Steam Link
Out to do our usual garage sale trawl this morning, but found precious little to actually spend money on. There was a sale that advertised video game stuff, but the lady wanted absolutely insane prices for everything (a PSOne for $125!) - she did have a PS2 fat, and I went back before closing to ask if she’d take $20 for it (about half what I could buy a tested+working one on Gumtree if I found myself near Melbourne) and noted she had $70 on it, and would take $50. Too rich for my blood thanks.
After dropping Duncan off at Lincoln’s to stay the night, we went to EB, where Sabriena had found that the Steam Link was on sale - again - for $27AUD. I wanted to buy one last time they were on sale, after being told they’d be on sale until the end of June, and found that they weren’t, so I was interested to see if they had any for that price. They did, so we bought one - I had $12 left on a gift card, so I’m only actually $15 out of pocket.
Brought it home and… the experience is shit. I know they say to play over ethernet, and I had the Link itself on Wifi and my desktop is on a WDS bridge, but this was awful! Why is it any different to my laptop? Something is up. So I plugged my laptop in to test, and it was awful too. Something’s going on.
Tested streaming Dark Souls off Sabriena’s laptop, and it worked great. GTA5 did too - her laptop is new enough to suport ShadowPlay, which is supposed to allow recording+streaming with very litte to no performance penalty, and unfortunately my laptop doesn’t seem to support it, despite being a GTX670m (and GTX600+ is supposed to support it). But her laptop is significantly weaker than my desktop so what’s going on?
In the process of VNCing to my Linux VM to write about it, I discovered the reason… My VNC connection was shit too. The results of typing “date” into my shell over VNC:
~$ dateeeeeee
bash: dateeeeeee: command not found
~$ datttttttttttttttttte
bash: datttttttttttttttttte: command not found
Checking the pings, I had some 350ms pings and frequent packet loss. I’ve already got the electrician supposed to be quoting on running an ethernet drop to the back of the house for me (since my lease prevents me from doing it), but the WDS bridge has never been this bad. I power cycled the rear WAP, and everything returned to normal: 2~3ms pings from the back of the house to the front. Except now I can’t test the Steam Link out again because Sabriena has the TV!
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