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Published on November 30, 2015 at 08:19PM
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Published on November 30, 2015 at 01:58PM
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Published on November 30, 2015 at 12:01PM
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Hi, my name is Paul, I’m a computer technician and I’m stuck using Comcast/XFinity. I’ve worked at seven sites with XFinity branded Technicolor routers, and I have one in my house. It should be noted I’ve had to disable WiFi on nearly every one of them due it it not working particularly well. Based on my experiences when I saw the claim that XFinity delivered 2X the WiFi performance of Google Fiber I thought “Hrmm, that sounds like a load of horse shit.”
So here’s the advertisement, it’s coming across Facebook as we speak:
You can click the image, it’ll take you to a comparison page where they claim that XFinity will deliver 725Mbps WiFi vs Google Fiber’s 306Mbit per second. Huh, wow, a service that generally tops out at 50Mb can deliver 725Mbps vs a service that tops out at 1000Mb and can deliver 306Mb.
I’m using the average speed as 50mbit as that’s what average is here, but according to a quick search the average Xfinity package is 25Mb.
If you’re not catching the problem right off, that’s what Xfinity is hoping. In these situations you’re always limited to the slowest portion of the connection is the best you’re going to receive. In XFinity’s claim, the maximum internet speed you’re going to get is about 50 Mbit. This means Xfinity will serve you internet via WiFi at 50 Mbit at max.
If they had better internet speeds, they could serve you 725Mbps, but 25-50Mbps is what you’re going to get.
Now, Google Fiber, equal or less expensive (at over a year, those are introductory prices on the Xfinity page,) tops out at 1000Mbit, costs $70 a month, and can deliver 306Mbit of that 1000Mbit.
The actual comparison is 50Mbit vs 306Mbit, in which case using Xfinity’s own advertising they’re saying Google Fiber spanks them by 6X on in-home WiFi. Google Fiber is 12X better if you’re paying for a 25Mbit XFinity package.
Now, should you need to copy multiple terabytes of data via WiFi between two devices in the same network (you don’t need to, really,) you might want to dispute my findings, but for any realistic use of the service they’re making claims that don’t play out in reality.
XFinity is advertising having an 8-lane WiFi highway you can drive a Pinto at 25mph whereas Google has a three lane highway you can drive at 306mph. Sure in the XFinity scenario you can park next to another car and run back and forth to the next cars at 725Mph, but that’s not getting you anywhere.
Xfinity claiming 2X faster WiFi than Google Fiber by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.
Published on November 30, 2015 at 10:59AM
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The Christmas season is nearly upon us, and that means it’s time to choose your gifts, schedule the Christmas parties and take the Christmas lights out of the loft. The internet has made shopping and arranging parties more convenient — so far, so obvious — but it’s made Christmas lights easier to control too. In this article, we’ll show you how how to get started.
Instead of turning on and off your Christmas lights by flicking on and off a plug on the wall, you can do it on your phone. This is achieved using a smart plug — literally an internet-connected plug.
Simply connect all of your Christmas lights together using a 4- or 6-way extension lead, then into the smart plug, and you’ll be in business. Open the app on your phone, and you can turn your lights on and off, whether you’re in the same room or a different continent. You can also do more clever things, like automatically turning the lights on at sunset or connecting multiple lights on different plugs and controlling them independently.
Of course this isn’t just useful for Christmas lights; the rest of the year you could use it to turn on a coffee machine, lamps or whatever other appliance you like.
We have a few options along these lines at Mobile Fun. D-Link do a cheap Smart Plug with an easy-to-use app, which offers energy use tracking and overheating protection as a nice bonus. You can get this as a single plug or a discounted pack of three.
Energenie also do a starter pack for a similar price, offering three plugs, a hub and a remote. Their offering can also use the stellar If This Then That (IFTTT) service, which lets you set up more complex routines. For example, you could turn on your lights earlier if the weather is bad, or coordinate with other elements in your smart home.
So there you have it – an easy way to control your Christmas lights using your Android or iPhone. Let us know what you think in the comments below, and stay tuned for more Christmas light control options in future articles!
I woke up today to some errors involving SSL at work, about eighty emails from places wanting to inform me of their Cyber Monday deals, and a wicked hangover from a carbocoma I’d been fueling for a couple of days with Thanksgiving leftovers.
This is just a collection of random thoughts written down while doing some server maintenance.
Upon getting to work I had multiple texts involving various 4K TVs and flash sales on them (I’ve got a TV from 2004 that hurts me to look at,) and I kept noticing that every single one was more or less not a good deal. Here’s a good one claiming to be a $1600 savings, but when I checked the MSRP and the incredible $1600 savings ends up being about a 14% sale. Oh well. Supply and demand. I see no great Cyber Monday deals. Oh yeah, if someone wants to buy me a TV feel free.
Playing with Maggie’s Amazon Fire Kids Edition (on sale for $84.99 now, extremely decent deal,) I decided I wasn’t going to let her grow up in an Amazon isolated ecosphere and I put Google Play on it (conflict of interest link included as I’m not cut and pasting it over here).
That tablet (which is the same hardware as the $49 version,) is actually a pretty decent machine. I think they’re selling it at a loss to keep you in the Amazon ecosystem and make it up on the back end.
While investigating some SSL and disconnect issues I fired up Microsoft Edge. I never use it. As in I’ve opened it once to see if a problem I was having with Chrome was in fact Chrome or my connection. Anyway, I opened Edge and went to YouTube and was greeted with a thumbnail of a woman giving birth as the first recommended video with all bits visible, the rest was Hindi softcore porn and top-x lists from the early 2000s.
Clicking on the first (which I edited in the pic here,) brought up a warning that it might not be safe for all audiences. Hrmm. You’d think they’d have changed the thumbnail slightly. It was odd.
There were a few hours this weekend when I lost contact with my VZW friends. Evidently they had a mass outage. Combined with that the new Hangouts has decided to deliver SMSes whenever it feels like it so I’m moving off of it as I noticed one at 10:40 that was sent at 4pm asking me if I wanted to do something that night. *sigh*
I got to spend a lot of Black Friday at work diagnosing what the hell was wrong with a Netis 1200 router. I’m to the point I think it’s DOA (wouldn’t do 2.ghz out of the box, loses settings, has to update the firmware just to get Bridge mode to somewhat work, poisoned the connected routers and shut down my network by advertising it was the gateway to everything, rassafrassa) – have another one and will know soon enough if it’s a hardware failure or just a crappy product.
Got a Chromecast 2 I’ll be playing with later today. My old Chromecast gets to go to work and become the conference room Chromecast as I’m getting tired of people asking for a 100 foot HDMI cable.
Finished Tomb Raider, the reboot that was offered for free on XBOX Gold. Overall feel it was a disservice to the Laura Croft character and physics in general, but it was amusing. Seemed like it was nearly impossible to lose on normal difficulty. Tried to start another free game “So Many Me” but it required an update of nearly a gig and the console was already downloading about a gig of updates for Batman.
As a bit of an update on the site, the SEO fixes have leveled the site out. Unfortunately with only me writing for Pocketables now we have about 1/5th of the content we used to. I’m not sure how people above are going to look at this, but I accomplished what I was attempting. Unfortunately now properly ranking for how to root an HTC EVO 4G and all the stuff we wrote about last year doesn’t help too much. FML.
Thanksgiving projects through Cyber Monday shenanigans by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.
In retrospect, this is a review that should have been posted pre-Halloween as the mad-scientist looking 1byone Plasma Ball doesn’t particularly fit anywhere else except at a costume party.
The 1byone Plasma Ball is a Bluetooth speaker, a Micro-SD card player, and a plasma lightning ball that responds to touch. In each aspect there’s a level of neat, but combined there’s something to nitpick at every level.
The plasma ball by itself is very neat, but in conjunction with music it doesn’t have any wow effect. The lightning shuts off when the music is at a reasonable volume and only pops on at the top 10% or so of the range. This means unless you’re listening to a solid wall of sound (or have it cranked to 11,) the ball stays off most of the time. Fortunately there’s a switch to lock it on and keep it on.
The speaker is loud, but not particularly clear. Perfect for playing The Monster Mash or such, but at low volumes it’s not particularly amazing.
One of the things you think when you think “Bluetooth” is wireless. Well, you can forget about that. This needs to be plugged into a USB power supply at all times. It doesn’t appear to support USB audio so you’ll still need to pair it if you want to use it from your computer.
Speaking of pairing, I paired with no issues last week, walked in expecting it to work with no issues today, nope. A weekend of being plugged into a consistent power supply that’s powered by a computer power supply behind two UPSes and a line conditioner (I’m saying there were no power fluctuations,) and the device was brain dead. I had to physically remove power from the device and plug it back in in order to re-pair it.
It may sound like I hate it, but I don’t. It’s just a little bit of a disappointment as a speaker (except it is very loud, I do give it that.) As a Plasma Ball it’s pretty cool though.
The 1byone Plasma Ball Music Speaker is currently out of stock at Amazon
1byone Plasma Ball Music Speaker review by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.
No, the Nexus 6P doesn’t have wireless charging.
Although a common feature on earlier Nexus devices, Google didn’t include the technology on the latest Nexus phones, the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X. In a Reddit AMA interview session, Google engineer Hiroshi Lockheimer stated that they ditched the tech because USB-C solves a lot of wired charging problems and they wanted a thinner phone:
We added Qi wireless charging starting with N4 because plugging in USB micro B was such a hassle! (Which way is up!?) With this year’s Nexii, we support USB Type-C which has a reversible connector so there’s no more guessing. AND it charges incredibly swiftly: 1% to 100% in 97 mins on the 6P for example (the first ~45 mins of charging is especially fast). Meanwhile, wireless charging adds z (thickness). So, ease of plugging in + fast charging + optimizing for thinness made us double down on Type-C instead of wireless!
As referred to in that statement, the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X do have a new form of fast charging, courtesy of their novel USB-C connector. When using an appropriate 15W USB-C charger, operating at 5V and 3A, it’s possible to get 7 hours of battery life out of just 10 minutes of charging on the 6P. To learn more about fast charging on the new Nexus phones, see our guide to rapid charging on the Nexus 6P and 5X.
Does this answer your question? Let us know in the comments below!
