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Speeding Up Home Internet

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Router Settings to improve home internet performance

I’ve recently put together a few mini-projects with the goal of maximizing home internet performance. Below is how. First, a primer.

We’ll talk about:

-Choosing the right “speed” from your ISP (save your money, you don’t need extra bandwidth) -Setting up local DNS to improve query times -Bufferbloat and how to minimize it

ISP Speed

Readers here will probably understand that the topline “speed” number presented by your ISP is only one number, the max download bandwidth, and there are many other relevant numbers. Nexflix says you need 10 Mbps for an HD-quality stream. Games don’t need a lot of bandwidth. When I upgraded to Fios a few months ago, I had the option to pay for Gigabit internet speeds. But why? Unless I need more than 10 HD movies playing from Netflix at the same time, I don’t need more than 100 Mbps download bandwidth, which is what I chose.

In addition to the bandwidth number, there are other factors to consider:

-Upload speed is increasingly important as more people use the internet in a two-way fashion, mostly by using video chat functions and syncing large amounts of data into cloud services. Typically cable internet has much lower upload speeds, whereas fiber has matching upload and download speeds.

-Latency/ping time is how fast data travels from your computer out to the interenet and reaches its destination. It is certainly the most important number for gaming, where data needs to reach someone else very quickly, and also very important for video chat. It is measured in the number of milliseconds data takes to reach its destination. Fiber providers can get under 10ms of latency, whereas cable internet is typical noticably worse.

Raspberry Pi Temperature

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 15:19:58 +0000

A Raspberry Pi Temperature Sensor

When I found out we were having a baby, I immediately clicked into gear and started reading about how to raise an emotionally well-adjust 7-year old. But I was also concerned that the baby’s room would be too hot or cold and set out to make my, at the time, new Raspberry Pi into a temperature sensor.

There are plenty of tutorials on the internet. I am pushing the data to Sparkfun, and visualizing it with Google Charts. Here is the live temperature in my bedroom (or whatever room the Raspberry Pi is currently in):

And just in case I tire of keeping the Raspberry Pi on all the time, here is a screen shot of it:

Golf Swing Analysis Cameras

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 15:19:57 +0000

DIY 2-camera golf swing analysis

I decided to set up a portable 2-camera golf swing analysis system. Though my dream was a home golf simulator, I live in NYC, an no one has that much space. I will be making sure my suburbs home has 10’ ceilings in the garage or the basement.

This swing analysis setup has been done before, so I am only lending my voice to budget-friendliness and feasibility.

Ingredients

1 Windows laptop 1 download of Kinovea, open source sports video analysis software 2 PS3 Eye cameras - I paid $10.34 for both cameras 1 download of Code Laboratories single-camera driver for PS3 Eye - $2.99 2 USB extension cords - $10.98 2 Tripods with a smartphone “adapter” - $19.98

Setup

This post is exactly right – it does work to have two of the same cameras doing dual-capture, simultaneously. But the order you plug in the cameras is extremely important. Follow the directions in that post precisely. If it doesn’t work, the next time plug the first camera into a different USB port.

The tripods I bought are extremely flimsy. I guess that is why they are cheap. They can blow over in the wind. But so far the cameras have survived two falls.

You need the extension cords because you can’t get a good down-the-line and face-on view with the cord length of the PS3 Eye.

The cameras are really what makes this possible. You can spend thousands of dollars of cameras that have a high frame rate and can stream to a laptop. For some reason the PS3 Eye is super inexpensive. I do captures at 640x480 resolution and 60 frames per second. That is good enough to analyze a golf swing.

Kinovea isn’t designed for golf swings, but has all the functionality you need. Make sure to find the “sync videos at this frame” to make the playback on both videos match. I am still getting more advanced on the object tracking features. It would be nice to be able to time the movement of arms, shoulders, and hips in the downswing.

After all this, my takeaway is still too far inside.

Nyc Tax Assessment Challenge

Sat, 13 Feb 2016 15:19:57 +0000

Understanding NYC property tax assessment challenges:

You don’t need to let the seemingly complicated tax certiorari process beat you.

If you are New York City homeowner, sometime after January 15th, you received a “Notice of Property Value” from the city’s Department of Finance, showing your property tax increase as of July 1, 2016. Coops pay taxes as a building, not individually, though the same tax process applies.

If your taxes jumped, you are not alone. According to the Wall Street Journal assessments increased 10.6% from last year across the city. In Brooklyn, the increase was a staggering 18.2%. In my building, the increase was higher still.

Most people are confused by the jumble of numbers the DoF produces and don’t give the assessment a second thought. But the property tax system is not perfect, and conscientious buildings may challenge the City’s assessment of their property by hiring lawyers in a proceeding called tax certiorari. These lawyers will take between 12 and 20% of the total tax savings, only if they achieve a reduction. Sounds fair, right? Well, it’s not that simple.

Let’s say, for example, that I have previously been assessed $2 million, and the City raised my assessment to $2.2 million. And let’s assume the lawyer is getting 20% of the reduction (on the high end, but that is what the poorly-managed attorneys were making off my building). So if the lawyer successfully brought our taxes down $100,000, they’d take 20% of that – $20,000 – but we’d still be up $80,000. Right? Not exactly.

There is a state law that says the City can only implement an increase in our taxes over 5 years, 20 percent each year. So the hypothetical $100,000 tax increase – after our tax challenge was successful, remember it had been a $200,000 increase – only represents a $20,000 increase in year 1. That’s the same amount as our lawyer’s fee.

We are paying the lawyer the entirety of the year 1 tax savings. Then in year 2, the city will very likely raise our taxes again, and the lawyer will again take 20%. This process will go on every year. For owners and boards, the tax cert process is much closer to revenue neutral than it is a big bonanza. To see the benefit, you will have to think 4th dimensionally.

The reason to challenge your assessment is that your taxes would have been higher otherwise. Remember our tax increase of $100,000 after our successful challenge? Even though we paid the lawyers the entirety of the year 1 savings, as the City implemented the rest of that increase over the next 4 years, it was $20,000 at a time for a total of $80,000. If we didn’t challenge the assessment, we would have paid $40,000 in each of the 4 following years. This build up of past years’ increases is the “Transitional Assessed Value” line on your tax bill.

What should you do? It does make sense to challenge your property tax assessment each and every year. But owners and boards should understand that the benefit is not a large refund check. The benefit is in smaller increases in future years. As always, being an educated consumer can yield huge savings. Tax certiorari firms will charge what they are able. If your building’s firm is taking 20% of your savings upfront, renegotiate – or find a new firm – that will charge you less, let you pay over a period of years, or reduce their fee for settlements over consecutive years.