I’m pretty sure that many of you have heard about self-driving becoming a reality soon. Famous Elon Musk promised it first in 2013 and his “release date” is getting sooner and sooner. And it is not baseless blabbing. Recent videos from Tesla in fact are looking quite promising. Will we have full autonomy soon? I’m sure a lot of people will pay quite good money for it. But unfortunately, the answer is hard NO. Not in the next 10-20 years unless some major breakthrough happened. And let me explain why.

Cost

The main reason why Elon pushed so heavily for autonomous driving is to make Tesla cheaper. If you compare Tesla with any car even a very basic one you

When I was thinking about a new PC in 2018, one of the decisions I had to make was how much memory I need. And that time I decided that 16 Gb is enough, and I didn’t see any reason why I should buy more. And my choice was correct.

But now I see a very good reason to increase my memory size in my next build and that reason is simple – browsers. Let me explain. For example, I have Firefox with 4 windows and around 10 tabs each. And that consumed 6.5 Gb in Firefox. And very often I can open much more, when I research some problem, or when I would like to buy something.

And I’m

Imagine you would like to develop your own game. What tool is the best for you to use: Unity or Unreal? Some time ago I wrote this post and compare the development side of Unity and Unreal and I would like to update. Both Unity and Unreal are equivalent and it is possible to do the same things in both. Some things are easier in Unreal, and some are easier in Unity.

No visual tool, please

As I wrote before, don’t even try any visual programming unless your game has extremely basic programming. Visual programming is like hammering nails into a board using rock. Yes, you can do it and if you have only a pair of them, then

Firstly some history. About 9 years ago I bought an Epson XP-810 printer. It cost me around $120 if memory serves me right. It is quite a versatile multifunctional device. Especially I like that it can scan documents on both sides 2 sides which I found quite rare these days because some time ago I was looking for a printer for my relative and it was quite hard to find a consumer-grade printer that does this while costing reasonable money.

But the most important feature is that I can buy 2 full sets of aftermarket printer ink of XL size for $12-$15. Right now the same set of original Epson ink cost $99. And from my memory 9 years ago

Recently I found that more and more different websites switched to 2-way authentication. I completely understand why and I support this movement because it is way more secure but there are a few things I hate in 2-way authentication for quite a long time.

The first and most important thing is a lack of focus on the website. I entered the username and password and now I’m prompted to enter the security code that the website sent as SMS. I’m gabbing my phone, type code and press Enter just to find that the edit box is not focused and I have to click on it first and then switch on and unlock my phone, then go to iMessage and find

The company where I work is actively using AWS for many services. Our monthly bill is many hundreds of thousands of dollars. We are using many different techniques to reduce our bill and one of them is “Savings Plans”. But there is one problem with it. When you create a “Cost and usage report” you will see prices without it.

Why is this a problem? Well, imagine you would like to see the real cost of EC2 instances because it has sense to start optimization from the most expensive instances. But Savings Plan applies automatically to the most expensive instances and effectively their cost is zero. As a result, you don’t see real cost and if you are not familiar

If you trying to develop any game in Unity or even if you are trying to experiment with Unity I suggest using some kind of version control system. Even if you are developing something alone. It will bring a lot of benefits:

  • You will have a backup of your code.
  • You will see a list of changes before you commit changes. This can help you see unwanted changes. Once I spent a few hours because I accidentally press a minus key.
  • It will allow you to go back in time and get the version day/week/month ago. It is very helpful because sometimes you do change that broke something but you didn’t see it immediately. And later it would be very hard to find what change broke your code. But if you commit often, usually it will take from minutes to an hour to find the change that broke the functionality.
  • It is much easier to experiment with your code. Just make sure you commit everything before you start experimenting. If your experiment is successful then commit new changes. Otherwise just roll everything back. It happened to me very often. I had a great (I think) idea and then I started refactoring. And then somewhere in the middle, I found that it is a bad idea. It takes a lot of time to revert everything back and very often I forgot something. VCS makes it extremely easy.
  • It is very easy to go back to the old code. For example, you may refactor code and everything looks good for some time. Then you may realize that you didn’t take into account some cases that the old code did. In this case, you can check how the old version works.
  • It is very helpful to review your changes just before commit. It helps to find some experiments or unfinished code. Sometimes it helps you to find nonoptimal code.

More than 3 years ago I bought Archer C7. I bought it as a replacement for the 8-year-old TP-Link TL-WDR4310 and it looks not bad at that time. I didn’t really care about Wi-Fi speeds because my communication cabinet was at the corner of my house, and I didn’t plan that somebody will use it persistently. And TP-Link TL-WDR4310 became my main Wi-Fi router because it was located close to the center of my house.

But then I replaced my main router with Cudy X6 router and then I replaced Cudy with Belkin RT3200. And then I started to think about which router I should put as my main Wi-Fi router.

As you know my relative

If you open this link to see 5GHz channel allocation you will find 2 green blocks. The first block has channels 36, 40, 44, and 48. The second block has channels 149, 153, 157, 161, and 165. As far as I understand, these blocks can be used in any country. As a result, many routers only allow you to choose only these channels for a 5 GHz network. All channels between these are co-called DFS channels, and their usage is different in each country.

DFS channels have some rules that are different in each country and that routers must follow.

But what will happen if you try to use any of those DFS channels? For example, let’s try to