Jon mourns the death of a retail icon, reveals some useful Wi-Fi tools and sings the praises of VR technology that hits all the right notes.
Jon mourns the death of a retail icon, reveals some useful Wi-Fi tools and sings the praises of VR technology that hits all the right notes
The news that Fry’s Electronics has closed all of its stores across the US has left me rather upset. Yes, it was a bricks-and-mortar chain that sold computers and related peripherals. So does Currys PC World. But the difference couldn’t have been starker, at least in the distant past.
When I first visited San Francisco in 1991, I made visiting the Silicon Valley branches a “must do”. I was absolutely stunned by what I found. This place didn’t just stock computers – it had CPUs. All of them. In all speeds. Motherboards by the stack. RAM? Yes, all of that, in every flavour. There was enough stuff here for you to build any computer you might wish for. Then there were the shelves of tools and test equipment. And cables and adapters. Absolutely everything you could possibly want.
Going to Fry’s became a standard part of every trip I made to the US. It wasn’t unusual for me to go through the red channel at Heathrow with a receipt for $2,500 in components, useful items and widgets that were just unobtainable here in the UK.
To give you an idea of the magnetic appeal of Fry’s, let me tell you a tale. Back in 2005, a bunch of UK techies and journalists, including myself, were in Los Angeles for a Microsoft developer conference. The Sunday preceding the conference week was set aside for a press day.
We dutifully turned up, only to be told to leave by a very senior Microsoft head of development tools, because “you know too much and will be disruptive”. Smiling as we left, we decided that we had a day to fill. Fortunately, the previous evening, my friend Ian Murphy of Enterprise Times and I had visited LAX’s Hertz rentals to pick up a car. I spotted the Hummer H2, and we both decided this was a necessary toy for the week. Microsoft even did a video interview with us both sat on the bonnet.
Anyway, what were four men and a Hummer to do in LA on a sunny Sunday morning?
I suggested that we could go to Fry’s. Ian started looking for the local emporium. Then, for some inexplicable reason, I mentioned we could have a Caesar salad at Caesars Palace. Tim pointed out that it was rather a long way to go for a salad. Indeed, I said, but the new Fry’s had recently opened in Vegas.
We drove there and back in the day, enjoyed a wonderful wander around Fry’s and filled the boot area with essential technical items (aka “toys”) to bring back on the flight. The Caesar salad was exceptionally good too. Late that evening, we rolled back to our hotel in downtown LA, happy but tired. Let’s not mention the 106 gallons of fuel that were consumed, at a rate of about 5mpg. I still blush at the thought.
Why do I mention this? Because more recent trips to the US showed that Fry’s had fallen on hard times. The shelves were empty and there was far too much low-rent rubbish on sale. All the pizzazz had gone.
It is no surprise that Fry’s has failed, but I’m deeply saddened by the news. Unfortunately, Amazon does a better job, and I don’t have to fly to the US to browse the aisles. But it’s a moment that should be remembered. Fry’s was an institution, a champion of a past era. It will be missed. And it’s hard to see how Currys PC World can hold off against the onslaught of Amazon and the web too.
Pfizer jab and Bill Gates
This morning I had my first Covid-19 jab. It was the Pfizer-BioNTech version and I’ll be going back in three months for the top-up. My local GP practice was the very model of an efficient process – a proper workflow, plenty of staff and a rapid turnaround. The longest wait was the 15 minutes of cooldown after the jab to check I wouldn’t keel over.
However, since then, I’ve been having some strange thoughts. Although I’m typing this on my 16in MacBook Pro, my eyes are moving furtively over to the Dell XPS 15 that’s running Windows 10. I felt the urge to watch the video of Steve Ballmer making the famous plea to developers, and d it suddenly ddenly made sense e( ( pcpro.link/ 320ballmy 0ballmy).
Only now do I realise that his views on the iPhone and why it would fail against Windows Phone were ere entirely prescient cient ( pcpro. link/320ballmier link/320ballmier). Maybe there’s something in this “the Covid vaccine means Bill Gates can track you” nonsense that’s circulating on Twitter?
Hidden HMTL
There’s a growing rumble in the jungle
about HTML as used in email today. It has come to people’s attention that all of the unpleasant, hidden tracking tools that have been deployed in web pages have been in play in email for years. It’s just that we didn’t really notice it.
The growing number of tracking tools have been matched by a similar rise in add-ons and extensions for browsers that allow you to control the flow of information. In Firefox, which is my main daily browser, I use a number of them: AmIUnique for spotting the fingerprinting that some sites are doing; Decentraleyes does sterling work against content delivery networks; Privacy Badger blocks invisible trackers; uBlock Origin handles advertising spam. Similarly, FB Purity lets me regain control from Facebook over how I see things, while Facebook Container stops Facebook attempting to snoop into all of my other sessions.
So here’s the obvious question: why don’t we have this in email clients today? HTML has taken over as the predominant email format, allowing for nicely formatted text and a host of other useful capabilities. No one denies its capability. However, because the email is rendered within a container window inside your email client, there’s no way to wrest control of what’s going on. Especially for the more insidious items such as singlepixel tracking images.
It’s time that email client vendors stepped up to the plate. I don’t mind if this is done within the client or elsewhere along the chain; I would be quite happy if it could be done within my Office 365 E3 account, where all incoming email was scrubbed in line with my requirements. This tracking and snooping has to stop, and email will be the next battleground.
Synology says a hard no
I was intrigued to read the news that Synology has launched new high-end NAS boxes, but that there are restrictions on the drive s that can be fitted. It seems that you can continue to use almost any drive up to 4TB, but above that you must, on these new systems, use Synology’s own drives, called HAT5300 for the 3.5in hard disk, SAT5200 for the 2.5in SSD and SNV3000 for the M.2 SSD models.
My initial reaction was somewhat predictable: it’s doing this to force up prices. But a quick look on the web showed that the HAT5300 at 8TB size is around £241 inc VAT from one well-known online vendor, while an IronWolf Pro drive of the same size – one of my go-to devices for NAS – is only a few pounds cheaper at £216 inc VAT.
So evidently there isn’t some enterprisegrade price gouging going on. It is a well-known secret in the industry that those vendors who offer very large enterprise arrays will often discount their list price on drives by almost hilarious amounts, but that’s because they’re starting from a truly heroic amount of markup in the first place.
Synology says that it’s done this because it isn’t easy to work out exactly what firmware and version of a drive you’re buying from a third party (head to pcpro.link/320syn for the full statement). One reason I use IronWolf Pro drives is because of the enhanced SMART reporting from the drive into the Synology platform. I expect the HAT5300 drives to build on that and take things further.
Is this a good move by Synology? Only time will tell, but so far the claims and pricing add up. I have a bunch of Synology models with about quarter of a petabyte of storage in them; some are five to six years old now. I’m thinking that it’s time to start considering moving the primary devices into a secondary backup/ archive role, and buying new 2021 model year NAS boxes with the builtin 10GbE Ethernet ports. I’ve been impressed by the new DS1621XS+ that I bought as a test box in the lab – I didn’t go with the new Synology drives, but would certainly consider them in the future.
Metageeking out with Wi-Fi monitoring tools
The various tools from Metageek ( metageek.com) continue to be my daily go-to tools for monitoring what’s happening on Wi-Fi. The big daddy of its range is Chanalyzer, which, when used with the Wi-Spy DBx 3 USB spectrum analyser tool, allows you to peer deeply inside what is currently happening in your Wi-Fi space. I’ve lost count of the times where this has provided answers to the difficult question of “why is our Wi-Fi so slow?” And when you have to do advanced technical support for your family, having the right tool for the job is a godsend – despite the price tag.
I see that Wi-Spy now produces a unit that can pair with an iPhone or Android device. Called Wi-Spy Air, it allows you to have most of the power of Chanalyzer but in a package that can fit into a large pocket. For myself, I’m happy with the large Windows 10 view on my Dell XPS 15, but I can certainly see the benefit of this tool for more mobile users.
But that’s not all. There’s another big-ticket product called Eye PA that does graphical Wireshark on Wi-Fi channels. This can work with many built-in Wi-Fi chipsets, or you can use the Riverbed AirPcap Nx adapter, which I also have. Fire up Eye PA, point it at a Wi-Fi channel, hit record and, after a few minutes, dump the PCAP file into the Eye PA analysis tools for a fast, graphical dig through the data. If you’re more of a hardcore Wireshark user, just take the PCAP file over to that. I use both methods.
“When you have to do support for your family, having the right tool for the job is a godsend”
This came in very useful recently when I was trying to work out why I was seeing a small but mildly troubling amount of traffic emanating from my Netgear RAX200 router at home. As I’ve discussed in this column before, I now have three ADSL lines into the house (for domestic use and for line testing) but also have 1GbE fibre straight back to the lab for work requirements. The RAX200 was working in access point (AP) mode on the lab network, and every so often it started chattering. I could see this on the Chanalyzer heat map, which lit up every few minutes.
Eye PA did a ten-minute capture for me, and I loaded up the PCAP file into the analysis software. It was clear that something was chattering away, but only sometimes. Digging into that section of the data recording showed a lot of broadcast traffic on the network. This led me to the IP address of one of my core Synology NAS boxes. And thence to a software monitoring package called Domotz ( domotz.com), which I had installed to try keeping an eye on the wider network state.
As you’d expect, with the benefit of hindsight, Domotz was regularly reaching out onto the network to see what was happening. This traffic went straight through my Wi-Fi unit and appeared as “over the air” noise.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with Domotz doing this – it is, after all, doing what it is designed to do. I confess I looked at Domotz, found the user interface to be interesting but strangely impenetrable, and after the useful trial period expired I decided not to sign up for the time being. But
I’d forgotten to uninstall the software from the Synology NAS.
To cut to the chase, Eye PA allowed me to find this Wi-Fi noise very simply. I could, of course, have just dived into a Wireshark session, but doing this on Wi-Fi is far sexier. And it was a good reminder that most business and enterprise Wi-Fi units run as access points, and so don’t have the benefit of NAT (network address translation) to keep out such lowlevel network chatter.
There’s another tool in Metageek’s arsenal. Called InSSIDer, it’s aimed at the small business user. It provides much of the capability of Chanalyzer, and also supports the Wi-Spy spectrum analysis and integrated packet-capture tools, if you have those options. I’ve found it useful, simply because it has a more recent version of the Metageek core engine within it. With Chanalyzer, I was finding that it wouldn’t correctly highlight the 802.11ax traffic patterns from my RAX200. I did some Eye PA capture files and sent them to the consistently helpful support team at Metageek. They found some unusual traffic in the RAX200 broadcast streams and have promised to fix it in the next bug-fix drop, which is due in a few weeks.
The reality is that Wi-Fi is hard. Frankly, it’s a minor miracle that it works at all. And to get near 1Gbe speed through 802.11ax on 5GHz is quite astonishing. It’s great when it works and a real pain when it doesn’t. Wi-Fi congestion in suburban areas has never been so bad, and sorting out the mess needs tools. Yes, of course there are some cheap or even free Wi-Fi visualisation tools for iOS and Android that can give you some level of insight. But when you want to know exactly what’s going on, you need to wheel out the big guns.
Other tools I like? I’m quite a fan of NetSpot ( netspotapp.com), which is available on macOS and Windows 10. This allows you to do walk-around measurements of a house of office, marking the test locations on the map. And then it will generate heat maps to visualise a whole range of tests and results. The Pro version isn’t too expensive and allows you to do over the air iPerf3 testing against a local server. This can prove invaluable at working out why a laptop is slow in a particular conference room – sometimes the Wi-Fi signal level isn’t enough information. I also like VisiWave ( visiwave.com) for doing larger site surveys. This can drive its acquisition through GPS data, and this is especially useful when doing a walk-around of a larger campus area, for example.
None of these tools are perfect and it’s an indictment of Wi-Fi that we have arrived at this mess. But with the right tools, it shouldn’t be too hard to work out what is going wrong.
VR hits high notes
I’m not sure what to make of Massive Technologies( massive technologies. ca). At first glance, it simply appears to be a jolly good implementation of augmented reality – but then you look closer at the virtual reality pianist demonstration.
The pianist is appearing to play the music you hear. Except that the music is actually a recording from a real performer. What this company has done is to develop a method by which it can extract musical pitch notation in real-time from an existing recording. That’s no mean feat, but it’s not totally extraordinary.
“The reality is that Wi-Fi is hard. Frankly, it’s a minor miracle that it works at all”
What really made my head turn is that it can then generate the image of a pianist playing the music. It isn’t clear just how much processing time is required to do this, but the videos are compelling.
There’s one particular piece where the pianist starts playing, the hand and finger movements are nigh-on perfect, and then the score that’s being played appears above the keyboard ( see screenshot below). All of this is viewed from the moving perspective of a VR headset.
To say I am stunned is an understatement. Few of you will know that I studied as a pianist in my teens to a pretty good standard – I was a stand-in rehearsal pianist for Pascal Rogé for Brahms’ Piano
Concerto No. 1 conducted by Sir Charles Groves. I still have my Steinway grand piano, which my wonderful parents bought for me when I was 11.
But I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s beautiful and utterly terrifying at the same time. It’s either an extraordinary breakthrough or a staggering abuse of technology. And I can’t decide which.
PC Pro podcast
“And finally Cyril.” “And finally Esther.” (One for those with very long memories.) A little reminder to come along to the PC Pro podcast recorded live every Thursday at 1pm for an hour.
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PC Pro readers there, and they don’t shy away with their thoughts and feedback. Indeed, nor should they. jon@jonhoneyball.com