cats

Bean warmer.

Beam former.

Two for the price of one.

I actually have one, as well as a 3d printer, I was sort of toying with the idea of taking the thermal pad, printing a base that looks like my router, and installing some tiny fans to blow the slightly warm air upwards, it would be a biggish product but I'd be down for her to keep the spot while I keep my router free of heat damage

I actually did a similar project for her which you can see in the Bottom left, it's a little monitor that actually works and used to play bird videos so she could sit next to my desk and feel like she had her own monitor. Since then I've repurposed it to run a media server but she still gets to look at it i suppose . The back says peppersoft

tell ur cat she's a pretty one :3

Wouldn’t work unless it was more expensive or fragile than the router ;-)

"spoiler"?

Woah, an "icanhazcheesebugers" reference in 2024! I love it.

cattail

It's to hone the palantir's connection to the other 6 palantirs

Holy fuck she gives it even if you don't

It is fantastic, still i have it set to power cycle every few days regardless to be safe, but I've never had all the issues I have with past routers

A lot of the ISP provided routers don't even let you change the DNS.

Better range, better speeds, better control panel, and some extra features that can be great for gaming or self-hosting servers (eg: network-wide adblocker, nat loopback)

An ISP provided router is generally going to be the cheapest device they can buy that will be functional on their service.

This means that if you are using more than a handful of devices it can overwhelm the processing power of the router leading to lag, drop outs, loss of connection, sites taking ages to load, etc.

When you buy your own router you get to choose a device that fits your (and your families) needs.

If you shop at an actual tech shop instead of your local big box store, you will find a huge number of different devices available that are far more capable than either the ISP's or big boxes stores offerings.

There are even entry level professional units that can support about a hundred devices connected to it without breaking a sweat.

When I switched from ADSL to fiber years ago I purchased a D-Link DIR-879 router which at the time was good enough for my needs but had some drop out issues so I have recently upgraded to a MikroTik RB960PGS Router which is both a wired only router (no inbuilt WiFi) and much more powerful both in performance and features.

I can use a Wifi access point or two to get WiFi where I need it and it can be upgraded as new WiFi standards come out without replacing the router.

Mostly directional range, but mine also offers a huge suite of features so I can have total control over my network, as well as wifi 6 which is nice and a bunch of high speed ports

Lot of comments but the real answer is that generally router firmware is pretty shitty and price does not equal performance. If you want something good for cheap get a 50-100 dollar (can find even cheaper especially if you don’t have crazy internet speeds) computer (like a raspberry pie clone) stick on open wrt, and get a separate Wi-Fi access point. Will blow past any consumer grade premium router because a lot of them are sold the be “all in one” with the cheapest, low power hardware imaginable and while not universal, software that never updated. Also, Something like openwrt has something called cake sqm which can massively reduce latency as well as constant software updates that fix vulnerabilities.

Well I sure hope not, they all seem to weigh the same and use gold connectors but I guess you never know