Dariusz Więckiewicz

Privacy is the key and it’s not only in our private life but also in business. If you using Gmail (Google Workplace) for your business, something called read receipt is an odd thing.

Many businesses however are using solutions from Microsoft called Microsoft 365 Business (in various plans).

Microsoft, in their subscription service, provides a lot of useful functionalities, but there are some functions, that are heading back to times when Microsoft Outlook started gaining popularity (Microsoft Office 97).

Through these functionalities there was one, requesting a receipt sent back to the sender when the recipient read an email.

It was all about immigration. It was all about controlling our borders.

bollocks, bollocks, bollocks…

How is it going brexiteers when you need cheap labour for simple jobs and you will not get away with a £10 per hour rate?

Difficulty: Low
Preparation Time: 30 minutes + 45 minutes for dough rising
Baking time: 15 minutes, 180C with fan per insert

On websites that I tend to create, I always try to utilise Structured Data (Schema) as much as possible. This invisible for ordinary visitor data is served in the background and is used by search engines and other websites for better positioning of your content.

On YummyRecipes.uk I have already widely implemented Schema for Recipes but would like to do some more.

If you read my other post, you will find out that I recently rediscovered Progressive Web Apps (PWA).

Following this lead, I decided to implement it on the websites, where our main audience browses it from mobile phones. Later I decided to implement it gradually on all of my websites, independently of whether the main audience is on mobile or desktop. As you will see, PWA is quite useful for desktop users as well.

If you are not a first time on my website you already know, that I like simplifying things and using a minimal approach with a complex solution. Overall, if something complex can be done that same, but simple, why not try?

This time I want to cover Favicon during website design.

“A favicon is a browser icon that represents a brand or website. Most often seen next to a web page’s title in browser tabs, favicons can also be found in address bars, bookmark lists, search results pages, toolbars, browser history, and other places across the web.”

What is a favicon? @ blog.hubspot.com

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, as there is already a perfect solution for that, well written and documented by Andrey Sitnik from Evil Martian.

Over the last years, I forget about something called Progressive Web Apps (PWA) until one day I added to my Home Screen a bookmark to Homebridge, and, believe me, or not, I do not add bookmarks that way very often.

When I added this bookmark to my Home Screen on iOS I noticed, that it looks unusual. The icon was like a native app. When I click on the icon it didn’t open inside Safari like other bookmarks but it run on full screen like a normal native app.

Of course, it was still Safari in the background but highly limited to the scope of that single website, that it feels like a native. It certainly can be confused with an app.

Not so far ago I wrote down about how my Apple Watch didn’t last as long as I expected.

I recalled my Apple Watch 4th generation that had been with me for two years before I changed to the newest model at the time. The S6 didn’t do that well.

Have you ever struggled to measure the true speed of your internet?

Each router is different, and additionally, WiFi wireless networks come in different standards, on different frequencies and offering different speeds depending on external factors.

If our computer has a card that only supports 2.4GHz at a speed of 54Mbps, we can have 100, 200 or more Mbps, and we will not go faster than 54Mbps.

Some 2.4GHz networks can even offer 300Mbps. In the case of 5GHz and speeds go up significantly. This does not mean that we are always able to achieve the offered speed.

If we have 3 devices that actively use the WiFi network, the network capacity, i.e. the maximum speeds we can achieve, is also divided by three.

Therefore, to properly measure the internet speed, you would need to connect directly, preferably by cable, to the router and be the only user for whom the entire bandwidth would be available.

If you have a router with OpenWrt software, you can measure the connection speed directly from the router, bypassing all users.

My OpenWrt adventures began with the ASUS RT-AC56U router. It was a fairly good, cheap router with a dual-core Broadcom BCM4708A0 processor clocked at 800MHz. It also had 128MB of flash memory and 256MB of RAM.

Appetite grows with eating, as the saying goes.

While I didn’t complain about the processor, I quickly ran out of space for more of these applications. So I decided to replace it with a Linksys WRT3200ACM, which I later changed to a Linksys WRT32x.

WRT3200ACM (WRT32x) is a very solid machine, we still use this type of router at work. While I was pleased with its performance, the WiFi network did not work out very well.

The signal strength left much to be desired, and cooperation with other routers or access points was not without problems. All because of the wireless chip from Marvell used in it.

Additionally, the lack of support for DFS channels in WiFi in the 5GHz frequency further limited its use. Also, forget about WPA3 encryption introduced by default in the OpenWrt 21.02 series (WPA3 can be turned on, but WiFi and the entire router quickly stop working).

In my search for a better router, I came across the Linksys MR8300. It had 3 Qualcomm Atheros radios. One was for the 2.4GHz frequency and the other two for 5GHz, the first for channels up to 60 and the second for above 100 (with DFS support).

While the router performed well, it was clear to see that it was much slower, especially when installing software.