I recently moved to a much more rural area, so getting Starlink set up was one of my top priorities. My area is an internet dead zone where you might get a bit of 4G on a nearby hill, but that’s about it. No cellular for phone calls, and the best I can hope from a landline connection is 3 Mbps. As a modern man with a modern family full of modern devices, I need fast internet—so I readied Starlink even before my kids’ beds. It worked pretty well, too. At first I heard a bunch of buzzing noises that I was not expecting, but that sort of coil whine is apparently pretty typical. A few minutes later, I was online! But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Having Starlink isn’t like having fiber internet, and I ran into several surprises along the way. Here are all the things I wish I’d known before getting Starlink at home. Starlink is better when it’s mounted As soon as I had Starlink working, I messaged my friends saying “Space internet installed!” with the following image: Jon Martindale / Foundry That’s right. The Starlink dish is propped up in the cardboard box it came in, sitting on some steps leading to a lawn that was never intended as its permanent home. It worked well enough for the first night—but that’s as long as I would ever want it to be there. Turns out, Starlink performs best when the dish is mounted in a location that’s free from obstructions and oriented in a way that maintains a connection with as many Starlink satellites as possible. The Starlink app makes the whole process pretty straightforward, with dynamically adjusting on-screen graphics that help you rotate the dish into its optimal facing. My ground-mounted performance was (obviously) bad, so taking the time to get it into a better position was worthwhile. But I’m no handyman. I can build a PC, sure, but hoofing up a ladder and drilling into red brick isn’t something I’m super comfortable doing—so I brought in a local professional TV antenna installer. Within a couple of hours, he had the dish mounted by my roof. Performance jumped from 50 Mbps to nearly 200 Mbps downstream. A huge improvement with better coverage, less chance of someone just wandering into my yard and stealing the dish, and no chance of my kids riding their bikes over the cable. That’s a win-win-win. …but Starlink can be ugly when mounted Personally, I think the Starlink dish looks pretty cool. Its a unique sight compared to all those rounded satellite dishes that you’ve likely seen in urban centers over the last several decades. It’s more modern. Jon Martindale / Foundry But the makeshift pipe-mount system I used? Eh, that leaves a lot to be desired. There are more attractive first-party mounts you can buy at additional cost, but a giant pipe on an unpainted brace is cheaper. Unfortunately, my wife is even less of a fan. It’s not like I’m going to be looking at it much up there. But if the exterior aesthetics of your home are important to you, it’s probably worth spending some more time (and money) than I did to get it mounted in a way that gets you great performance while looking good. Starlink’s upload speed is still lacking One aspect of fiber internet that’s easy to overlook is that it isn’t just blazingly fast for downloads—you can get upload speeds that are often as fast as your download speeds. That makes quick work when uploading work documents, personal photos, YouTube videos, and more. Jon Martindale / Foundry As I said at the start, though, Starlink isn’t fiber. I’m getting around 150 Mbps average download speeds with peaks up to 300 Mbps, but my upload speeds are decidedly slower. I’ve seen some people post screenshots of 50 Mbps uploads, but I’ve yet to see mine break 30 Mbps. More often than not, it’s closer to 15 Mbps. To be fair, 15 Mbps is plenty for sending photos over messaging apps and streaming my webcam during Discord D&D sessions, but it’s a lot more noticeable when I’m trying to send long videos to friends and family. And I don’t think I’d get far trying to livestream my gaming on Twitch at anything over 1080p with this kind of internet. Starlink’s router is underwhelming This might sound like a humblebrag, but the bundled Starlink Gen 3 router—a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router with a claimed coverage of just over 3,000 square feet—wasn’t enough for my new house. Truth is, my place is about half of that, yet I still had trouble getting signal everywhere due to walls, obstructions, and other sources of interference. Could I have place the Starlink router in a better spot for better coverage? Yeah, maybe. And there’s even a mesh system I could’ve employed if I was married to Starlink’s hardware. TP-Link But, fortunately, I have a much better TP-Link Archer GE800 Wi-Fi 7 router, so I didn’t need to bother. It’s complete overkill for a civilian gamer like myself, but it does offer fantastic coverage in my wonky-walled home, and I already know my way around it from the past year of faithful operation. (Lean more about why you should get your own router.) Props to Starlink for making the bridging process super simple, though. Just plug them in, switch the router to bypass mode in the app, a quick router reboot, and it was good to go in less than 10 minutes. There’s no planning for a global outage Two days after I got my Starlink dish mounted, my service went down. My wife had just left the house and closed the door the very second my PC connection dropped, so I thought it was her fault. Maybe she knocked the mount loose by slamming the door too hard? But as it turns out, it wasn’t anything so innocuous. In fact, the entire global Starlink network had gone down. Jon Martindale / Foundry I managed to text a few friends from my board game group to see if they could send me tips on how to get it working again. They sent me screengrabs from Reddit, Twitter, DownDetector. It confirmed that it wasn’t just my router or my dish. Indeed, all of Starlink was down. Apparently something like this has happened a few times before, but I also have friends who’ve had Starlink for years who claim there’s never been any outages as far as they know. So I’m not expecting this to happen again anytime soon, but tech is tech and it can fail. Even the magic of space internet can stop working from time to time. Your friends will judge you for Starlink Since November 2024, people around the world have been protesting against Elon Musk and those who support him. Many Tesla owners have added stickers to their vehicles, promising that their Teslas were bought before the CEO went crazy, all to fend off potential attacks. It hasn’t gotten that bad for Starlink, but I do have to put up with friends who ask if I couldn’t have found another way to get online. Indeed, if I could have, I would have! But while Amazon is working on Project Kuiper, its own low-Earth-orbit network of broadband satellites, that’s still years away from being fully operational and may take even longer to catch up to Starlink. Plus, as far as billionaire CEOs go, it’s more a lateral move than anything to go from Musk to Bezos. There are other providers with geostationary satellites that might have bandwidth, but the latency is poor. Eutelsat might be a legitimate option for me at some point, but not yet. Ultimately, the performance and viability of Starlink trumps my own misgivings about supporting a Musk-related company. Until that changes, I’ll have to swallow my pride and the condescension of a few friends. Starlink: Incredible tech, flawed execution There’s no denying it: Starlink feels like the kind of Jetsons-era future tech that has always captivated me. It just works, it’s nearly flawless, and it doesn’t have many real competitors. It’s really cool that I get super-fast, low-latency internet in a place that’s otherwise barely online. But I wish I’d paid more for a better-looking, less-obvious mounting system. I wish I’d had a better backup solution in place just in case it went down. I wish it wasn’t tied to one of the most odious CEOs in the world. For now, it’s the best solution available and a joy to use. It’s hard not to see how it could be even better, though. Read...

While some findings confirm long-held concerns, others don`t go far enough, say rural folk. Read...

Modern notebooks with integrated AI hardware are changing the way artificial intelligence is used in everyday life. Instead of relying on external server farms, these large language models, image generators, or transcription systems run directly on the user’s own device. This is made possible by the combination of powerful CPUs, dedicated graphics processors and, at the center of this development, a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). An NPU is not just an add-on, but a specialized accelerator designed precisely for the calculation of neural networks. It enables offline AI tools such as GPT4All or Stable Diffusion not only to start, but also to react with high performance, low energy consumption and constant response time. Even with complex queries or multimodal tasks, the working speed remains stable. The days when AI was only conceivable as a cloud service are now over. Work where others are offline As soon as the internet connection is interrupted, classic laptops begin to idle. An AI PC, on the other hand, remains operational, whether in airplane mode above the clouds, deep in the dead zones of rural regions, or in an overloaded train network without a stable network. In such situations, the structural advantage of locally running AI systems becomes apparent. Jan.ai or GPT4All can be used to create, check and revise texts, intelligently summarize notes, pre-formulate emails and categorize appointments. Foundry With AnythingLLM, contracts or meeting minutes can be searched for keywords without the documents leaving the device. Creative tasks such as creating illustrations via Stable Diffusion or post-processing images with Photo AI also work, even on devices without a permanent network connection. Even demanding projects such as programming small tools or the automated generation of shell scripts are possible if the corresponding models are installed. For frequent travelers, project managers, or creative professionals, this creates a comprehensive option for productive working, completely independent of infrastructure, network availability, or cloud access. An offline AI notebook does not replace a studio, but it does prevent downtime. Sensitive content remains local Data sovereignty is increasingly becoming a decisive factor in personal and professional lives. Anyone who processes business reports, develops project ideas, or analyzes medical issues cannot afford to have any uncertainties when processing data. Public chatbots such as Gemini, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot are helpful, but are not designed to protect sensitive data from misuse or unwanted analysis. Local AI solutions, on the other hand, work without transmitting data to the internet. The models used, such as LLaMA, Mistral or DeepSeek, can be executed directly on the device without the content leaving the hardware. This opens up completely new fields of application, particularly in areas with regulatory requirements, such as healthcare, in a legal context, or in research. AnythingLLM goes one step further. It combines classic chat interaction with a local knowledge base of Office documents, PDFs and structured data. This turns voice AI into an interactive analysis tool for complex amounts of information, locally, offline and in compliance with data protection regulations. NPU notebooks: new architecture, new possibilities While traditional notebooks quickly reach their thermal or energy limits in AI applications, the new generation of copilot PCs rely on specialized AI hardware. Models such as the Surface Laptop 6 or the Surface Pro 10 integrate a dedicated NPU directly into the Intel Core Ultra SoC, supplemented by high-performance CPU cores and integrated graphics. The advantages are evident in typical everyday scenarios. Voice input via Copilot, Gemini or ChatGPT can be analyzed without delay, image processing with AI tools takes place without cloud rendering, and even multimodal tasks, such as analyzing text, sound, and video simultaneously run in real time. Microsoft couples the hardware closely with the operating system. IDG Windows 11 offers native NPU support, for example for Windows Studio Effects, live subtitles, automatic text recognition in images or voice focus in video conferences. The systems are designed so that AI does not function as an add-on, but is an integral part of the overall system as soon as it is switched on, even without an internet connection. Productive despite dead zones The tools for offline AI are now fully developed and stable in everyday use. GPT4All from Nomic AI is particularly suitable for beginners, with a user-friendly interface, uncomplicated model management and support for numerous LLMs. Ollama is aimed at technically experienced users and offers terminal-based model management with a local API connection, ideal for providing your own applications or workflows directly with AI support. LM Studio, on the other hand, is characterized by its GUI focus. Models from Hugging Face can be simply be searched in the app, downloaded, and activated with a click. The LM Studio chatbot not only provides access to a large selection of AI models from Huggingface.com, but also allows the AI models to be fine-tuned. There is a separate developer view for this. LM Studio Jan.ai is particularly versatile. The minimalist interface hides a highly functional architecture with support for multiple models, context-sensitive responses, and elegant interaction. Local tools are also available in the creative area. With suitable hardware, Stable Diffusion delivers AI-generated images within a few seconds, while applications such as Photo AI automatically improve the quality of screenshots or video frames. A powerful NPU PC turns the mobile device into an autonomous creative studio, even without Wi-Fi, cloud access, or GPU calculation on third-party servers. What counts on the move The decisive factor for mobile use is not just whether a notebook can run AI, but how confidently it can do this offline. In addition to the CPU and GPU, the NPU plays a central role. It processes AI tasks in real time, while at the same time conserving battery power and reducing the load on the overall system. Devices such as the Galaxy Book with an RTX 4050/4070 or the Surface Pro 10 with a Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU demonstrate that even complex language models such as Phi-2, Mistral, or Qwen run locally, with smooth operation and without the typical latencies of cloud services. Copilot as a system assistant complements this setup, provided the software can access it. When travelling, you can compose emails, structure projects, prepare images or generate text modules, regardless of the network. Offline AI on NPU notebooks also transforms the in-flight restaurant, the waiting gate, or the remote holiday home into a productive workspace. Requirements and limitations The hardware requirements are not trivial however. Models such as LLaMA2 or Mistral require several gigabytes of RAM, 16 GB RAM is the lower minimum. Those working with larger prompts or context windows should plan for 32 or 64 GB. The SSD memory requirement also increases, as many models use between 4 and 20 GB. NPUs take care of inference, but depending on the tool, additional GPU support may be necessary, for example for image generation with Stable Diffusion. Sam Singleton Integration into the operating system is also important. Copilot PCs ensure deep integration between hardware, AI libraries, and system functions. Anyone working with older hardware will have to accept limitations. The model quality also varies. Local LLMs do not yet consistently reach the level of GPT-4, but they are more controllable, more readily available and more data protection-friendly. They are the more robust solution for many applications, especially when travelling. Offline AI under Linux: openness meets control Offline AI also unfolds its potential on Linux systems—often with even greater flexibility. Tools such as Ollama, GPT4All, or LM Studio offer native support for Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch-based distributions and can be installed directly from the terminal or as a flatpack. The integration of open models such as Mistral, DeepSeek, or LLaMA works smoothly, as many projects rely on open source frameworks such as GGML or llama.cpp. Browser interface for Ollama: Open-Web-UI is quickly set up as a Python program or in a Docker container and provides a user interface.IDG Anyone working with Docker or Conda environments can build customized model set-ups, activate GPU support or fine-tune inference parameters. This opens up various scenarios, especially in the developer environment: Scripting, data analysis, code completion, or testing your own prompt structures. In conjunction with tiling desktops, reduced background processes and optimized energy management, the Linux notebook becomes a self-sufficient AI platform, without any vendor lock-in, with maximum control over every file and every computing operation. Offline instead of delivered Offline AI on NPU notebooks is not a stopgap measure, but a paradigm shift. It offers independence, data protection, and responsiveness, even in environments without a network. Thanks to specialized chips, optimized software, and well thought-out integration in Windows 11 and the latest Linux kernel, new freedom is created for data-secure analyses, mobile creative processes, or productive work beyond the cloud. The prerequisite for this is an AI PC that not only provides the necessary performance, but also anchors AI at a system level. Anyone relying on reliable intelligence on the move should no longer hope for the cloud, but choose a notebook that makes it superfluous. Read...

At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Straightforward setup and mapping Delivered an even, thorough cut from the first mow Obstacle detection is promising (although it still needs work) Cons Somewhat underpowered for its size Rear-wheel drive only Underwhelming performance on slopes Our Verdict The Eufy Lawnbot E18 is a great robot lawn mower for smaller, flatter yards and for people who don’t want to spend a lot of time setting one up. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Eufy Lawnbot E18 Retailer Price Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices Research and development efforts aren’t cheap. Outsourcing is one of the ways manufacturers can more affordably expand their product offerings, and some smart home brands—including Anker’s Eufy smart home division—have taken this approach rather than developing their own products in-house. In this case, we’re talking about robot lawn mowers. The Eufy Lawnbot E-series robot lawn mowers that Anker debuted at CES last January are actually rebranded TerraMow models that have been available in Europe since mid-2024. Apart from battery size, the two Lawnbot E-series mowers are identical, with the model E15 capable of handling up to 0.2 acres, while the model E18 reviewed here is suitable for up to 0.3 acres. Specifications Both Lawnbot E-series mowers might seem small compared to much of the competition—suburban and rural American yards tend to be very large—but you don’t need to own an acre or more of turf to appreciate a robot lawn mower. The Eufy Lawnbot E18 will look familiar to European readers, as it’s based on the design of the TerraMow S2100 that came to market in that region in 2023.Ed Oswald/Foundry These are smallish, rear-wheel drive mowers, but don’t let their size fool you: Both machines are packed with smarts. The GPS navigation that so many other modern mowers use, however, is not one of their features. These mowers map your yard using computer vision alone. Moving from unboxing to mowing happened more quickly with the Eufy Lawnbot E18 than any other mower I’ve evaluated to date. The mower maps your yard completely on its own: you only direct it to the portions of the yard you want it to map and then draw pathways between these areas. I had the Lawnbot E18 up and running in my yard in less than 30 minutes. While it’s exciting to see a mower that doesn’t depend on GPS satellites or require a complex installation involving antennas on tripods and the like, I certainly had my doubts about a mower that relies solely on vision, but those have largely dispersed—at least regarding Eufy’s (and TerraMow’s) bots. Setup The Lawnbot E18 will memorize the location of its garage base station and use the pattern printed on its inside back wall for precise docking.  Ed Oswald/Foundry The initial setup of the Eufy Lawnbot E18 involves finding a suitable location for the mower’s base station, plugging it in, and then turning your attention to the mower itself. While the mower comes with enough charge to complete setup, we charged it to 100 percent, which took less than half an hour (Eufy says a drained battery should reach a full charge within 90 to 110 minutes). After that, you can start mapping from within the app. Place the E18 anywhere within a grassy area (the app will guide you) and allow it to calibrate. The mower will spin in a circle, utilizing its cameras to determine its location in the world. Watching a robot doing donuts in your yard will seem odd, but that’s how this mower determines its precise location without the assistance of GPS. Once that orientation process is successful, the mower will proceed to map the entire area of grass. I have a complex yard, so I set the Lawnbot E18 free on the easiest patches of grass first. It handled these spectacularly, needing less than 10 minutes to map the 400 square feet. The mower struggled in the sloped portions of my yard, however, often attempting to map areas that were too steep for it to navigate. This required me to set no-go zones and boundaries within the app to prevent it from getting stuck. All-wheel drive would have helped with this, but the E-series mowers only drive their rear wheels. The Eufy Lawnbot E18’s smaller size allows it to more easily navigate narrow pathways in your yard compared to most robot lawn mowers.Ed Oswald/Foundry The mower also insisted on returning to its base station after each zone was mapped, which I found frustrating. When it came to mowing areas far from the base station, this added a considerable amount of time to the mapping process. This behavior might be necessitated by the Lawnbot E18’s reliance on computer vision for navigation. Apart from that, the Lawnbot E18 was surprisingly smooth at mapping, even in areas with view obstructions or obstacles. You won’t spend much time setting up a more basic yard; indeed, moving from unboxing to mowing happened more quickly with the Lawnbot E18 than any other mower I’ve evaluated to date. Performance The Lawnbot E18 is underpowered compared to most of the rear-wheel drive mowers I’ve tested in this price range, and it can climb slopes of only 18 degrees or less. If you have anything more than gradual rises in your yard, you will likely run into trouble with this mower. While the Lawnbot E18 is smaller than most robot lawn mowers I’ve reviewed, its size—and the fact that its cutting blades are quite close to the edge of its deck—gives it at least one important advantage: Bulkier mowers can have difficulty maneuvering around obstacles, leaving unsightly strips of uncut grass behind. Slopes are not the Lawnbot E18’s forté, as its limited to climbing 18-degree grades.Ed Oswald/Foundry That said, the E18’s small cutting radius—8 inches—results in longer mowing times than many other robot mowers. But I’m OK with that, provided the mower does its job. And for the most part, the Lawnbot E18 does its job. While its vision navigation isn’t perfect, the mower performed well overall, and the maps it created became increasingly more precise with each run. This meant the E18 left fewer untouched patches of grass after a few mowing sessions. Another surprise came when I packed the mower away and then re-installed it later for a photoshoot. I put its base station in approximately the same location, but I assumed the mower would need to create an entirely new map; instead, it recognized the yard and adjusted itself accordingly. Some of the most significant navigation issues I experienced were sun blindness and incorrectly identifying tall grass and weeds as obstructions. You can change the direction of its cut by zone; however, there is no option for alternating the direction it mows to prevent its wheels from leaving tracks in your lawn. Segway’s E3-series mowers have this feature, and it’s great. The Lawnbot E18 can’t operate in the dark, either, even though it’s equipped with an LED light that can be turned on while it’s in remote control mode. This means you won’t be able to mow your lawns at night, as you can with some competing mowers. The Eufy app From left to right: the Eufy Lawnbot E18’s in-app scheduling function, live view, and primary screen.Ed Oswald/Foundry Some of the problems I encountered with the Lawnbot E18 can probably be chalked up to software/firmware issues. Until June, the base station had to be placed within a mow zone, or the bot wouldn’t be able to find it. And you could only set the mow direction for your entire yard rather than by zone. Also, an errant firmware update in early June temporarily prevented some Eufy mowers from operating at all. These problems reminded me of what I dealt with during my Mammotion Yuka 1500 review last year. In both cases, things improved over time. Eufy’s Lawnbot app is now much more stable than when I first tested the E18 in May. It also got better at detecting transitions between grass and sidewalk. Walkway stones, on the other hand, continuously tripped up the mower, as it would treat them as a solid sidewalk. If you own other Eufy smart home devices—whether it be security cameras, video doorbells, smart lighting, vacuums, or mops—you’ll use the same app to control the Lawnbot. It will appear under the Clean tab. The app is generally easy to use, although a bug would sometimes cause the mower to occasionally disappear from the app’s Home page. The app’s live-view feature is generally useful, provided you have good Wi-Fi coverage in your yard, but it does take some getting used to. The mower’s movements are somewhat jerky, so it can appear as though the machine is lurching in unexpected directions when it really isn’t. I didn’t thoroughly test the app’s remote-control function, however, as my Wi-Fi router doesn’t blanket my yard with coverage. Should you buy the Eufy Lawnbot E18? That the Eufy Lawnbot E18 is a rebranded TerraMow product doesn’t lessen its appeal—at least for homeowners with smaller lawns. Its reliance on visual navigation is novel, but that feature gets you as close to plug-and-play as you’ll get with a robot lawn mower. It’s a great option for folks who feel overwhelmed by modern technology. And if you own other Eufy smart home products, you won’t even need to download another app. If you have a larger or more complex yard, the Sunseeker Orion X7 AWD will probably be more suitable. Or if you don’t want to wait for a mower to learn the shape of your yard, you might consider the Mowrator S1 4WD, which you control with a gaming console-like remote instead of relying on the mower to navigate. This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robot lawn mowers. Read...

Auckland`s economy is falling behind that of the South Island and rural areas, and there is no government hero coming to the rescue. Read...

The earthquake struck at 11.49am NZT, was 2km deep and centred near the rural town of Kilkivan, according to Geoscience Australia. Read...

I recently moved to a much more rural area, so getting Starlink set up was one of my top priorities. My area is an internet dead zone where you might get a bit of 4G on a nearby hill, but that’s about it. No cellular for phone calls, and the best I can hope from a landline connection is 3 Mbps. As a modern man with a modern family full of modern devices, I need fast internet—so I readied Starlink even before my kids’ beds. It worked pretty well, too. At first I heard a bunch of buzzing noises that I was not expecting, but that sort of coil whine is apparently pretty typical. A few minutes later, I was online! But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Having Starlink isn’t like having fiber internet, and I ran into several surprises along the way. Here are all the things I wish I’d known before getting Starlink at home. Starlink is better when it’s mounted As soon as I had Starlink working, I messaged my friends saying “Space internet installed!” with the following image: Jon Martindale / Foundry That’s right. The Starlink dish is propped up in the cardboard box it came in, sitting on some steps leading to a lawn that was never intended as its permanent home. It worked well enough for the first night—but that’s as long as I would ever want it to be there. Turns out, Starlink performs best when the dish is mounted in a location that’s free from obstructions and oriented in a way that maintains a connection with as many Starlink satellites as possible. The Starlink app makes the whole process pretty straightforward, with dynamically adjusting on-screen graphics that help you rotate the dish into its optimal facing. My ground-mounted performance was (obviously) bad, so taking the time to get it into a better position was worthwhile. But I’m no handyman. I can build a PC, sure, but hoofing up a ladder and drilling into red brick isn’t something I’m super comfortable doing—so I brought in a local professional TV antenna installer. Within a couple of hours, he had the dish mounted by my roof. Performance jumped from 50 Mbps to nearly 200 Mbps downstream. A huge improvement with better coverage, less chance of someone just wandering into my yard and stealing the dish, and no chance of my kids riding their bikes over the cable. That’s a win-win-win. …but Starlink can be ugly when mounted Personally, I think the Starlink dish looks pretty cool. Its a unique sight compared to all those rounded satellite dishes that you’ve likely seen in urban centers over the last several decades. It’s more modern. Jon Martindale / Foundry But the makeshift pipe-mount system I used? Eh, that leaves a lot to be desired. There are more attractive first-party mounts you can buy at additional cost, but a giant pipe on an unpainted brace is cheaper. Unfortunately, my wife is even less of a fan. It’s not like I’m going to be looking at it much up there. But if the exterior aesthetics of your home are important to you, it’s probably worth spending some more time (and money) than I did to get it mounted in a way that gets you great performance while looking good. Starlink’s upload speed is still lacking One aspect of fiber internet that’s easy to overlook is that it isn’t just blazingly fast for downloads—you can get upload speeds that are often as fast as your download speeds. That makes quick work when uploading work documents, personal photos, YouTube videos, and more. Jon Martindale / Foundry As I said at the start, though, Starlink isn’t fiber. I’m getting around 150 Mbps average download speeds with peaks up to 300 Mbps, but my upload speeds are decidedly slower. I’ve seen some people post screenshots of 50 Mbps uploads, but I’ve yet to see mine break 30 Mbps. More often than not, it’s closer to 15 Mbps. To be fair, 15 Mbps is plenty for sending photos over messaging apps and streaming my webcam during Discord D&D sessions, but it’s a lot more noticeable when I’m trying to send long videos to friends and family. And I don’t think I’d get far trying to livestream my gaming on Twitch at anything over 1080p with this kind of internet. Starlink’s router is underwhelming This might sound like a humblebrag, but the bundled Starlink Gen 3 router—a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router with a claimed coverage of just over 3,000 square feet—wasn’t enough for my new house. Truth is, my place is about half of that, yet I still had trouble getting signal everywhere due to walls, obstructions, and other sources of interference. Could I have place the Starlink router in a better spot for better coverage? Yeah, maybe. And there’s even a mesh system I could’ve employed if I was married to Starlink’s hardware. TP-Link But, fortunately, I have a much better TP-Link Archer GE800 Wi-Fi 7 router, so I didn’t need to bother. It’s complete overkill for a civilian gamer like myself, but it does offer fantastic coverage in my wonky-walled home, and I already know my way around it from the past year of faithful operation. (Lean more about why you should get your own router.) Props to Starlink for making the bridging process super simple, though. Just plug them in, switch the router to bypass mode in the app, a quick router reboot, and it was good to go in less than 10 minutes. There’s no planning for a global outage Two days after I got my Starlink dish mounted, my service went down. My wife had just left the house and closed the door the very second my PC connection dropped, so I thought it was her fault. Maybe she knocked the mount loose by slamming the door too hard? But as it turns out, it wasn’t anything so innocuous. In fact, the entire global Starlink network had gone down. Jon Martindale / Foundry I managed to text a few friends from my board game group to see if they could send me tips on how to get it working again. They sent me screengrabs from Reddit, Twitter, DownDetector. It confirmed that it wasn’t just my router or my dish. Indeed, all of Starlink was down. Apparently something like this has happened a few times before, but I also have friends who’ve had Starlink for years who claim there’s never been any outages as far as they know. So I’m not expecting this to happen again anytime soon, but tech is tech and it can fail. Even the magic of space internet can stop working from time to time. Your friends will judge you for Starlink Since November 2024, people around the world have been protesting against Elon Musk and those who support him. Many Tesla owners have added stickers to their vehicles, promising that their Teslas were bought before the CEO went crazy, all to fend off potential attacks. It hasn’t gotten that bad for Starlink, but I do have to put up with friends who ask if I couldn’t have found another way to get online. Indeed, if I could have, I would have! But while Amazon is working on Project Kuiper, its own low-Earth-orbit network of broadband satellites, that’s still years away from being fully operational and may take even longer to catch up to Starlink. Plus, as far as billionaire CEOs go, it’s more a lateral move than anything to go from Musk to Bezos. There are other providers with geostationary satellites that might have bandwidth, but the latency is poor. Eutelsat might be a legitimate option for me at some point, but not yet. Ultimately, the performance and viability of Starlink trumps my own misgivings about supporting a Musk-related company. Until that changes, I’ll have to swallow my pride and the condescension of a few friends. Starlink: Incredible tech, flawed execution There’s no denying it: Starlink feels like the kind of Jetsons-era future tech that has always captivated me. It just works, it’s nearly flawless, and it doesn’t have many real competitors. It’s really cool that I get super-fast, low-latency internet in a place that’s otherwise barely online. But I wish I’d paid more for a better-looking, less-obvious mounting system. I wish I’d had a better backup solution in place just in case it went down. I wish it wasn’t tied to one of the most odious CEOs in the world. For now, it’s the best solution available and a joy to use. It’s hard not to see how it could be even better, though. Read...

The rebound in export prices, improved farmer confidence and spending drove an improvement in PGG Wrightson sales and profits. Read...

AOL may have discontinued its dial-up internet services, but at least three others still exist as alternatives — yes, even in 2025. Three providers — Microsoft, Juno, and NetZero — say that they offer dial-up plans, with Juno continuing to offer free dial-up for 10 hours a month, though with a potential major catch. Over the weekend, the internet discovered that AOL had quietly announced that it would discontinue its dial-up internet services at the end of September. The shutdown will also affect associated software including AOL Dialer and AOL Shield, the company said. While AOL became synonymous with dial-up internet — and it’s “You’ve Got Mail” notification even became the inspiration for a feature film — customers moved on to DSL and then broadband connections to the open internet. Deploying broadband to rural locations requires investment, however, and the rollout was increasingly funded by governments, rather than private businesses. Wireless connections like T-Mobile’s 5G broadband services and StarLink‘s satellite connections helped make the older dial-up services increasingly obsolete. But for now, there do still appear to be dial-up options available. Among the most well-known is MSN Dial-Up Internet Access, which Microsoft sells for $21.95 per month or $179.95 per year. However, when I tried to access a list of nearby access numbers to check of service was available, a few numbers I tried — all in relatively populous areas — weren’t recognized. That wasn’t the case for NetZero, which offers “high-speed accelerated dial-up” for $29.95 per month. I used my Bay Area phone number and was able to find several local access numbers. (Of course, the Bay Area is also a haven for broadband, too.) Finally, Juno still advertises a free broadband service, though the Wikipedia page devoted to it notes that the company had planned in 2009 to use its software to harvest CPU cycles from its customers, a plan that may or may not have come to fruition. The page also notes issues with the company’s software and how it handled modern web formats. Clearly, most American internet customers have moved on to broadband, whether fixed or wireless. But if you need dial-up, a few providers remain — for now. Read...

AOL was once the largest provider of internet service for Americans. Today, it belongs to Yahoo! Inc. and operates as a web portal where you can read online articles aggregated from sources across the web—and it also still offers dial-up internet service! But not for much longer. Last week, AOL announced that it will be discontinuing its dial-up internet service starting September 30, 2025. Active users will need to switch to another internet provider by then, and the shutdown will also affect associated software including AOL Dialer and AOL Shield. Once bustling with 30 million customers It’s quite stunning that AOL is still offering dial-up service in 2025, and more astonishing that people are still paying for it. In 2022, one report counted about 175,000 dial-up subscribers in the US—and that number has surely dwindled in the three years since, but not to zero. The reason why people still pay for dial-up is more sad than amusing: many people in rural areas simply have no other access to the internet, forced to rely on dial-up through telephone lines to stay connected. AOL isn’t the only dial-up provider, but was the largest for a long time. AOL began offering its dial-up internet service back in 1991, then grew to be the largest internet provider in the world in 2000 with around 30 million active users. In recent years, however, AOL earned more from tech support and digital security services than from its internet services. Dial-up internet is a legacy service In recent years, the number of dial-up internet users has fallen sharply due to the proliferation of broadband infrastructure in the US. Unfortunately, broadband still hasn’t reached every nook of the country, and those who have no other option must still resort to traditional dial-up access. Dial-up isn’t only slow and impractical, but also exceedingly expensive for what you get, plus susceptible to cyberattacks and other security risks. Many now consider dial-up internet to be a legacy service and we wouldn’t be caught dead using such an outdated technology—but legacy tech continues to power our country in ways unseen. For example, Windows 95 and floppy disks are still used in air traffic control and some businesses still use Commodore 64s for customer checkouts. Read...