Stupid thing of the minute:

I've got a Raspberry Pi stuck in a dusty corner behind a chair, in a place where no one ever goes, next to a fire place that no one ever uses. I think it's only ever been lit once since my parents moved into this house a little more than 8 years ago.

This Raspberry Pi is connected to a cheap Behringer audio interface, which is, in turn, connected to a pair of cheap Behringer microphones that lives outside, such that it is always capturing, streaming and recording the ambient sounds in the neighborhood in stereo. I've been doing this for almost 16 nearly uninterrupted years, other than some time around a move in 2017.
It's a blind man's webcam, as it were.

Since I don't actually live where this is anymore, I sometimes find it nice to just listen in on the place when I'm at home. Sometimes, interesting things happen. It's generally pretty peaceful, though.

Anyway, maybe two years ago (can't remember exactly when now), I was experiencing some major issues with the Raspberry Pi's built-in WiFi connecting to the network. Unfortunately, this Pi is not where I can run Ethernet, which is also the case for most devices in this house.

My solution was to get a cheap TPLink Archer something-or-other USB WiFi adapter and use that instead. It was less than $20, and only supports what is now being called WiFi5, I guess... 802.11AC.
It's one of those adapters where the antenna is in the same housing as the dongle itself. I don't really like anything about that design. It's way too top-heavy.

It turns out that the Realtek chip TPLink used wasn't natively supported by the rPi kernel, requiring a third party driver that some random user compiled.

I installed this driver, got terrible performance and crappy throughput, switched back to the built-in WiFi, and managed to make it work OK by adjusting some stuff on the access point.

Apparently, I just left this USB adapter connected to it and forgot about it, because according to my UniFi controller, that host had two IP addresses assigned to it.

The UniFi wireless access points all have iperf (not iperf3) installed on them, so I installed iperf on the Pi, and did speedtests between the access point and the Pi from both IP addresses, since they were both active. Because of another unrelated stupid compromise situation that currently exists involving a much narrower than intended wireless mesh channel bandwidth that I am still trying to find a solution for that isn't just not using wireless mesh, which is what I would really like to do, I knew that measuring with another device on the network would probably be slower than theoretical achievable speeds to/from the wireless interface and the access point itself, so I opted to use iperf directly from the access point, since it was already installed, albeit an older protocol and a binary from 2016, for some reason. And, yes, this is with a firmware from December of 2025.

Anyway, turns out that the forgotten WiFi adapter provides significantly more throughput than the built-in chip, not to mention a stronger signal (-47 dBm vs -60 dBm), so I have once again disabled that Pi's onboard WiFi, and am now using the USB adapter again.

The end-result: probably no one at all will ever notice the difference but me, and even then, only under some very specific circumstances.

Oh well.

All that for that.

Completely unrelated:
This Pi is still running Raspbian Buster, and probably should be upgraded. It isn't hosting anything that is directly exposed to the internet, though. Liquidsoap is streaming to a local Icecast server, which is then being relayed by a larger server over a Wireguard VPN. The ISP here only does CG-NAT, so I can't serve things from the IP address directly even if I wanted to, which I don't care about as much these days thanks to how easy things like Wireguard and Tailscale makes it to do on damn near any type of connection, combined with a properly configured exit node.

If you want to listen to the live stream that this thing provides, feel free to click here, or plug this into your media player of choice.

stream.borris.me:8888/outside