[00:00:00.05] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.18] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.01] - Gordon
My name is Gordon from Drayson Design
[00:00:12.00] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.29] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:24.24] - Taylor
Welcome back.
[00:00:25.23] - Gordon
It's been an extremely busy week for me. How about you?
[00:00:30.22] - Taylor
Yeah, it's been, it's been good.
[00:00:32.10] - Gordon
We had Easter, which was very nice. We popped into London, didn't we? You got yourself some new shoes. But it meant that I effectively had shows on Friday after the podcast that we did last week, and then I had show Saturday and then two shows on the Sunday and then the Monday was the bank holiday. So I didn't get a great deal done over the weekend. But Tuesday was very exciting. I'll come to that in my topic when we get there. Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:01:08.26] - Taylor
You can go first this week since you're so excited.
[00:01:11.10] - Gordon
Thank you so much. So on Tuesday I had something that I've effectively been waiting for for 19 years. Years. So I've been in my house now for 19 years next month and we've had ADSL Internet, which means that on a really good day I was getting 20Mbps download and about 0.5Mbps upload, which is not good at all. I mean, it's much better, don't get me wrong, it's much better than dial up modem, which is what I started on. You know, that's a lot quicker. But for today and you know, doing videos and all sorts of things that require quite a bit of data moving about that is extremely bad. And in fact the house I was at before we had cable internet and I had a sort of a gigabit effectively. 19 years ago this was, gigabit internet. I paid a fortune for it, but it was nice and fast. But they didn't come to our new house 19 years ago and I was unable to get it. So I've been waiting all this time and had a phone call about three weeks ago now from someone trying to sell me high speed fibre to the property internet.
[00:02:40.16]
And I said, "yeah, it's not, it's not possible." Because I knew that the cabling came to the main part of our road but didn't come down our little spur because they didn't dig up the road. Turns out they didn't need to dig up the road, they just actually had to put the fibre cable in. So I investigated, spoke to my internet provider and they went, "yes, we can do fibre to the property now." And it's like, "Ah! That's amazing. That's so cool." So long story short, on Tuesday they came and they installed fibre to the property. Now I had a bit of a problem with them coming along and saying, "yeah, we can't do it because we need to dig up your garden to put a tubing in so that we can get the cable to your house." But on Tuesday they turned up, again potential problem because the cable, the fibre cable didn't come down as far as my house, but it was all set up and ready to go and they were able to do it. And so when they left, about 3 o'clock ish, no, it was a bit earlier than that, 2 o'clock ish.
[00:03:55.12]
I had full fibre at my house and that was just phenomenal. They put an ONT, which is the little box on the inside of my office, another little box on the outside where they spliced. It's very interesting. They spliced the glass together, which is what fibre optic cables are. Basically they're made of glass. And it was fascinating to watch because it was very, very precision work to do. And they had a very expensive £4,000 machine apparently.
[00:04:37.04] - Taylor
Wow.
[00:04:37.25] - Gordon
That they used to effectively fuse the wire or the glass together so that the signal could go all the way through. And that was fascinating to watch. But anyway, I had internet that was giving me about 800Mbps down.
[00:05:00.07] - Taylor
That's pretty fast.
[00:05:01.03] - Gordon
And about 100Mbps up. Not quite as fast as you, but, you know, that's the fastest I can get. But I did plan for this and once I realised that it was coming I thought, "well, it's a good chance to upgrade my network." Because the network I've got is over 19 years old because it effectively came from the previous property. And I had a switch, but it wasn't a particularly good switch.
[00:05:31.18]
And a switch, for those who don't know, is...
[00:05:36.26] - Taylor
An Ethernet switch.
[00:05:37.05] - Gordon
An Ethernet switch so you can plug all your ethernet cables into it. A lot of people use WiFi these days. You don't have a switch because you don't need it. But there's only one ethernet port on the Ubiquiti Express 7, or UX7 they call it, router that I bought. Which is the same one you have. I let Taylor do the research for me on this one and then I just bought the same thing. But there's only one Ethernet port. Now my network requires a lot more ports than that. I think I'm using seven Ethernet ports and that's because I've got things like Home Assistant and I want to have that wired because it's a lot quicker and I've got my printer and I've got my computer. And yes, I could do some of these, most of these on WiFi, but by having it plugged in with Ethernet, you're getting the fastest speed you possibly can. And that's what's really important. Yeah, for certain devices, my main computer for example, I want that to be wired because that gives me the fastest speeds.
[00:06:49.24]
And everything else around the house can be WiFi. You know, my laptop can be WiFi, my phone, my iPads, they can be on WiFi. I've got a tonne of Home Assistant and smart home devices which all use WiFi. My alarm is using WiFi plus a load of other things. So the important thing to do was to make sure that I kept the same SSID for my internet so that all the devices that I had, and the same password, would automatically just reconnect to my new network, which is really a quick and easy way of doing it. However, there's lots of things I can now do with this network. And so I've got a NAS drive which is a, like a local area storage and, sorry a Network Assisted Storage? I don't know what the A stands for.
[00:07:50.24] - Taylor
Access, maybe?
[00:07:51.25] - Gordon
Network Area Storage? I'm not sure, but it's basically a tonne of hard drives that are accessible on the network. And I've got lots of my sort of video files that I've been working on that I wanted to see if I could access when I'm away from home. And there's a way to do this using piece of software called 'Tailscale.' And that basically creates a VPN into your network or in fact into your NAS.
[00:08:27.06] - Taylor
So it creates a tunnel basically.
[00:08:29.04] - Gordon
Yeah. And then with the right credentials, you can access that drive as if it were local to you. Now it does depend on your internet speed for uploading from your NAS drive, and also the download speed from the location you're at when you are accessing it. But now that my upload speed is really fast, I didn't see that as being a problem. So I went ahead and set that up and I can now access the films that I've been working on and the files from pretty much anywhere in the world with a reasonable internet connection, which is really, really exciting. There's lots of other things as well.
[00:09:14.06] - Taylor
UniFi Express is mainly enterprise hardware and software. A lot of times they're used in offices, coffee shops, any kind of like restaurant or building. They have a really, really good system and configuration. You can create like access points. So instead of having, what a lot of people have is an extended vendor and so you'll connect to either the main WiFi or the extender WiFi, what UniFi allows you to do essentially have these extenders, but they all basically appear as one single network.
[00:09:50.28] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:09:51.19] - Taylor
So you don't have to then automatically switch you depending on whatever the closest access point is. But it also allows you to do a lot more things like configuring a hotspot portal. So whenever you go to kind of coffee shops and you have to connect to the WiFi, they say please put your email address in and whatever and then put a password in and agree to terms and conditions, things like that. This is what you can do as well. So with...
[00:10:17.17] - Gordon
And they can tie your data to that as well so that if anything it, if you are searching on sites you shouldn't be, they can find out, you know, what you're doing. I mean, I don't think anyone ever puts their actual details in unless it requires them to get, you know, two factor authentication by email or something.
[00:10:37.03] - Taylor
But you can also then control what websites you can visit, what devices are able to connect. You can route certain websites and devices through different VPNs or different networks. So you can actually have different networks that have different policies, different rules.
[00:10:56.11] - Gordon
And different speeds as well, which is really important. So I have a guest network now, which I'm going to let anyone who's visiting use, but that is its own network, so it can't interact with anything on my network. And I've limited the upload speed to 30Mbps and the download to 100Mbps so that it doesn't impact any of my work, for example, but it still gives them a reasonably fast, you know, connection. They can't access my printers, they can't access any of my Home Assistant stuff or any of my devices. So it's...
[00:11:34.20] - Taylor
An isolated network.
[00:11:35.24] - Gordon
Yeah, and it's a really secure way of doing it because you don't know what your guests are going to be doing, you know. So.
[00:11:43.09] - Taylor
Something that I found really useful was setting up a VPN and being able to route certain websites and devices. So in the UK we have laws that require things like ID verification for certain websites. And there's a...
[00:12:03.03] - Gordon
We're not talking about, you know, naughty websites, we're talking about websites like Imgur, which is a simple site for uploading and hosting images.
[00:12:13.29] - Taylor
So it was created for Reddit originally. So there's a guy who was got annoyed that it was hard to share images and videos on Reddit threads. So he built this basically free platform that you could just upload any image. It's all like anonymous or you can have a login. But because there are certain content that are not audited or not checked, instead of basically complying with the UK laws and requiring ID verification, they decided we're just going to block anyone from the UK. And so what we did is we set up a VPN that goes through the Netherlands. So when it.
[00:12:53.24] - Gordon
Well, before you say that, what happens is if you go to a website and they're using images from Imgur, you just see an empty image, there's nothing there, because it can't pull the image down because of the restriction for the UK.
[00:13:08.20] - Taylor
Yeah. So, I mean, it's not something that the UK has done. It's just that Imgur, because they don't want to go through the hassle of setting up verification and things like that, they've just outright blocked everyone from the UK, essentially. So if you go there, it just says, "sorry, we don't support the UK." And so the kind of workaround was to use a VPN. And normally you would use a VPN on your computer, you would say, I want to connect to this location and that entire device and basically runs through a VPN. However, what the Unifi Express allows you to do is allows you to set the VPN on the entire network so you don't have to turn on a VPN to connect to Imgur, it will automatically detect, "okay, you're going to this website, I'm going to route you through a VPN which is in the Netherlands, which isn't blocked, but it only affects that single website or that single device." So you can do this for Firestick, you can do this for any website, you know, especially if you're working remotely, but you work for another company, for example, America.
[00:14:14.09]
A lot of companies and software will basically block anyone from outside of America, for example. So you can say, "oh, whenever I visit my works, kind of internal tools and stuff, I can make sure that it runs through a US VPN, for example, so that it looks like I'm connecting from inside of the USA."
[00:14:32.09] - Gordon
And another thing you can do, which I don't quite know how it works yet, but you can actually go back through your network from anywhere when you're away from home and use the network as if you were browsing from home. So, for example, if you wanted to use iPlayer and you're on holiday, well, you're blocked in most countries from using iPlayer. You're only allowed to use it in the UK, but you can actually sort of reverse VPN back into your own network and then view things like iPlayer from that because you're in the UK, which is a really interesting and clever way of doing it.
[00:15:14.21] - Taylor
Or if you have local networks, devices that aren't exposed to the outside world. Again, as long as you just route through and tunnel, you can basically connect, which is similar to what you do with what you're talking about with your videos and stuff.
[00:15:30.12] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:15:31.14] - Taylor
But yeah, you can do it that way as well.
[00:15:34.16] - Gordon
So, you know, it started with me wanting fast internet and it's turned into just completely changing the whole of my network. And that caused a few problems, especially with Home Assistant, because there are some matter over thread devices that had fixed IP addresses and the subnet has changed from 0.1 to 1.1 and that has messed up a few things. But Cursor was very good. It went into Home Assistant, it looked to see what was wrong. It told me what I needed to do. I found all the hard coded IP addresses, changed them, and they're now running again. Oh, and one last thing. Because of the fibre network and the copper wires for telephone lines being phased out, one of my telephone lines is now running through the internet. It's going voice-over-IP. And that caused me a bit of trouble as well because it meant that I had to have the broadband router, the one they give me that the telephone plugs into as the first device in the chain. So that's coming straight from the fibre network. And then I'm coming out of that and going into my Ubiquiti Express 7 and that is then dealing with all the traffic and all the devices.
[00:17:00.06]
And it took me, you know, I was up till about 4 o' clock in the morning trying to get it working because otherwise my telephone line was down, which was not good and there was no way around it, so I had to sort of fix it before I went to bed, otherwise I would have struggled with having no telephone line. But yeah, that's all up and running and I'm really excited. Yeah, it's really nice to have fast internet.
[00:17:25.19] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:17:26.28] - Gordon
So that was my topic. And you sort of chimed in as well. Is that your topic or have you got your own?
[00:17:32.04] - Taylor
Yeah, I mean, that kind of just piggybacking on your topic, really, and just. And joined in. The only thing I was going to say was that I bought some running trainers on Monday. So I'm hoping to get into running using "Runner," which kind of helps you get back into running or gets you started if you've never run before. And they give you like a plan of what to follow. So they have things like telling you "walk for two minutes, run for two minutes" and things like that to help you build up. And they have other plans, they have 10k plans, 5k plans, half marathons, marathons. So if you want to train towards something, then they can kind of give you a training plan specially designed for you. And so that's something I want to add into all the other things that I do. So all the other sports and the gym and things like that, adding in running. So that's something that I'm starting up again.
[00:18:25.23] - Gordon
Very good.
[00:18:26.25] - Taylor
I used to run cross country quite a lot back when I was at school and things like that, and I really did enjoy it, but, you know, because I was ill and things like that, I stopped and I lost the stamina and things like that. So I'm kind of just working my way back up to, yeah, just get back into running.
[00:18:44.09] - Gordon
And you played football as well, which involves quite a bit of running. So, yeah, good to see you back running again. Well done. That is everything from me.
[00:18:52.22] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:18:53.20] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, if you're on YouTube, please, like, share and subscribe.
[00:18:59.28] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:19:04.17] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us, which I completely understand, we're on all the major podcast platforms and also your smart speaker. Just ask or look up "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." There are several This Week Withs. But there's only one "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." So that's what you need to look for or ask for. We'll be back with you next week on Friday at 1pm, until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:19:31.00] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:19:33.17] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:19:34.04] - Taylor
Bye.
