cable

Recently this website's been the target of malicious DDoS attacks.

But after accidentally leaking my home IP address in some network benchmarking clips in a recent YouTube video, the same attacker (I assume) decided to point the DDoS cannon at my home IP.

I have things relatively locked down here—more on homelab security coming soon!—but a DDoS isn't something most residential ISPs take too kindly. So it was time for me to recycle my home IP. Lucky for me, I don't pay for a static IP address. That makes home hosting more annoying sometimes, since I have to deal with tunnels and dynamic DNS, but it also means I can hop to a new IP address if one is under attack.

Getting a new IP address

At least with the DOCSIS 3.1 modem I'm using, the overall process is as follows:

SpaceX's Starlink internet service uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet to underserved parts of the world, especially places without easy access to cable or fiber.

SpaceX's Starlink beta opened up in my area, so I installed Dishy—that's the nickname for the large white satellite dish above—and I've been testing it and comparing it to my Cable internet.

I have Raspberry Pis monitoring my Internet—one on Starlink, and one on Spectrum. And I also have a power monitor measuring power usage. And I've tracked everything since day one to see if weather like snow and thunderstorms affect service, and how Starlink compares to Cable.

Here's the bottom line: Most of the time, I couldn't tell I was using Starlink. And that's good. Everything felt the same.

tl;dr: The cable is well-built and delivers 4K at 60 Hz without issue. And the DisplayPort end even uses the locking mechanism to ensure it's retained better—but it's also a tiny bit longer of a connector than most others, meaning it's not the best fit if your monitor needs to fit in a tight space!

When I upgraded my 2016 MacBook Pro, I decided to also replace my main external display (a 1080p 27" monitor) with a 4K UHD equivalent. Since I work on my computer all day, I find it's important to have as good a display (sharp, good color, etc.) as possible, to prevent eye strain.

4K displays are interesting beasts—there are so many pixels on these displays that even decent older laptops (like my former 2013 MacBook Air) couldn't drive a 4K display in native resolution, even if I had the proper mini DisplayPort cable.

tl;dr: If you need a long Lightning cable, this is one of the few reliable options. If you need the fastest charging possible for an iPad, stick to Apple's much shorter cable.

A year or so ago, the owner of NOYCE Labs sent me a sample iPhone-compatible microphone to test, and I really liked it—I still use it for impromptu recordings with my iPhone, in fact!

So when I got an email requesting I review NOYCE's latest product, the longest (at least that I know of) Lightning USB cable available on Amazon, I gladly accepted. NOYCE sent me their 13-foot-long (4 meters for the non-Imperial reader) Lightning cable, and I've used it for a couple months now, so I figured it was a good time for a review.

Tonight, after I made a couple changes to my wired in-house Gigabit network (I recently added a few Cat6 runs after moving my main Wireless router—in this case an AirPort Extreme base station), I noticed the Raspberry Pi webserver that was hosting www.pidramble.com wasn't reachable over the network, and Server Check.in started reporting an outage.

I have that particular device set using a DHCP Reservation based on it's MAC address, and it's been working like a champ for over a year. So something was strange, since I hadn't made any networking configuration changes on the Pi itself in a few months, nor had I unplugged it at all in the past month.

I spent the greater part of this afternoon trying to get my AirPort Express to connect to the Internet and share an IP address using a Motorola SB5101 Cable modem (with Charter Internet)... and since the solution was so simple and annoyingly stupid, I thought I'd post it here, for my reference and for anyone else spending an afternoon thinking his AirPort Express is dead.

As it turns out, the cable modem (this one, and likely many others) will only remember the MAC address of the first device it recognized when you last power cycled the modem.

When the Internet went down at my condo yesterday, I turned off my cable modem, plugged my Mac straight into it, turned the modem on, and use the internet via this direct connection for a while. When I plugged the AirPort Express back into the SB5101, I just got a flashing yellow (amber) light, and in the Airport Utility, a notice that the 'Internet Connection wasn't working'.

[UPDATE: It looks like there's a nice app available to jailbroken iPads via Cydia called 'Display Out' that will allow you to use the iPad with any external display, the way it was meant to be! Also, some other interesting comments down below...]

I bought the iPad VGA cable at the store today, hoping to be able to browse the web via Safari, show presentations using Keynote, and view slideshows on my monitor and on the projector, using the cable. A couple of these things are possible, but right now the VGA cable is pretty weak, and probably not worth the money.

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