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By now, you may have noticed that Windows 11 has a new menu that appears when you click the Network, Volume or Power glyph in the Taskbar’s Notification Area:

(I added the red outline for clarity. When you hover your mouse pointer over any of those three glyphs, the section of taskbar indicated by the outline will appear to light up slightly.) The menu that appears is called the Quick Settings menu:

This is actually a bit annoying if your goal is simply to connect to a wireless network, because it adds a step. In Windows 10, you could simply click on the network glyph, which would pop up a list of available wireless networks, choose a network from that list and enter the password for it. In Windows 11, this menu first appears. Next, you have to click on the “>” button next to the Network glyph (which now looks the same as the wireless network icon in Mac OS and on most smartphones if you’re connected to a wireless network, looks like a monitor with a little antenna sticking up next to it if you’re connected to a wired network, or looks like a wire representation of a globe if you’re not connected to a network). For me, at least, this is not intuitive, and when connecting to a new wireless network, I often find myself staring at the Quick Settings Menu, as I try to remember what I’m supposed to do next. In any case, once you click on the “>” button, you can finally click on the desired wireless network and enter the password for it.

The other icons that appear on my Quick Settings menu, shown above, are the default icons, as I haven’t changed them. They are: Bluetooth (“C1L” happens to be the name of my Bluetooth earbuds, which I am using right now as I type this), VPN, Airplane Mode, Focus Assist, Night Light, (screen) Brightness, Audio Volume, Power settings (the battery), Quick Settings Menu Settings (the pencil) and Windows Settings (the gear). But the nice thing about the Quick Settings menu is that you can change what appears on the Quick Menu. A little bit. So, I’ll go ahead and click the pencil glyph so you can see whyI haven’t changed my Quick Settings menu.

The buttons shown in the upper part of the Quick Settings Menu can now be removed, by clicking on the crossed-out pushpin in each button’s upper right corner, and even rearranged, just as you can rearrange pinned icons on the Start Menu. But rearranging these buttons is of limited value, because there just aren’t that many of them, and rearranging them here has no impact beyond how they appear on the Quick Settings Menu. The ability to rearrange the buttons would be of more value if you could add more buttons. Well, in fact, you can add more buttons; just click the + Add button at the bottom:

This is the list of additional buttons you can add to the Quick Settings Menu. As you can see, it’s not a long list, and the reason I haven’t added any buttons to my Quick Settings Menu is because I have no use for any of them. But each of them is potentially useful to somebody. If you have a use for any, then add away, and click the Done button when you’re finished.

Adding more buttons to the Quick Settings Menu will not change the glyphs that appear in the Notification Area in any way. But adding them will make the corresponding functions more convenient for you to get to — if you can remember to click on the Network, Volume or Power glyph in the Notification Area to get to them!

Next week, we’ll begin exploring the Quick Settings Menu buttons.

I received an interesting – and scammy – letter in the mail last month. It was from a company calling itself “United States Domain Authority” and, at first glance, appeared to be a reminder to renew my lebowitzit.com domain name. The letter was a slick job, liberally festooned with American flags on both sides of the letter, and even on the envelope and return envelope. (Apparently, when people see American flags, they’re supposed to drop all caution and common sense and just do what purports to be the patriotic thing, which, in this case, would be to pull out the checkbook and respond to the pitch.) Here is the letter for you to see:

(For those of you wondering, I did not blank out my company name or address because I purposely post those online. I only blanked out the data items that someone might, for whatever reason, use to respond to the ad in my name.)

So, how did I know this was a scam? The answer is that this is one of those situations in which knowing just a little bit about your own organization can save you, even if you don’t know a whole lot about what it takes to have an Internet presence. Specifically, I knew that my domain name wasn’t up for renewal, because I had just renewed it several weeks before the date on the letter.

That had me looking more carefully at the letter. The next thing that stuck out, other than those pervasive American flags, was the big, bold text in the upper right corner, which proclaim “MARKETING SERVICES”. A letter from my domain name registrar, were they to send me one, would not have such text. It would be focused on domain name renewal, which is what they would be all about. Before you think that the scammers are doing you a favor by clearly identifying their wares as “MARKETING SERVICES”, they aren’t. The reason that text is there is because it is a federal crime to use the United States Postal Service to perpetrate fraud, which is exactly what making a letter like this look like a domain name renewal notice is. So, they prominently label the letter as “MARKETING SERVICES”, and then design the rest of the letter to distract your eyes from that text. This is what’s known as covering one’s legal a**.

Recognizing the remaining clues that this letter isn’t what it appears to be requires at least a bit more technical knowledge. But that’s OK — that’s what we’re here to provide!

Let’s start with the name of the sender: United States Domain Authority. It’s fairly easy to do a web search and find out if they actually are a domain name registrar, but I can tell you that I know which companies handle most domain name registrations in the United States, and this company’s name didn’t sound familiar. I also happened to know it isn’t the name of my domain name registrar. And if you read carefully, you can see the letter discloses, in smaller print, and in the middle of a paragraph that’s easy to gloss over, that they admit that they aren’t a domain name registrar:

Next, we have the cost. There is no MSRP for domain name registrations, as far as I know. Prices vary from registrar to registrar, and also depend on the exact domain name you are registering. Registrations in certain top-level domains can be extremely expensive. But I knew from my past domain name renewals that $289 was very high for just one year.

In fact, all this letter is really selling me is an opportunity, if you can call it that, to have my domain name listed in some directory that I’ve never heard of. That’s a dubious value, to say the least, and certainly not worth $289. For all I know, all it would do is put me on a list for receiving more junk mail, which I can certainly do without. There’s even the possibility that the letter is from a company that’s just a front for collecting account information to be sold on the dark web. I honestly don’t know or care. I just thought it made for an interesting blog entry and subsequent denizen of my circular file.

Some of the work I do involves transferring data from one device to another. This includes computer storage drive upgrades, recovering data from non-working computers. getting data from PC to Mac or vice versa, and more. To do this, I have an array of USB devices of various types and capacities, including flash drives (also known as “thumb drives”, which is the equivalent of calling a facial tissue a “Kleenex”, or “pen drives”, a phrase that I believe originated in the UK, although I don’t know its etymology) and USB hard drives, as well as several devices that enable me to connect several different kinds of internal hard drives and solid state drives to a computer’s USB port.

I recently needed to replace my 1TB USB hard drive. A lot has changed since I purchased that 1TB USB hard drive, in terms of the per-gigabyte cost of storage and the technologies used to connect them. Mulling this over, I still rarely need drives larger than 1TB, but since most computers nowadays have at least one USB 3.x port, many also have the smaller, more versatile USB C ports, and data recovery tools that run outside of Windows have supported both of those connections for some time, I opted for a Crucial X6 SE USB 3/USB C Solid State Drive. I’ve had an opportunity to use it a couple of times now, and when plugged into a healthy computer that supports its fastest connection options, it can copy large amounts of data in blessedly short periods of time. (Of course, if the computer isn’t healthy or only supports a USB version older than 3.0, it will be limited to much slower speeds.) As a solid state drive, it’s also fairly impervious to drop damage, unlike my USB hard drives. And it’s compact and lightweight enough to have a permanent home in my laptop bag. It’s surely a fine addition to my toolkit.

Looking over my collection of USB drives, pictured above, offers a snapshot of how external storage has evolved over the last 15 years or so. Note that all of these drives cost $85 or so at the time they were purchased.

Starting from the top, I have a Western Digital My Passport 250GB model, official model number WD2500ME-01. This is a very old drive, purchased new sometime in 2007-2009, since all the manuals I can find for this line of drives mention support for Windows 98SE through Windows Vista. (Windows 7 came out in 2010.) It works well enough, but the conventional hard drive inside spins at only 5400 RPM, which is on the slow side for a hard drive, and its interface is USB 2.0. Between its relatively slow speed and small capacity, I only use it for small data transfers, and then only if my other drives are unavailable.

Second from the top is a unit that started out as an Iomega Prestige 500GB model. The reason it’s in a funny-colored case that says “acomdata” instead of “Iomega” is because I transplanted it into a 3rd party drive enclosure. Iomega, which was known for its innovative storage products in the 1990s, was no longer so innovative by 2012, when I bought this drive. They were selling relatively low-cost USB hard drives, though, which is mainly what attracted me to this model. I hadn’t owned it for six months when its mini-USB port broke. Since it was still under warranty, I sent it in for warranty service, finding out in the process that Iomega had been acquired by Lenovo, which fulfilled my warranty. Alas, the mini-USB port on the drive I got back didn’t last any longer than the first one did. At that point, I could still have sent it in for yet another warranty repair or replacement, but a quick look on Amazon.com told me that I could get a 3rd party enclosure for the drive for about what it would cost me to send the drive back to Lenovo again. I gambled that the mini-USB port on the 3rd party enclosure would last longer than the one on another Prestige drive would. That gamble paid off, and the drive still works fine. However, like the WD My Passport drive, it doesn’t get used often anymore, because while its capacity is more in line with what I need for data transfers, its USB 2.0 interface makes it quite slow, although not as slow as the My Passport drive.

The third drive from the top is a Seagate Expansion 1TB USB hard drive. I bought it in 2017 or 2018, and it’s the drive I’ve been using most often, because its USB 3.0 interface makes it much faster than the WD My Passport and the Iomega Prestige. I actually used to have two of these, but one was ruined when I dropped it on the floor accidentally. Unlike the My Passport and the Prestige drives, whose drives could theoretically be replaced with off-the-shelf hard drives or solid state drives, the Seagate Expansion uses a specially-made hard drive with a USB circuit board instead of a conventional SATA board. This meant there was nothing I could do but recycle the whole thing. This is the drive that’s being replaced.

Finally, at the bottom, we have my brand new Crucial X6 SE. The solid state drive inside it is many times faster than the conventional hard drive in the Seagate Expansion, and when plugged into a computer with a USB C port (or a USB 3.2 Type A port), it supports data transfers of up to 800MB/sec. Its real-world maximum speed is probably closer to 500MB/sec, but that would still make it three times as fast as the Seagate Expansion drive it replaced. (Despite USB 3.0’s theoretical top speed of 625MB/sec, I’ve never seen the Seagate Expansion copy faster than 175MB/sec, and it rarely exceeds 130MB/sec.) That means it’s far better for moving data to and from modern computers with very fast NVMe solid state drives.

It’s always interesting to see how technologies evolve over time!

Every once in a while, I come across an application of technology that is just plain ridiculous. For example, years ago, I walked into a Norelco store (back when such stores existed) to see about getting my electric shaver fixed (OK, now I guess I’m really dating myself — who fixes shavers anymore?) and look at some new ones. The man behind the counter proudly showed me Norelco’s latest and greatest model, which had some absurdly high price tag on it. Since I didn’t see any gold plating on the thing, I asked the salesperson what made this shaver worth so much. He replied that the shaver had a microprocessor in it that kept its motor spinning at precisely 3600 RPM at all times. OK, that was unexpected. If he had said something about diamond-edged blades or precision combs, it might have made some sense to me. But we were talking about shaving here, not keeping time or spinning records (oops, dated myself again!). So I paused, blinked a few times and then asked the salesperson, “And how, exactly, does guaranteeing a motor speed of precisely 3600 RPM give me a better shave?” He didn’t have an answer to that, so I either handed him my old shaver for repair or purchased a more reasonably-priced replacement, and that was that. But I never forgot the encounter for being an obvious case of techno-gimmickry.

This morning, I experienced another such encounter without even leaving my home. I received an Amazon Treasure Truck notification on my phone, about an amazing, get it while it’s hot, 42% discount on a Hamilton Beach Smart Coffee Maker, just $54.99 instead of the usual $99.99. And what’s so smart about it, you may ask? (Well, you should ask; after all, I did.) Why, you use Alexa to turn it on, that’s what! Don’t take my word for it; see it for yourself at https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07TFLNDNR/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_19ZZA1WE7RAX4YGF8ZY0

Looking through the photos and description, I suddenly found myself thinking about an episode of the original 1970s-’80s “Fantasy Island”, in which Tattoo excitedly shows Mr. Rourke his new invention, a fly killer, which consists of two wooden blocks. When Mr. Rourke asks how it works, Tattoo’s explanation begins with, “First, you catch a fly…”; you can probably figure out the rest for yourself. Turning back to Hamilton Beach’s technological wonder, we see that before you tell Alexa when you want her to set your coffee a-brewin’, you must first load up the machine with water, a conventional filter and coffee grounds. Oh, and close the loading door. Manually.

Is there a way to connect the machine to your kitchen’s water supply? Nope. Does the machine have a hopper for, say, a pound of coffee grounds or beans so Alexa can tell it, on the fly, how much coffee to make? Nope. Can it eject the spent grounds and filter into a nearby receptacle and clean itself? Nope, nope. So, what, exactly, does Alexa bring to the table here? Uh, she can tell the coffee machine to turn itself on when you’re not there. That’s nice, but my completely conventional Mr. Coffee brewer can do that just about as well, and for less than half the discounted price, with its delayed brew timer. So, all the smart features really do is increase the cost of the machine, and, if the seller has had a lot of practice as a carnival barker, increase his profit margin. I’m going to guess that didn’t work out too well for Hamilton Beach or Amazon, because the latter just put the machine on the Treasure Truck at a much more conventional price, and the former has discontinued the product.

Don’t get me wrong here. I love technology. I’m in the business of selling and servicing technology. But I will never sell you technology that serves no purpose beyond the product description.

A number of years ago, I had my first encounter with open-source router firmware. My revelation came in 2014 or ’15, in the form of an old Linksys WRT54G pressed into service by a VoIP vendor. My casual observation at the time (backed up, after the fact, by some research I did for this blog post) was that the router had to be at least 10 years old, and my experience with consumer-grade routers was that they rarely provided more than 5 years of 24/7 service. There were much more powerful, industrial-grade routers to be had in 2014, so it seemed rather odd to me that a commercial VoIP vendor would choose such an old, clunky, outdated router to direct an office’s VoIP traffic. So, I did what came naturally to me: I asked the vendor, politely and diplomatically, of course, about his choice of routers for this application. His answer was that I was correct, a stock Linksys WRT54G would not be an appropriate piece of equipment for handling VoIP. However, this was not a stock Linksys WRT54G; it was a WRT54G whose original firmware had been replaced by an open-source router firmware called Tomato. Tomato not only had the magical power (well, it seemed magical to me at the time) to resurrect a failing consumer-grade router, but it could also unleash capabilities not normally found in consumer-grade routers. Well, that was certainly not the answer I had anticipated, and not knowing what else to do with it, I made a thoughtful face, uttered “Cool!”, or maybe a Mr. Spock-esque “Fascinating.”, and filed the information away in my brain for future reference.

The next time I thought about this was a year or so later, when my own home wi-fi router started acting flaky. Before running out to buy a replacement, I thought, “Hey, wait, let’s see if maybe this Tomato or Potato or Avocado or Whatever-o (I knew it was some fruit or vegetable ending in ‘o’) can resurrect my dying router. I fired up a web browser, did a quick search, and… no dice. I quickly discovered that Tomato didn’t support my router. It only supported a handful of routers, mainly variants of the Linksys WRT54G. I also found that there were other open-source router firmwares available, such as OpenWRT and DD-WRT, but they didn’t support my router, either. So, I went back to Plan A, and bought a new router. I didn’t think much about it again until 2018 or 2019, when I once again encountered an old, outdated-looking router in an office, only to discover that the router had been loaded with open-source firmware, this time DD-WRT.

Fast-forward to a little over a month ago, when my current router, a Netgear Nighthawk R7000P AC2300 model, started dropping wi-fi connections intermittently. It’s not an old router, but, frustratingly, its problems began just a couple weeks after its one-year warranty ended. Two Netgear firmware upgrades failed to fix it, Netgear’s online help provided no useful information, and all I could find out about it from public forums were posts from plenty of other Netgear R7000P owners who were experiencing the exact same problem, with no solutions mentioned. That’s when I remembered that VoIP vendor’s statement from all those years ago, that third-party, open-source firmware could sometimes fix problems with a failing wi-fi router. My most recent encounter with open-source router firmware was DD-WRT, so I looked up its web site and found that it works with my router. Yes!

I then set about finding out what I had to do to wave DD-WRT’s magic wand over my increasingly malfunctioning router. It didn’t take long for me to come across a stern warning to read DD-WRT wikis and forum posts before beginning, find the correct version of the firmware for my router, and then carefully follow the installation instructions, because there was a very real chance of turning my already unhappy router into a paperweight if I did something wrong. And to emphasize all that, the introductory instructions included the warning that “TL:DR is no excuse”. That did give me pause, at first. But then I remembered that my router was failing anyway, so, if worse came to worst, my attempt to load DD-WRT on it would brick the thing, at which point I’d just go buy a new one.

I’m not going to bore you with the technical procedures that transformed my flaky, stock Netgear Nighthawk R7000P into a DD-WRT-powered wi-fi router that seems to be stable so far. The main reason is that the procedures vary from router to router. Your router might require different procedures, or might not be supported at all. One thing you learn from reading those wikis and forum posts is that no two consumer-grade router manufacturers agree on how to implement the technology, and routers from the same manufacturer might all require different steps for loading DD-WRT. It must have been a maddeningly complicated project for DD-WRT’s developer community to make the product work with as many routers as it supports, and it sounds like an equally maddening project to continue to fix bugs and make improvements to the firmware. The bottom line is that if you want to run open-source firmware on your router, you’ll have to do your own homework, and a lot of it.

I will provide you with my observations, though. First, the results: As of right now, all the major features I was using before the firmware change – Internet routing, wired network switch, wi-fi network, guest wi-fi network and sharing a USB-connected external hard drive over my network – are working, at least for the most part. There appears to be a bug that prevents the 5GHz guest network from working, and attempts to make it work make the other wi-fi connections unreliable, but I can live without that. The parental controls that Netgear included with my R7000P, Netgear’s flavors of OpenDNS and Circle, are gone, but I no longer need those.

Another thing I picked up along the way is why not all routers can be supported by open-source firmware. First and foremost, in order for a router to be supported, its factory firmware must run on Linux. In fact, this is why the original Linksys WRT54G was the router supported by the first open-source router firmwares: it was the first consumer-grade router known to run Linux, which made it hackable. (Note that to programmers, “hacking” is not necessarily a bad thing. It simply refers to writing short, clever program code intended to accomplish a task. Only when we’re talking about a malevolent hacker does the task involve breaking through security and stealing data.) To this day, not all consumer-grade routers run Linux.

Be aware that when you load open-source firmware onto your router, you effectively become your own tech support provider. Open-source router firmware, like open-source application software, is written by consortia of volunteer programmers. There is generally no company bankrolling the project, and there is no company paying tech support agents to help people use it. There are wikis and knowledgebases containing a wealth of information about the firmware, but it, too, is written by volunteers, so it’s not always well-organized, it’s often out of date and it’s not unusual to encounter conflicting information. You can join the support forums for the firmware and post messages there requesting assistance, but if your message makes it obvious that you’ve made no attempt to look in the wikis or for other forum posts dealing with your issue, then you’ll most likely receive a brusque referral to those wikis or posts, or your message may be ignored entirely. And if you cop an attitude by demanding a response, calling programmers idiots or complaining about rude or inattentive support personnel, you will get a frosty response at best, and might even get banned from the forum. Open-source is a very cool concept, but you must remember that when you opt for open-source products, you are nobody’s valued customer.

Part and parcel with learning to support your open-source router firmware is learning a whole slew of unfamiliar terms. For example, earlier, I mentioned that I had gotten my “guest wi-fi network” working. You may be familiar with the concept of a guest wi-fi network from your own router, but when you look through DD-WRT’s administration pages, you won’t see any mention whatsoever of a guest wi-fi network. That’s because in DD-WRT, guest wi-fi networks are simply a specific application of what they call “virtual access points”. In a nutshell, to create a guest wi-fi network in DD-WRT, you create a virtual access point, turn on the Unbridged, AP (Access Point) Isolation and Net Isolation options, specify an IP address range and a DNS address, visit another page to set your virtual access point’s password and security settings, and visit yet another page to turn on something called Dnsmasq and type in several arcane-looking lines of code to make Dnsmasq create a DHCP server for your virtual access point. Got all that?!? Probably not, but maybe now you have gained some appreciation of all the things your stock wi-fi router does for you behind the scenes when you activate its guest wi-fi network feature, name it and give it a password. Personally, I had never heard of a Dnsmasq before. I still don’t quite know what one is, although I now have some idea of what it does.

This is my foray into DD-WRT open source firmware so far. It’s going to be an ongoing adventure for me, and I may post more about it in the future if it leads to any new, interesting stuff. I actually kind of hope it doesn’t, because now that my router appears to work reliably again, I would very much like it to go back to being an appliance that just works in the background and doesn’t require me to think about it much. I decided to write this only because I like to post once a week about interesting tech adventures, and this certainly qualifies. But it is not an announcement of a new product or service from Lebowitz IT Services. Please do not ask me to load DD-WRT or any other open-source firmware on your router. If you do, then my reply will tell you that as of right now, I don’t have the experience and in-depth understanding of open-source router firmware to do such a project, very likely followed by an offer to send an estimate for what a new router or mesh wi-fi system would cost.