Brian Ward

  • Don't let your ISP take your ONT away from YOU

    In Seattle, CenturyLink has sold off its fiber business to AT&T Quantum Fiber. Recently I got caught up unwillingly in the latest of this enshittification saga. About a month ago, there was a power outage at the house, which knocked out the ONT for my fiber connection, a Calix 711GE. It wouldn’t power on anymore despite my best troubleshooting efforts.

    Due to the corporate changes at CenturyLink, they wouldn’t be able to send a support tech out to me until I went over to Quantum and setup a new account with them. Mind you that they’ve been collecting billing from me all along, so let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that, at some point along the way, someone made a decision that it would be better to wait for the customer to have a time-sensitive net outage and that this would be the best time to play a few rounds of Not My Bailiwick. Fantastic.

    After all that, they sent someone out who was able to bring it back up. Problem solved, and I moved along with my life this past month. Fixed forever. The end.

    Fast forward to… the next power outage, which happened a week ago. This unfortunately knocked the ONT again, and I troubleshooted it… again. With very few exceptions, This ONT has been humming along for like 8 years or so without any problems and performance has been generally awesome. It’s important to note this was the case even after I fully switched to Quantum Fiber a month ago. Hold onto that thought.

    So again, they send out another very nice tech who basically says that these ONTs are all old (fair enough, old things get old) and are being replaced with SmartNIDs. Quantum can’t repair or replace them anymore, but we can put the new thing in the home and remove a layer of troubleshooting abstraction in the future. I say, sure that sounds great.

    Gosh, was that ever a mistake! I should have kept the ONT.

    The hardware that I was provided with is the Q1000K, which I’ve since discovered is infamous. Infamously bad.

    I put the device into transparent bridge mode so that it could talk directly to my pfSense hardware, and sure enough, I had all the problems that people were complaining about. Massive consistent lag spikes, generally higher ping than I was getting through the ONT, really buggy management software on the Q1000K. If you put it into bridge mode, you can’t even manage it anymore without factory resetting it, and sometimes apparently you need to do that randomly. They recently released a firmware update that broke the ability to offload the VLAN tagging to the pfSense which supposedly would have supposedly resolved most of the latency issues. Will any of this ever get fixed? Who is to say? 🤷‍♂️

    Setting all of that aside, IPV6 resolution via the 6rd tunnel straight up doesn’t work at all, although I am able to get an address. But hey, reduced surface area for troubleshooting points straight at the Q1000K. At this point, I’m just annoyed. The problem isn’t the net infrastructure outside; it’s probably still working just fine for my neighbors. The problem is this piece of trash hardware I’ve been allocated.

    I guess I’ll contact their support, but hey, Quantum Fiber… a month with you and I’m very unimpressed, and I want my ONT back.

    As an aside: Companies really need to be looking on reddit and elsewhere to understand the problems that matter to their users, and then they need to use that information to inform development of the services they are running.

  • Losartan might be a really bad medication

    I have had chronic dizziness, nausea, blurred vision, fatigue, and other issues since late 2020, and I just figured out that it’s been the Losartan I’ve been taking this whole time.

    I stopped taking it and the aggressively bad way I’ve felt this whole time disappeared completely for the past two days. I also saw many specialists during this period who all had their own terrible ways of dealing with the problem, like the neurologist who put me on like an anti-seizure medication that made my head feel like it was stuck in a vice. Let’s add another shitty med on top of the one causing the issue! 🙃

    I’m convinced Losartan contributed to and possibly was the reason I needed an emergency appendectomy two years ago.

    There are Reddit threads full of other people who have experienced similar issues.

    I’m still on the other two BP meds I’d initially suspected, but stopping Losartan was the one that fixed the problem.

    Other than a sense of time lost, I’m most annoyed at my then-primary doctor for scolding me when I tried this experiment 6 years ago by telling me never to self medicate again.

  • The MMO I work on at my day job just went into early access on Steam today. Check it out: www.camelotunchained.com/2026/06/0…

  • Just witnessed Colt Emerson’s third major league homer! ⚾️

  • Campfire

  • Haystack

  • Greetings from Cannon Beach! 🏖️

  • The world might have been a better place if their names had been Steve Naps and Bill Bridges. Think about it.

  • This RYB color tool is bitchin'! rybitten.space 🎨

  • My latest project: A photometric lighting viewer for macOS! 💡

  • The mountain is out! ⛰️

  • Happy birthday, Devin! 🥳🥳

  • I’ll believe it when I see it: www.windowscentral.com/microsoft…

  • Boat ride! ⚓️

  • Splashdown! 🚀

  • I hit that Mail bug again on iOS. Been careful since to only multiselect messages that are unread, but there’s definitely a problem with the state of the button toggle. It erroneously presented me with a Mark as Unread button.

    Re: micro-blog.brianward.us/2026/04/0…

  • I wish I’d had NFOViewer back at Runic. Before I went to bed, I added a global search feature. This was finicky to get working at first, but it works. The other issue I had to fix was when filtering thousands of items, I’d hit a deadlock while rendering the UI, but we debounce and stream in now.

  • In past support roles, I always preferred working from a Mac, but those pesky Windows System Information (*.NFO) files kept getting in the way. So tonight I built NFOViewer, a simple macOS app that opens them with zero friction.

  • Tonight I went through the process of bringing the classic Mac OS X app Backhoe (a terrain editor for Second Life) all the way from Objective-C and AppKit on Mac OS X 10.4 (PPC) over to Swift, Apple Silicon, modern macOS – and running on the iPad!

  • Fats Navarro w/ Don Lanphere www.youtube.com/watch 🎵 It blows my mind that I studied with Don and knew him a little bit. He was a musically-demanding perfectionist, but was a good guy with a kind heart. He used to tell me how much he and Charlie Parker hated Paul Desmond. 😆

  • Anybody else notice an annoying little hitch lately when dragging and dropping files on macOS, like into Claude or a web browser drop zone?

  • Got an old project up and running again in a docker container tonight. Hello, old friend!

  • It’d be real sweet if Mail got an update sometime to make marking all messages as read not suck. Twice this year I have inadvertently flagged all messages on all my accounts by mistake, usually due to some kind of UI lag bug on the iPad.

  • Last weekend visiting the cherry blossoms at the UW campus.

  • We went to a No Kings protest yesterday afternoon in Ballard.

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