arclight on Nostr: Tomorrow I may attempt to replace the WiFi router with a huge and shiny TP-Link ...

Tomorrow I may attempt to replace the WiFi router with a huge and shiny TP-Link thing. I've been having intermittent wifi failures on my gaming PC; I suspect either Windows 11 or some form of witches' curse. Either way, the current router is EOL and literally falling apart due to too many cat-vs-CAT5 interactions. Ideally it fixes the laptop's woes (doubtful) but I assume it's at least as likely to break everything.

I remember a time when upgrading hardware was something to look forward to. A fresh clean fast computer, speedy networking, something with better reliability and performance. Now it's one more device with a gratuitous 1000-watt blue LED, a shitty telemetry-laden app for setup, and the obligatory vendor account that exists only to leak credentials and burnish some asshat manager's KPIs.

I generally have OK results from TP-Link so I'm not expecting anything better or worse than average. The best I can realistically hope for is forgettable; anything memorable will likely be significantly and notably broken and awful. I'm trying to remember the last complex piece of gear that left me impressed and happy. Probably installing Daphile as an audio server on a refurbished Lenovo miniPC earlier this year. That worked surprisingly well and has been mostly reliable. But even that was just a secondhand PC with the stock OS wiped, new to me but definitely not new or innovative.

In the age of pervasive telemetry, slop, and Nazis, tech doesn't spark joy. It's just a dull ache of gratuitous negative change driven by some of the worst humans imaginable. It's not regressive or backwards, it's simply expecting my tools serve me first and foremost. It feels like such a rare thing anymore.