With Jim having major internet problems this week, Mike covers most of this shorten show. He talks about this work with Blue Iris with DeepStack AI and a replacement modem for the Cox rental. I think you will enjoy the show.

Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg448

Join Jim Collison / @jcollison and Mike Wieger / @WiegerTech for show #448 of Home Gadget Geeks brought to you by the Average Guy Network.

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Blue Iris Security System enhancement with DeepStack AI (https://deepstack.cc/) server running in Docker. This suggestion came from JP Simmonds in the Discord with his link to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwoonl5JKgo&list=WL&index=4&t=41s

Mike upgraded to the Arris Surfboard SB8200 DOCIS 3.1 modem and doubled his speed and lowered his wifi interference.  – https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DY16W2Z/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Jim Collison  [0:00] 
This is The Average Guy Network and you have found Home Gadget Geeks show number 448 recorded on June 11 2020.

Jim Collison  [0:22] 
Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all your favorite tech gadgets that find their way into your home news reviews, product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host Jim Collison broadcasting live from eautiful Mike. We had I don’t know eight or nine really hot days in a row seemed like and then thunderstorm rolled three guys everything survived the it was windy, like that storm came through and it was it was windy yesterday.

Mike Wieger  [0:45] 
Yeah, our neighborhood wasn’t bad. We didn’t get hit that bad. I there were just certain pockets around Omaha that got hit pretty bad. Yeah,

Jim Collison  [0:51] 
yeah, that that presented an opportunity last night. Of course we went from the 90s down into the 70s. And it was like Zero humidity and it was gorgeous. And Sammy Sammy and I spent the evening with a little screwball and a couple cigars well for me she still won’t smoke cigar but in really enjoy the evening hopefully got Did you get outside to

Mike Wieger  [1:13] 
enjoy? I’ve been outside like for the past two weeks I have. I’ve got out of my basement, I set up office on my back patio. And I have sat under there every single day all day. And that’s kind of where I’ve been working from now. Even during the rain. I just sit back there. It’s great.

Jim Collison  [1:27] 
Nice. Yeah, you got that big overhang? That’s pretty nice. Yeah, that will be it seems like the guys will not let up on a meetup. Even in the middle of a pandemic, on Twitter. They have been relentless about a meetup. guy. I need to do one. I know but it’s a pandemic right now. Like, let’s just let’s get through this first. Yes. We’ll get we’ll get a meet up. Of course, we’ll get some show notes as well and we’ll post those out at the average guy. tv Don’t forget you can also join us live on the mobile app Home Gadget geeks.com will get you there. If you want to get that Done, we want to thank our Patreon subscribers for that. And don’t forget on Patreon as well, we’re giving away the coins again and I left them on the desk you can kind of see. Let’s see right over there, right up there. And thanks, Big thanks to Ron who printed some more of those are available for you. Little $5 pledge on Patreon and I will mail it out to you my mail guy knows me now when I bring him in. He’s just a cheap option. Yeah, let’s just four bucks. So we’ll send those out to you and appreciate you doing that on Patreon. Don’t forget, you can follow the show schedule as well. And we’ll talk about the schedule here in a minute, but the average guy.eventbrite.com if you want to see what’s coming up or scheduled out through to four to 450 show number 450. Dave McCabe is coming back to talk a little bit about lawn care. So we’ll talk about this more head out there if you want to get done. If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, just head out to the average guy.tv slash subscribe and I am getting a mostly newsletter out it’s more just kind of an update of things that are coming on kind of just Here’s what’s going on. Just don’t forget about this. Here’s a reminder about that. Speaking of a reminder, June 18, that’s next Thursday. I think we have a pretty cool show lined up for. For folks. It’s an all feedback session. So if you haven’t done that yet, email some feedback. And I’m not like looking for feedback in the traditional sense of like, this sucks. This is good this like those kinds of things. It’s more like what’s going on in your world, we just want to read, like, like, what are we talking about? or what have we talked about that you enjoyed? And a little bit of the details, maybe you’ve done some projects, maybe you’re doing some things, send those in? And in many of you have I got a whole page full, including some audio feedback, if you want to give that in as well. Mike and I will cue that up. Do we want to do we want to say Mike, well, we’re going to do next week, are you?

Mike Wieger  [3:45] 
Well, maybe we just say there might be a change of scenery. Okay. might look different next week. All right, both of us. So

Jim Collison  [3:51] 
thank you, we’ll try something new Juneteenth feedback show still time if you’re listening to this before that, send a Jim at the average guy.tv And we’ll get you on the show as well. Big thanks to john. JOHN Biggs in the chat room, Mike, you’re gonna get a you’re gonna get some of this when I come. I mean the next time I see you You can do this as well. So can Kentucky bourbon barrel ale? That beer course store

Mike Wieger  [4:22] 
rounds right up my alley.

Jim Collison  [4:24] 
That sounds pretty, pretty great. So he sent he sent two of each of these and so I still I still have one. I still have two of those. I only have one of these because it it leaked in the in the box a little bit, because I didn’t want it to go flat. But this is a perpetual IPA. And john thanks for said this is hoppy. As like, Are you are you an IPA guy? Yeah, like IPAs? Yep. Okay, definitely hoppy and sweet. And really? Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, perpetual I you know, seven and a half 85 Ibu. So I mean, some good bite to it. All right, john. Thanks for thanks for sending those. I didn’t wipe this off. Good enough. It’s still sticky. Thanks for sending those over john. And we appreciate it if you want to send us your favorite beers easier if you send them in cans just to be 100% honest. But you can send them Jim at the average guy.tv. I’ll get your other mailing address if you want to do it that way. JOHN, appreciate you sending them out. And we will. Next week during the feedback show, we’ll open the show with those beers. So that’s what we’re drinking. Next week. Well, backspin speaks for you. Oh, did I cut out again? It’s get a little robotic on me. Okay, it’s been a couple weeks I’ve been

Mike Wieger  [5:40] 
I’ve been great. It’s, uh, I was weird. We got on this after tonight. And I was like, man, I haven’t seen you in like three weeks. I think I was off a week and then we were both off last week. So feels good to be back. And I was like, Oh, yeah, you podcast on Thursday. Still like yeah, it’s still a thing. You know, I’m still doing that. only been two weeks. It’s only been two weeks. It has but he’s actually his last weekend. Different from me because my boys went back to school last week. So working from home has just been way different than it was for the first three months of quarantine for me a lot more productive, which has been great. I do miss my boys. It’s kind of weird like I missed them in a way like I liked having them running around the house at times, but I do love the work productivity is much higher. I’ll say that.

Jim Collison  [6:22] 
Yeah, well my my audio video is great. So I’m just gonna feel great about it now. It’s probably not great on that and you got to know you’ve got to blue Iris security system update once you dive into that.

Mike Wieger  [6:34] 
Yeah, so this actually was a great suggestion from JP Simmons in the discord. So I know a lot of you guys have been posting a lot of great stuff out there. And a lot of good links. And so one of them that caught my eye though is because you guys know that I’m still in the middle of you know, so I switched over to blue Iris from site hound A while back I can’t remember how long we go was probably a month or two at this point. And I’ve been kind of weighing which one I like Better blue Iris or sight hound and they are almost they do the same thing. But they’re, they’re good at different things, which is why I’m struggling to pick one. And why really, if it came down to recommendations for different people, yeah, I would have different recommendations, right. And so, but there was a link that JP Simmons posted from a guy on YouTube, who had an enhancement to blue Iris that you can do that essentially, number one reduces the amount of storage that your recordings take, which has been a big downside of laris for me, because it takes it takes up a lot more storage than sideout and I’ll explain why in a second. And then number two, it makes your notifications and your alerts much much more useful than they were in the past and and this is all done through an AI server. And so what the what the video does and the video is going to be in the show notes so if you guys want the link it’s also in the discord. It’s in the Oh what? What channel are we in we were talking to Smart Home. So if you scroll up, he put it out there on May 20. And so I watched the video that it’s a perfect tutorial walks you through absolutely everything you need. I changed it up a little bit. But essentially what you’re gonna do is so blue Iris is your video recorder. Right? So it’s taking all the footage in. And it’s doing sort of alerts and it can do motion detection in the actual software, Blair’s you can do motion detection. But essentially all it is is detecting motion. There’s some granular control you get with sensitivity and zones and things like that. But as far as like detecting Is this a person? Is it a dog? Is it a car, blue Iris doesn’t do that you need some other supplemental program to be able to do that. So what you do with this video is you install deep stack AI. So deep stack AI is a it’s an AI server that you can run on your local hardware and the free version works pretty well for this. And you can either run it on the local like Windows machine running blue Iris on it What actually what I did was I went out and I just put it in a Docker on Unraid. Now, this is there is not a deep stack Docker, that’s in community applications on Unraid. But man, it’s super simple to just go and create a new template, because deep stack actually puts their stuff already in a Docker out in the repository. So you can go out, grab it super simple and create a Docker container. For deep stacks, you’ve got deep stack running. So this is a whole AI little server in a Docker, pretty cool, I’m just I’m kind of amazed at how all this stuff works. And essentially, then what you tell blue Iris do is blue Iris isn’t going to do any of the motion detection. Blue Iris is going to you set up two different versions of your camera. This is kind of where it gets a little weird. So we talked about space saving. Well, the reason that blue Iris takes up so much more space is traditionally you would set up your let’s say for me, I have nine cameras. I have nine cameras, you point it to the HD stream, because you want to record an HD all your alerts everything well if you Have it constantly record all the footage, even if you haven’t give you alerts, it’s recording at a very high bitrate, large file size, right, so you’re getting these very large files. For a lot of that time it’s recording, there’s nothing going on, you don’t need that. So with this setup, you actually set up two versions of your camera, you set up one to the HD stream. And once the sub stream almost all cameras now can do a sub stream at a lower, you know, lower resolution like a 640 by 480. I can’t remember the resolution but at a lower resolution, lower bitrate. And so you set up the lower and higher and essentially, you’re always recording the lower resolution. And then with this new system, when it detects motion, it then triggers the HD stream to record on that one, so you get HD recordings of actual movement. And then you’re 24 seven if it didn’t happen to catch an alert, but you still want to be recording. It’s recording at the lower resolution. It saves a ton, a ton of space. I probably am You know, before I was able to get about three weeks worth of footage, whereas now I’m looking at three to four months worth of footage with this new system. But the way this works is there’s an extra little program that you install on the Windows machine that’s running blue Iris. And blue Iris now is going to take a snapshot at a certain interval on that low quality camera. So it’s taking a snapshot, saving it to a folder, that folder is being watched by this program. And the program says, hey, there’s new picture here, I’m gonna go send it over to the AI server. In that AI server, you set up your cameras, and you tell it Hey, on this camera, if it’s a dog, if it’s a cat, if it’s a person, I want that to trigger an alert and record an HD and an alert in blue Iris. And you can set it per camera. So for example, in my front yard, I don’t need a high quality image every time a car drives by that would be all the time. But if it’s a person, if it’s a dog, if it’s anything else I do, and so you can get that granular with the API server. So then, so the image goes the API server. Yeah, I server says does it meet any of these qualifications? Is there a person there? Is there a car there? Whatever you told it to? If yes, it kicks it right back over to blue Iris through a URL. So blue Iris, if you don’t know is be able to you can trigger things through a URL. So it triggers through a URL. And Valera says, Hey, I got told that my HD stream should trigger an alert right now. So it triggers which starts the HD recording. And then if you have alerts, like to your phone, or whatever, it would, obviously also do that. But the main benefit here obviously, is that it’s only telling the HD streams to start recording when there’s actual motion that you want it to record. Not just any motion but motion that you set up in the AI server like I said, a person a car however you set it per camera. So really, really cool how this whole system works. It is a little bit more complicated, but I’ll say I had it set up in about 30 minutes. Very you know, once you kind of watch the video, the video does such a good job of describing in detail step by step how to do it. There’s really no way you can go wrong here and I And then what I liked about though is it made my alerts a lot more useful. Because before I would turn on, you know, alerts for my front door, and you know, any motion at all would trip it, even if I set it to a zone. But if a bird flew through that zone or a bug flew in front, it would trigger that and I would get an alert. And so it’s really cool. It gives you even so I will all pull up here. Real quick. I’ll show you guys the application that runs that sends everything to Well, I would, if I didn’t make it.

Mike Wieger  [13:35] 
go fullscreen here, one second. share the screen. Alright, so here, obviously, I’m remoted into my blue Iris box. And I don’t have blue Iris open because I have it running as a service. But this is the program that is sending all the files from Blue Iris over to the AI server and it keeps stats for you says okay, well you had 11,007 171 alerts, you had 6142 irrelevant alerts, so meaning things that you did not tell it to record. So on my front door camera, I say ignore cars. So that means that hey, it triggered because there was motion, but it was irrelevant because it didn’t meet one of the rules we had. So we did not tell blue Iris to record anything. And then there’s false alerts. false alerts is Hey, blue Iris said there was something here, but it’s not there’s there’s actually not, we don’t see any emotion at all. And then you can actually see in the history exactly what it saw. So here, this is a false alert. You can see there’s nothing here. Let’s go find one. front door. Okay, so this one said front door. It’s irrelevant, because it’s a truck. And yet it says there’s a truck here it was 44% sure, that was a truck and it ignored it because on this camera, I say ignore cars because that would trigger it all day long with those cars driving Let’s scroll down not to one of my indoor cameras. There are a lot. Let’s go front yard. Okay, so in this one I say do record cars. So you’ll see there’s a checkmark. So it said, Yep, we’re going to trigger this. And one of the cars, it was 97% sure was a car and one was 94. So since there were cars in here, and it met one of my rules, so this then this program would have told blue Iris to trigger the high definition version of this camera, and to record this, and the nice part about blue Iris is you have a buffer. So blue Iris is constantly recording the video into Ram. But it’s just regarding it if you don’t if it’s not telling you to record so it builds up a buffer. So it’s not like you’re gonna actually miss the motion because what it’s saying is, Hey, there was motion alert blue Iris versus cool. I have the last 10 seconds of video I’m going to start 10 seconds ago. So I’m gonna go back and grab that and start it 10 seconds before. So the big thing though here is that and I can actually we can close out of this screen recording. I got this all done, Jim. And I was like, Did I just spend a lot of time doing what siteground does? Pretty darn well, to be honest, right. And so this is what I was talking about earlier, when I say I have a really hard time choosing and recommending between blue ours and siteground. Because they just two separate things. For me, I am, I love to remotely view my security cameras. And you’ll notice my screen up here is off, because I haven’t been down here the last week. But this is usually up running the web GUI of blue Iris, you know, it’s remotely because this isn’t connected to the actual Blair’s machine, the web GUI, I can pull up on a Raspberry Pi on my phone. And blue Iris is web UI is amazing. You can do everything. You can pretty much never access to Glarus box again, and do everything from the web UI. Whereas the web UI for site hound is okay and gets the job done. But it doesn’t give you like you know the nice full screen just now. tile that doesn’t do any of that there’s no customizability and so for me I care more about remote viewing than I do about alerts and with this system here I can get close enough on the recording and the alerts to make it a little better and the other thing site hound did really well that blue Iris didn’t do before I set this up was blue Iris it I didn’t realize how

Mike Wieger  [17:24] 
intricate and nicely done the site hounds recording is site hound says hey, how many hours do you want me to record just everything and he said like 72 hours so for the past three days just record everything and then beyond that only keep things that you alerted as motion like people and site hound has the people detection you know, pet detection, I think it is and and car something like that. I care what categories it has. But that’s really smart. Because usually if something happens you bet okay probably have within the last three days. And if not, odds are it got caught in my recordings because it was motion and Viruses did not have a way to do that. So this does help a little bit. Because you are able to not record Full HD all the time and take up all that useless storage. We were able to at least have it. And so I do like this solution, it works well for me it was able to bring blue Iris a little bit more to the middle for me. I was I was contemplating going back to site hound just because of those items I talked about. But what was keeping me away was man like, man, I just love the remote monitoring and control that I have with virus. That’s what it had kept me there. So this was a really nice enhancement. So deep stack AI is just it’s super cool. go onto their website. It’s in the chat room, and I’ll actually put it in the chat right now.

Jim Collison  [18:42] 
We’ll throw it in the show notes as well.

Mike Wieger  [18:43] 
Yeah, sorry, show notes. And so you can check it

Jim Collison  [18:47] 
out. I’ll put it in chat, Mike. So I just you always do this to me. So I just paid for site out, you know, I have their two camera plan. I think it’s six and 12 bucks a year. So this is Not like him. It’s like $12 now right? But you know I’m a camera maybe I’ve been right to it. It does like said it over alerts and Sarah came to me this week and she was like is there I can shut that thing off I’m getting alerts all the time and I long a long time ahead. Still getting all the alerts just because well one of them.

Mike Wieger  [19:25] 
But I think we were you were going with that was you know, okay, so you have sight hound. And now there might just switch to blue Iris. I think honestly, if you are upset about the overall alerts now, definitely don’t go to blue Iris. Because siteground definitely has better obviously, AI. It’s the most accurate for alerts and it has the people tracking built in, and everything like that I have in the alerts on blue Iris, even the mobile app, the way that when you get an alert and you hit the alert, it doesn’t take to that video, it just opens the app. There’s a lot of things that I think site hound is probably better for almost everyone, and especially for you, Jim. It’s really for the rare use case for people like me who I have a usually two or three monitors in my house open all the time showing all my cameras. I just kind of like that. I even have now a Raspberry Pi in the living room. And when the TV’s not watching something, I switch the input. So it’s just displaying all the cameras.

Mike Wieger  [20:29] 
It’s just and so for me, that’s not possible with siteground. But for most people, I think site hound is the way to go. That’s what I’ve kind of determined is that the the AI in there, the alerts are so much better inside hound that I think now I see where the price difference comes into, especially with how all that stuff is just built in. So yeah, I mean, so I think what I’ve really learned just in summary of what I was just talking about is kind of what I just told Jim right. I think for the most if you are willing to spend the money on site, hound Think it’s, it’s by far, way easier to set up. It’s got much more accurate triggers for alerts, and much better recording, right without setting up something complex. Like I just mentioned, you guys. In the use case where you need more control over users, you want more web control when you’re not writing for the machine, you need the nice grid of screens, especially like in a business environment. I think blue Iris is probably a little bit better for a business environment usually because you don’t have like a security guard sitting there monitoring it 24 seven, that’s where blue Iris is probably a better fit. But I think site hound wins in a lot of these cases. But moving on real quick, another interesting story and I said so this is we’re going to talk about I swapped my modem out. And usually that’s not very exciting. But this left my head scratching a little bit so the reason I bought a modem was simply because I was paying 10 bucks a month to Cox Communications for the rental of their newest panoramic Wi Fi it’s actually a tripod here. Let me grab her. So this is I mean the latest and greatest from Cox. This is this is what you can get panoramic Wi Fi, right? It’s a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. And apparently the Wi Fi is good. I had it in bridge mode. But it this is the best thing you can get. You cannot get any better from this from Cox. And so I was paying them $10 a month for it. That’s the reason I switched or so I thought. So I grabbed the Eris surfboard, SB 8200. It’s a 3.1 DOCSIS modem. And here’s what I noticed. I had been doing speed tests right up until now and I paid for the gigabit plan. But I was capped out at 500. And not It was almost like it was a hard coded cap, because it wasn’t like it would fluctuate over 500 ever. It was just like speed tests would hit 500 and just flatline. And so when I talked to Cox and when the guy came out and fix it the first time, he said yeah, you know, like They’re throttling people back a little bit because of the pandemic, just to make sure everyone can have good internet access, you know, so you might see your speeds, pretty a lot lower than your gigabit, obviously half at this point, I was okay. I had accepted that it was like 500 good enough for me right now. If this stick around hope I would probably complain a little bit if this you know, went into the next few months it stayed captive 500 when I’m paying for gigabit, I would have been more upset. But I get it. I understood that. And but the other thing I noticed was that you know, so on the unified devices, so you guys know I had the Cox modem in bridge mode, and I use untangle from my router on custom hardware. And then for my access points, I use the ubiquity AC pros. I have two of them in my home. And the one nice thing about those is when you open up the controller, you can see how much congestion is on the different channels that you’re using for your access points. And I noticed that on the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum, no matter if I chose 160 11 I was constantly getting a lot of interference. Well, the other cool thing you can do with ubiquity is you can go into neighboring access points or neighboring networks. I can’t read what they call it. But essentially, you can pop up and it’ll say, hey, here are all the networks, their signal strength that are near yours. And I had one with a hidden SSID. That was 99% signal strength. Michael, that’s super weird. That’s like in my house. Because all the rest of them I can tell our neighbors, and they’re in like, the highest one is like 60% signal strength. Most the other ones are in like the 20s to 40s to like, you know, zero to 10. Right, but nothing at 99% signal strength. And but it was weird that ubiquity showed us a hidden SSID but I didn’t notice when I popped up on my phone that now there was a Cox Wi Fi network, in my house full strength. So what I figured out was that Cox was actually doing the same thing, I think spectrum or charter or you know, one of them A while back to this URL, I think it might have been Verizon to, essentially they started using if you were using their equipment in their home, they would have your network SSID out there, your private one. But then all of the ones that everyone houses was also a meeting, in this case, a Cox Wi Fi network that Cox subscribers could connect to essentially creating like a massive spread of Cox, Wi Fi across the cities, right, if a lot of people with the modems and you had no ability to turn this off, because I didn’t even know it existed until I kind of started to look around. You know, once all your Wi Fi is set up in your house, how often are you opening the Wi Fi settings and looking through the local networks that are around you? Not very often for me at least. So when I did that I noticed the the Cox Wi Fi my car, it was interesting. So I went back into the Cox modem and sure enough, there is no way doesn’t even tell you what’s doing it. No way to turn it off. It’s in full bridge mode. So I had no way to do that. So I swapped out long story Short guys made a little bit of a long story because you know Jim was gone so don’t know how long I was very nice. Thanks for coming.

Jim Collison  [26:05] 
Yeah just covering

Mike Wieger  [26:08] 
swapped out the modem What did the error surfboard first thing speeds up to full gigabit, sometimes even higher, right which is odd, but right at a gigabit full speeds with my own hardware and number two, obviously it got rid of the Cox Wi Fi network in my home. So my Wi Fi is no longer battling other channels. I mean that was because it did do a pretty good job. They talked about paying ran off Wi Fi being great signal strength, it was 99% around my entire house. And it was just competing with my own networks. There’s a lot of network congestion over the airwaves. And as soon as I got that thing out of there, number one having full gigabit speeds, and number two having much better Wi Fi It has been a much better experience. I didn’t realize the pains I was having before I got it out there like oh man, everything’s snappier around here. Everything seems to be working better. You know, things are loading faster. Faster, even just Wi Fi range of my main network outside my house was a lot better. So it’s just odd that I was paying Cox for their highest tier modem getting my speeds cut in half and having Wi Fi congestion when I couldn’t control it, so if you guys are paying for that something to consider, you know, this one was $149 so it’ll pay off in in 15 months. Not bad. You know, I will definitely still need internet 15 months from now. So it’ll pay itself off after that and man to double my speed and to free up the Wi Fi congestion was was huge. So a little pro tip for you if it’s something you’ve been thinking about doing. Definitely, definitely go for it. So the next thing was I know a lot of us have had conversations in discord A lot of you are network junkies like me and you like to play around with different router software’s and things like that. And you guys know that I started off on pf sense. And then I switch to untangle and I’ve been on untangle for a while and I I briefly went over to unify but I didn’t have necessarily the power that I wanted to control that I needed. And so I came back to untangle for some reason during all this especially with my speeds being slow there was a thought in my head I wonder if for some reason that’s untangle. I wonder if with all the filtering all the spam protection all the malware protection, all the intrusion prevention detection that’s going on. I wonder if that’s slowing down my speeds and so I did for a day swap back to pf sense. So I fired up a pf sense box and I did move it to the exact same box I had untangle so I essentially have two ssps one with untangle on it one of the PF sense so I can just power down the box plug in that hard drive fired up and also I’m running pf sense or I’m running untangle in that same box and fired it up and quickly remembered why I personally love untangle pf sense. First of all, there was no difference. Who’s that exact same speed so the router was not causing any any speed hindrance there. But man it made me appreciate I forgot how clean and easy it is to do things at untangle and how much stuff is is built in without much extra effort. Now I know a lot of that comes with a little bit you know like pf sense you have so many more options. pF sense is almost like the blue IRS right where you have so many options you can do so much stuff. It’s actually actually a really good comparison and untangle is a little bit like siteground much cleaner, easier to do for me for someone who doesn’t want to tweak and mess with deep deep network settings. But I do want IPS right and i want i want to be able to do filtering on will do all of that untangle makes it so easy. And I know a lot of you guys probably have been on pf sense forever and never tried untangle. If you’re looking for a quarantine project and you’re looking like me, I could fire someone up. Give untangle a shot because I was back to untangle within the same day. I didn’t even last year. For more than 12 hours back on pf sense like yeah, this is why I went today let’s why kind of stuck with it cuz it’s just it’s just easier for me pf sense if you need the customizability and power, definitely go for it. If you don’t know if you’re more of the run of the mill home user even like me, you just need some basic stuff port forwarding. I haven’t run a bunch of I have three VLANs which untangle handles just fine. Stuff like that. That’s why I came back to Jim you’re back and you look

Jim Collison  [30:25] 
clear. Well, we’ll see. We’ll see how it goes. All right. Funny. I mean, you’re you’re talking about you know, pf sense and untangled. I almost set up because of the some of the problems I’ve been having. I almost set a PSN week just to kind of kind of wanted to monitor what’s going on in the network and I’m trying to isolate this problem, right. Is it me Is it the modem is a Cox is it right you know, whatever. You’re telling the story about you know, having fi you basically had community Wi Fi on right, yep. In a kind of feel like that right now. You know you’re like so you started troubleshooting I stopped trying to troubleshoot things I shut down all the computers behind I shut down I could remotely you know, I started trying to isolate things here the modem I’ve got that you talked already about replacing your modem right? I did. Yep. And so like my modem currently the bottom light is flashing orange which I think is not like I think it’s what I’m gonna have to call I’m gonna have to call it it’s probably a new modem for me as well this week. I think this one Cox last time I call they said hey, you should probably replace that. So it’s probably time to buy off to look at what you bought.

Mike Wieger  [31:37] 
And maybe Yeah, pick it up. It went up $20 in the last week. But maybe find it somewhere else. But yeah, the era surfboard. It’s the sp 2800 or no sorry, at 200 and it’s there. It’s a really they’re only DOCSIS 3.1 modem, which is what you’re going to want at this point. And just so 3.1 I didn’t mention this is good for number one. Speed, number two buffer bloat. So 3.1 Hills buffer bloat a lot better. So you’re queuing and things like that are being handled a lot better with that DOCSIS 3.1. So even if you’re not a gigabit person, you don’t need that. It can still help in a lot of ways. So I would suggest, especially if you guys are buying something, you don’t want to be replacing this thing in a year or two. I would just, you know, 149 is not bad for a new modem that has all the bells and whistles right now.

Jim Collison  [32:26] 
Yeah, I think I’m going to call after and I’m going to call Cox and do some troubleshooting. After everybody goes to bed. Yeah, to see, you know, plug, isolate every testing last column, they said, Hey, well, your your rent, you could just swap it was like, no, not renting it by and now you know, you can just bring it in. We’ll give you a new one. So I don’t know. I may I may play that angle a little bit to see. Am I still stuttering as well?

Mike Wieger  [32:56] 
Yeah, you’re still stuttering? Yeah, yeah, I heard most of it. I got it. But to Joe ski has a good point he says they have that same motive at Walmart. So you could even make a late night run tonight and swap it and and you can do that yourself you just have to go online and plug in the new number and or call them I call them and they had it done in a minute.

Jim Collison  [33:16] 
Yeah, I think I’m gonna call and troubleshoot type thing. So shoot guys first of all coming out live thanks for there’s nothing more frustrating. I was saying Dave Jackson was on this on Saturday and I really felt bad for him because he just no matter what he would do, it didn’t work. And I just, you know, like you my connection was just fine. Yeah, so you know, I was like, Well, okay, you know, I just covered for him. So thanks for thanks for covering for me tonight. Still jittery, still jittery.

Mike Wieger  [33:54] 
It’s been fine for last two seconds.

Jim Collison  [33:56] 
No. So let’s, let’s close up because I’m going to call I’m going to call and start doing Yeah, recruiting, I have to do some stuff tomorrow. So one

Mike Wieger  [34:03] 
night, the one thing you can do is, I can’t remember the exact number. So name Google. So if you go to the address 192, dot 168 dot 100 dot one, that’ll get you to your modem. And it’ll give you these levels. And you can see your levels coming into the modem. And if you just Google it will tell you what those should be within. There’s a range. We’re giving that number again, 192 dot 168 dot 100 dot one. See if that brings up your modem, bog. Yep, yep. And so that’s a good tip for everyone. That’s your modem, IP address for essentially everyone.

Jim Collison  [34:42] 
As soon as you log in the motive, like oh, maybe I should click out to Asher. Maybe I should quick record the end of the show.

Mike Wieger  [34:48] 
Yeah, I think you could and you know, if you don’t get it, you can just add at the end. So

Jim Collison  [34:52] 
yeah, yeah. So a couple reminders as we wrap things up here. It’s been event, a much of what you just heard You didn’t actually hear because you had to be the live show I cut a chunk of it out because we had so many technical problems but just a couple reminders before you go if you want to support the show via Patreon, the average guy.tv slash Patreon we have some plans out there. $5 plan gets a little coin I’ll mail that to you love to have you do that if you want to join the conversation on discord, the average guy TV slash discord, send us your feedback. We get that big feedback show coming up next week. It’ll be better because well, we probably I probably won’t be here, not giving it away or anything. And so send it to me Jim at the average guy.tv we’d love to hear from you on that. You can still use the Facebook group if you want to the average guy, Facebook. Want to thank Maple Grove Partners for their support and sponsorship in show. Maple Grove partners.com that was secure, reliable high speed hosting from people that you know in your trust. You can also listen to Home Gadget Geeks live and maybe with better bandwidth Home Gadget geeks.com in the app and you can do that as we are live every Thursday at 8pm Central Knights are not here at the hour. gotta live. I’m going to get out of here fast before I locked up that was Goodbye everybody

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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