I am currently enjoying a brief escape from work, visiting friends across the UK as part of a motorbike trip. I do this each year over the Bank Holiday August weekend as it’s when many of us meet at Carmarthen in south-west Wales, “us” being friends that go back to the earliest days of the internet, who were there on the CIX system as it moved from a hosted CoSy conference engine to an internet-connected platform.
My route, from my Cambridgeshire base to Telford, Malvern, Cirencester, Ross on Wye, Carmarthen, through Wales to Chester, over to Scarborough and back home again takes six days and allows for an enjoyable trundle, and you might imagine a lot of thinking time. However, motorbiking requires top concentration so any pondering must be done on a low-priority thread in the background.
I always try to do this trip without a laptop. And every year I fail, and take something along just in case. The hotel Wi-Fi is usually reasonable, and I can fall back to 4G if required. A VPN tunnel using OpenVPN lets me connect back to the core network of the lab, and I always engage this whenever I’m on an untrusted hotel Wi-Fi. Although rarer now, I remember hotels, especially in Las Vegas, doing their best to break their way into web browser pages to insert adverts and other unpleasantness.
TLS-encrypted traffic means this isn’t the issue it was, but I prefer to be safe.
Not that it’s all progress. This time around, I’ve noticed a worsening of the call quality on the 3CX client for VoIP, with many more dropouts and stuttering issues. This is the
