Blog

Testing 10 GbE throughput on Windows - iperf3 is outdated

iperf3 only showing 4.5 gbps in Windows

Recently I upgraded my AMD-based PC on a livestream, and I installed an Innodisk EGPL-T101 10 Gbps M.2 NIC (link to Innodisk product page).

Under Linux, I could get through 9.4 Gbps using iperf3 between the PC and my Mac Studio. But under Windows, I could only get up to about 4.5 Gbps (tested around 1h 27m into the stream)!

Testing the Coral TPU Accelerator (M.2 or PCIe) in Docker

Google Coral TPU in PCIe carrier

I recently tried setting up an M.2 Coral TPU on a machine running Debian 12 'Bookworm', which ships with Python 3.11, making the installation of the pyCoral library very difficult (maybe impossible for now?).

Some of the devs responded 'just install an older Ubuntu or Debian release' in the GitHub issues, as that would give me a compatible Python version (3.9 or earlier)... but in this case I didn't want to do that.

Getting my amateur radio (ham) license

After four decades in the broadcast radio industry, I finally convinced my Dad to join me in getting an amateur radio license this summer.

In the US, there's a huge community of amateur radio operators, or 'Hams' for short. There's a whole history to how they got that name, but to me, radio's a lot of black magic.

Throw on top of that the fact that Hams are always slinging around weird terms like QRT, using morse code—or as they call it, CW—and they call themselves weird things like NK7U!

But we cut through all that jargon and learned the basics—well, I did. My Dad went the 'Extra' mile and ran through all three tests, relying on his 40 years of radio experience! We both have licenses now (I'm KFØMYB, and my Dad's KFØMYJ) and made our first contact. Here's a video documenting that entire journey (up to the point I sent out my first QSL card!):

A Pigeon is still faster than the Internet

Jeff Geerling holding a homing pigeon

In 2009, a company in South Africa proved a homing pigeon was faster than an ADSL connection, flying a 4 GB USB flash drive to prove it.

Besides IEEE's speculative work, nobody's actually re-run the 'bird vs. Internet' race in over a decade.

Now that I have gigabit fiber, I thought I'd give it a try.

Video

I published a video with all the details—and even more background on the graceful birds used in the experiment—over on my YouTube channel: