Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

In Which I Geek Out About Why You Should Update Your Marvel AQtion 10bit Network Adapter

Posted on September 3, 2026 by Michael Froomkin

I have an Asus Z790 atx motherboard on my home desktop and I’ve been happy with it. Except one thing (I’ll get to that).

The ethernet port is attached to a Marvel AQtion 10bit network adapter, which sounds vastly surplus to requirements given I have a 1 MB wired home network, and only 1.2 Mb internet to the 2MB capable router. I do have a somewhat Rube Goldberg system for playing music to my Swann powered desktop speakers which are connected to a Fiio K11. The music source is controlled via a Roon Nucleus One, accessed via my PC (Windows 11) with the actual music coming off my personal music library stored on my Synology NAS, or downloaded from Qoboz, a Spotify-like service that is known for the breadth of its classical music offerings.

I relate all this not to confess my evident sins in over-doing the music thing, although I swear I can hear the difference, but to explain why when I started getting drop-outs in music playback I put up with it for a very long while: while the speakers are rocks, and the Fiio DSP seemed unlikely to be a problem, that left an awful lot of things to troubleshoot: The internet (Comcast, ick!), the router, the PC, the NAS (also an unlikely culprit), the Nucleus One (Roon keep sending me ads to upgrade, but why would I want to?), the PC.

To simplify troubleshooting, I played only stored music from the NAS; problem continued, so unlikely to be Qoboz or the Internet. My next suspect was the Roon server, the Nucleus One. Google offered me a bunch of tips, notably reboot it daily, but none helped. Looking at the graphs on my task manger showed that the dropouts commonly were connected with a short period of packet inactivity, followed by a massive one.

So, I turned to the PC as my next suspect. Thinking it might be some CPU usage thing, or memory congestion, I killed lots of backround processes. But looking the device manager did not show any greater CPU usage around the music drops.

The Marvel AQtion 10bit network adapter became my next suspect. When I tried to update the driver, Device Manager told me I had the most recent version of it, so I wrote off the most obvious solution. Guided by random posts online I started fiddling with the advanced settings on the network adapter. Several posts said to turn off the ‘Energy Efficient Ethernet” so I tried that but it didn’t help. I was reluctant to turn off the flow control. Instead I went to see if there was maybe a better driver on the Marvel site. And oh boy was there: the one on the Marvel site is several versions and a few years newer than the one Microsoft claimed was the latest.

So I downloaded an installed the Marvel AQtion 10bit network adapter version 3.1.11.0, instead of the version 3.1.7 or such that I had before. And voila.

Just two questions: What took me so long? And, do I turn the ‘Energy Efficient Ethernet” switch back on?

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Electric Lunch

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Michael Froomkin

Click for larger imageBetter than science fiction:

A team of researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) has created a totally edible and rechargeable battery, starting from materials that are normally consumed as part of our daily diet. The proof-of-concept battery cell has been described in a paper, recently published in the Advanced Materials journal. The possible applications are in health diagnostics, food quality monitoring and edible soft robotics.

Spotted via Completely Edible Rechargeable Battery Created;

Actually, of course, we won’t feed the robot the edible cells, we’ll eat them ourselves as part of medical devices and maybe ultimately food-quality monitors. As I.K. Ilic, V.Galli, L. Lamanna, P. Cataldi, L. Pasquale, V.F. Annese, A. Athanassiou, M. Caironi. An Edible Rechargeable Battery. Advanced Materials (2023) explains:

In this paper, we present the first edible rechargeable battery based only on organic redox-active materials. All the materials used in the formation of the battery are common food ingredients and additives that humans can eat without harm in large amounts, >100 mg per day. First, we prepared a composite of redox-active food additives and ingredients with activated carbon, a conductive food additive. This allows electrons to flow to and from the redox-active centers. Upon testing the electrochemical performance of these composites, we established two alternatives for cathode and anode materials. We chose the highest and the lowest redox reduction potential materials, namely riboflavin (vitamin B2) and quercetin, and assembled the battery using edible current collectors and packaging. Such a battery can be used to power edible electronic devices operating outside the human body, as well as those operating inside, once the packaging is adjusted for the application. While rechargeable properties of the battery might not be useful for short-lived applications inside the human body, edible devices operating outside the human body can be recharged, prolonging their lifetime. This long-sought achievement not only enables the development of edible electronics, but can also pave the way for the replacement of commercial batteries in ingestible devices, reducing their risk upon ingestion.

Meanwhile,
Q: How do you classify the role of an edible-battery tester?
A: It’s a high-power job.

Posted in Robots, Science/Medicine, Sufficiently Advanced Technology | Comments Off on Electric Lunch

Apple’s Great New Privacy Commercial vs Reality

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

Apple has unveiled a terrific new video/commercial for the privacy features of the iPhone:

While I do think Apple deserves real credit for resisting government attempts to get a back door into iPhone encryption, I can’t help but view that video a little cynically in light of reports, not so long ago, that more than half of the App Store privacy labels were false.

Bonus shout-out to “Mind Your Own Business” by Delta 5 which provides the background.

Posted in Kultcha, Law: Privacy, Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 8 Comments

Is the ‘Ever Given’ Still Stuck in the Suez Canal?

Posted on March 27, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

Get near-real time info:

More info here, if you’re a glutton.

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How to Prevent ‘Zoom Fatigue’

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Michael Froomkin

According to Jeremy N. Bailenson in Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue, there are four main source of ‘Zoom Fatigue’:

  1. Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense.
  2. Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing.
  3. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.
  4. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.

But Zoom, they argue, could make design changes to fix or ameliorate these:

[M]any of these problems could be solved with trivial changes to the design of the Zoom interface. For example, the default setting should be hiding the self-window instead of showing it, or at least hiding it automatically after a few seconds once users know they are framed properly. Likewise, there can simply be a limit to how large Zoom displays any given head; this problem is simple technologically given they have already figured out how to detect the outline of the head with the virtual background feature. Outside of software, people can also solve the problems outlined above with changes in hardware and culture. Use an external webcam and external keyboard that allows more flexibility and control over various seating arrangements. Make “audio only” Zoom meetings the default, or better yet, insist on taking some calls via telephone to free your body from the frustrum.

What I like best about all this is the suggestion that I’ll do better as a Zoom listener if I do other things while listening from time to time.  Depending what the other thing is, it might be right.  But it’s so Millennial!

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology, Talks & Conferences | 1 Comment

Your Smart Doorbell Could Get You Killed

Posted on November 19, 2020 by Michael Froomkin

These things are DANGEROUS.

Amazon Ring Doorbell Hacked in Florida Swatting Incident:

In a Florida suburb Friday afternoon, local law enforcement received a call from a man confessing to hoarding explosives and killing his wife after seeing her cheat on him. Seemingly distraught, he gave them a play-by-play of the chaos unraveling. However, the crime didn’t happen. The call was made by someone who hacked into his Ring surveillance camera.

…

When authorities arrived at Courtney’s home, they found her unharmed and couldn’t decipher who the incognito caller was. Then the Ring camera started calling them names. It had been hacked and then used in a version of a swatting prank …

No one was hurt this time, but SWATting incidents can result in fatalities.

Posted in Florida, Law: Criminal Law, Sufficiently Advanced Technology | Comments Off on Your Smart Doorbell Could Get You Killed