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"Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of pulses of the analog signal per second. A signal that has two voltage states can convey two bits of information per symbol.

"Bit rate" refers to the amount of digital data conveyed. If there are two states per symbol, then the baud rate and bit rate are equivalent. 56K modems used 7 bits per symbol, so the bit rate was 7x the baud rate.

This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).

I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simply as an attempt to gather as much data as possible, I connected the oscilloscope to see what the signals looked like. And, because, why not. I had driven 2+ hours to get there, might as well try everything! I didn't expect it to actually be able to decode the signals. I was surprised to find a correlation between the modem losing sync and a visually-distinct pattern appearing on the scope though.

I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.

Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.

Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.

This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.

I'm curious what you mean by this. I've never had trouble syncing files with the Nextcloud client, inside or outside of my LAN. I didn't do anything special to make it work internally. It's definitely not the fastest thing ever, but it works pretty seamlessly in my experience.

- A new Honda Accord LX in 2003 was ~$19k

- A new Honda Accord LX in 2020 was ~$23k

In today's dollars, that's roughly $33k and $29k, respectively. These numbers are very approximate, but it means the same car model in 2020 was about 12% less expensive than the one in 2003. And the new version has a whole lot of improvements and features the old one didn't. (They cheaped out and removed the lock from the glove compartment though!)

Stepping back and thinking about the complexities that go into manufacturing a modern automobile, it's wild to me that they can cost so little compared to what you get. It's a machine that can travel 200+ thousand miles and last for decades with barely any maintenance.

Commercial-scale vehicles (semi trucks, busses) cost an order of magnitude more than personal vehicles, yet share many of the same complexities. Like, how are cars so cheap for what they are? Manufacturing volume, I guess.

After that experience, I replaced it with a Davis Instruments Vantage Vue, which has been running for 10 years without a single issue. Just needs periodic cleaning and battery replacements. Someone also made a device that goes inside the console to provide local access to the weather station (for Home Assistant integration, for example). It's called WifiLogger2. Pricy, but recommended if you want to pull the data from the console easily. I've also set up two more of these weather stations for family, and they've been similarly stable. So my experience with Ambient Weather left a bad taste. I'd rather pay the higher cost for Davis Instruments hardware that I know will work for a long time, than roll the dice with Ambient Weather ever again.

It's also telling that a search for "davis instruments weather station" on Amazon suggests the WS-2902, followed by actual Davis Instruments products. I imagine Ambient Weather is spending a lot of money for that search placement.

It sounds like there may be a hardware problem with your printer. Did you buy it assembled or do it yourself? You may want to contact Prusa about this, because I can confirm this is not normal behavior for this printer.

For a visual aid, these are pictures of the replacements parts: https://www.partstown.com/panasonic/PANA010T8K10AP https://www.partstown.com/panasonic/PANF202K3700BP

Details if anyone is curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/printers/comments/r04j3s/trying_to_...

I am also perplexed by this. As someone who obsessively tracks and categorizes all my spending, I have not observed a significant upward trend in my grocery spending. And I have data in a spreadsheet which confirms this. I'm honestly not sure what I'm doing so differently than the general population which perceives prices as skyrocketing.

While most goods are slightly more expensive, egg prices have been a notable outlier, which I believe was more an effect of culling due to bird flu rather than inflationary. If anything, the most notable cost increases I've observed are in restaurants and takeout places, not grocery stores.

It's entirely possible these costs are highly region-specific, so it's interesting to hear different takes on it.

You're not too far off :)

It's actually hosted on super cheap shared VPS with only 768MB of RAM and a single CPU core. This is the first time it's seen any real heavy traffic, and all considered I think it did pretty well with such limited resources.

I did a little postmortem investigation and, surprisingly, it wasn't CPU-bound. A low memory condition killed the database service a couple times. It looks like PHP-FPM was set to scale too aggressively. For the future I've reduced the number of workers it can spawn. Server administration is not my specialty, so this was a fun learning experience!

I simplified the story a bit for brevity. I actually tried a bunch of different font styles, including a 47 page fax using a pretty large size Courier (with only 72 characters per line). The screenshots from the blog post were after the point I decided OCR wasn't working, so I was using a heavily reduced font size to optimize the transfer time. Hence the characters looked like barely-legible blobs.

The Fax-to-Binary converter isn't doing anything particularly complicated with the image, just breaking it up into an accurately-aligned grid and hashing the pixel data of each tile.

Replacing the characters in the document hadn't occurred to me at the time! It's a good idea, but for my programmer brain, writing this software was the easier (and more fun) solution :)

Should we discover any more files to recover from the laptop, I may explore this avenue a bit further. If the ZTerm software is present, the trickiest part might be physically connecting the serial port to something else. Not an insurmountable problem.

The transcription errors I was getting were not consistent. Like, D would be O or 0 or D, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it. And the turnaround time on each fax attempt was long enough that I focused on doing the image recognition myself instead.