(s) were and regardless of which group they were in, but I'll probably restrict it at some point.
      • A couple of improvements to topic tagging:
        • If two people happen to edit a topic's tags at the same time, there will be an error if there's an edit conflict, instead of just having the second person's changes overwrite like they did previously.
        • @deing added a check for people trying to add tags with invalid characters, and it will now show that the tag has an error before you try to submit.
      • You can now search inside a specific group by using the search box while inside that group. The search results page will have a note at the top saying that it's only searching inside that group, along with a link to search the whole site instead. If you search from the home page it will still be site-wide.
      • Writing strikethrough text in markdown now requires using two tildes on each side of the text: this text ~~has some~~ strikethrough. Previously, one tilde on each side of the text would work too, but there were some strange edge cases because of us using ~ when referring to groups as well. Requiring two tildes should be a lot less ambiguous. About 90% of posts with strikethrough were already using two anyway, but this change affected a small number of past posts (sometimes in a positive way by fixing accidental strikethrough). I'll send messages out today to anyone with posts that were affected, so that they can go edit and fix the formatting if they want to.
      • @Algernon_Asimov has been doing a massive rework of a lot of the official docs/help pages. They're currently all in the ~tildes.official wiki, but I need to work on moving them over to https://docs.tildes.net, which involves making some changes and updates to that site.

      That should about cover it for now, let me know if you have any questions or notice any issues with any of this (or anything else).

      63 votes
    5. Proposals for new groups - July 2019

      It's been over a year now since we first talked about adding some more groups to the site (and ended up adding several). I think the current set has mostly worked well since then, but some people...

      It's been over a year now since we first talked about adding some more groups to the site (and ended up adding several). I think the current set has mostly worked well since then, but some people have mentioned being hesitant to post as many topics as they want to on some subjects due to not wanting to flood out the more-general groups, as well as feeling like some subjects also don't fit into the existing ones.

      So let's do another round of suggestions. New groups can be either top-level ones (if that seems to make the most sense) or a sub-group of an existing one (for example, this group, ~tildes.official is a sub-group of ~tildes). The functionality of sub-groups is a little weak right now, but I'll be working on that over the next few days to get it into better shape in case we end up adding some new ones.

      The general process from last time seemed to work fine, so I'm just going to copy that:

      Proposing a group

      If you want to propose an idea for a new group (either a new top-level group or a sub-group of an existing one), make a top-level comment with the following information:

      1. The proposed name for the group, and a short description of its purpose/subject.
      2. 3 examples of topics that would be appropriate to be posted in that group. These can be existing posts already on Tildes, or hypothetical new ones. Just example titles/links is sufficient, it should just give an idea of what sort of posts you're expecting the group to get.
      3. A "failure plan" - if the trial group doesn't work out, what should we do with the posts from it? For example, should they be moved into an existing group or groups, with a particular tag?

      Supporting a proposal

      To express your support for a proposal that someone else made, post a reply to it, saying something like "I would post in this group" (assuming you actually believe you will). I don't want to interpret votes on a proposal as support, and for a group to be successful it really needs people to post to it, so I think it's most important to get at least some indication that there are users that will post in the group if it's created.

      I'll let this topic run for at least 3 days before making any decisions, so don't feel like you need to rush. General questions or thoughts about groups are welcome too, it doesn't need to be entirely proposals. I've also topped given everyone 10 invites again as well. Thanks!

      74 votes