Will Angley

Today’s word of the day is ancient Greek: kapnobatai, literally “smoke-treaders” or “those who walk on clouds.”

It comes to us as the nickname for an ancient people in Strabo’s Geography. The work Strabo cites is now lost, and scholars have advanced several theories to explain what the nickname referred to. One theory is that the people would enter trances walking in clouds of smoke.

It’s this theory that makes kapnobatai my word of the day, since it’s a word we need again, for modern engineers entranced by clouds of computers.

I use a Netgear R7800, running a release build of LEDE Reboot 17.01.2, and am happy with it.

It’s a powerful WiFi router, lets you load your own Linux on it, and will turn on WiFi once you do. And it has a recovery mode which lets you unload your own Linux if you mess up and put something on it that breaks it.

This was hard to figure out: I read a whole lot of forum threads that talked about discontinued routers, or routers that worked once but were now locked down, or routers that only worked in Europe, and then one forum thread that was enough to make a decision.

It took a couple hours in total, and that was with having some idea what to look for since I’d worked on WiFi for a few years. If I hadn’t, I’m not sure I would have gotten to an answer at all. (Anecdotally: I tried and failed to find an OpenWRT router once before, four years ago, and bought an Airport Express instead. I think I’ve changed more than the way the Table of Hardware works but it’s hard to be sure.)

Setting up the router with LEDE was straightforward once I got past this, and it’s been running smoothly for the past week.

Late last year, I got a note from my credit card company that their “Fraud Early Warning Department” had flagged some transactions as suspicious and asked me if I’d made them.

I hadn’t. I was able to get everything resolved within a few weeks though, and I was excited the company had caught this for me within a day of the charges happening, instead of needing to wait for my monthly statement.

I told a few friends about my interaction with the early warning department. One, who had worked in payments, was less impressed than I was. He said it sounded more like a “late warning department” since they didn’t reject the charges in real time :).

I didn’t think much of this at the time. But I’ve since had interactions (with other companies!) that went much like this, where something that could have been addressed with a few seconds of text messages at the time wasn’t and turned into a an hour or two sorting things out with Support the next day.

Can we please start making systems that ask us for help before problems get big enough to be annoying instead of after?