Exiled for an Hour
My other half is taking part in an online Yoga class in the lounge. For the previous two weeks she has failed miserably to stream the session. Therefore the entire house is now banned from the internet for an hour on Monday nights.
It doesn't help that the TV – which she insists on streaming the session onto – is at the far end of the house from the router, and that the range extender we bought to solve this problem will only allow a random assortment of devices around the house to connect to it.
After doing a bit of digging, I realised that half of the problem was she was casting the screen of her Chromebook to a Chromecast on the TV – so essentially her screen was being pushed to the router, the TV was then downloading the data from there (if indeed it didn't go on a lap of the internet first), while also downloading the stream of the Zoom session on both the laptop and the TV.
The solution has been to both ban the kids from the internet for the hour (who seem to survive on a steady diet of YouTube, Tiktok, and Netflix – sometimes at the same time), and to use a different computer for the Yoga stream. The Chromebook has no HDMI port – an old laptop that I've turned into a Chromebook does – so it's become my other half's Zoom computer now. I may leave it down the side of the television.
When we announced the ban, you would have thought we had asked the kids to cut their legs off at the knees. Quite predictably, our eldest daughter has taken no notice of the requested ban at all. I considered blocking all of her devices at the router, but relented because life is too short.
It's worth repeating – this is all caused because the TV is at the very far end of the house from the WiFi router. Short of drilling holes through four (very thick) walls, there's few other ways of getting the internet through the house. We've bought several range extenders over the years – they always fail within a few months of purchase. I tried moving the router once too – within six months the shielded cable to the router failed. Oh – we tried powerline ethernet too – it worked, until the endpoint hardware started crashing increasingly frequently.
I've heard no shouted complaints tonight so far. For what it's worth, I think the Chromecast was a total and utter waste of money. And the Amazon Firestick. We always go back to Roku for TV shows and movies. Oh, and before anybody suggests it, we had Apple TV back in the day too – we gave up on that after Apple fell out with some of the content providers, and cancelled series half-way through us watching them.
Anyway. Enough of that nonsense.
While writing this I have yet another pretend aeroplane in the air over eastern Europe. Tonight's flight is from Minsk, Belarus, to Stockholm, Sweden. We're about 100 nautical miles from descent, cruising along at 34,000ft. I have about 20 minutes until I need to tell the pretend passengers to put their seat belts back on, and put all their crap back in the overhead lockers.
I wonder how busy pretend Stockholm approach is tonight ?