Laptop Connectivity Problems

A problem that I encounter almost daily on my 2013 MacBook Pro is a connectivity issue. Whether I'm connected wirelessly or wired via an Ethernet cable from a repeater, I lose the connection and am repeatedly prompted for the password to the WiFi network if I'm connected wirelessly. After a short while the problem goes away and all is well. The problem is annoying but doesn't seriously trouble me.

Nonetheless, I'd like to get to the bottom of it and there are plenty of requests on Internet forums from Linux Mint users for solutions to exactly this problem. The fact that it doesn't make any difference whether I'm connected via WiFi or cable rules out the WiFi hardware driver as the problem. Neither does it matter whether I'm connected to the WiFi repeater or the WiFi router.

The Internet router that I'm using is an ancient one and only operates on the 2.4 Ghz frequency with no support for 5 Ghz or any other frequencies! I don't use Bluetooth on this laptop so I've just now turned it off and I'll see if that makes any difference. It shouldn't but who knows. It's worth a try. Overall, I should be happy that things are working as well as they are given the antiquity of the technology that I'm using.

The operating system that I'm using is Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon with the Cinnamon version being 5.2.7. This means that the system is up-to-date. My WiFi adapter is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

I'd like to say that things worked flawlessly when I had Mac OS X installed on this laptop but that wasn't the case. Right from the beginning I had IP conflict alerts whenever connected to a repeater. I first encountered the issue when I stayed at a hotel in Singapore that was clearly using a repeater. In my own bedroom, where the WiFi signal was weak, I encountered the same problem when I installed a repeater. I solved the problem by connecting an Ethernet cable from the repeater to my laptop.

Thoughts on Backing Up My Calibre Library

I thought it was time to back up my Calibre library that now is 39.8 GB in size and so I dusted off my trusty 128 GB SanDisk and thrust it into the USB 3.0 port on my old 2013 MacBook Pro. From previous experience I knew that this would be a slow process but today I got to thinking about how slow. Figure 1 shows the situation.

Figure 1

The USB 3.0 ports on the MacBook Pro can transfer data at the rate of up to 5Gbps. Now that's 5 gigabits per second. There are 8 bits in a byte and 1024 x 1024 bytes in a megabyte (MB) so that translates to a transfer speed of up to 640 MB/s.  For my file transfers I'm achieving a rate of around 4 MB/s which is 160 times slower than the maximum possible! This seems impossibly slow.

However, if we look online we find the following (see Figure 2):

Figure 2

Even SanDisk only claims a speed of up to 100 MB/s for this particular device and  presumably this is for reading of data and not writing. Furthermore, the thumb drive spends more time checking that writing and so if there are many small files (and I am transferring 34,646 of them), the transfer time will be very much longer than if I were transferring a single 39.8 MB file.

On this particular site, it's claimed that 3.0 USB has a 10~20 MB/s write speed and if that's the case then the 4 MB/s for my worst case scenario (thousands of small files) is not unreasonable. Overall it's not a problem for me because I'm in no hurry and I only carry out the backup every couple of months or so.

I'm also merging the latest library with the older one and this probably adds to the checking time as the new folder (every book has its own folder) has to be compared to the older one. It would probably be quicker just to delete the old library and simply copy the new one across.

An alternative approach would be to make a note of any new books added and then drop their folders into the library backup from time to time. On reflection this makes the most sense and the update would then be almost instantaneous given the small file sizes involved. The current library on my MacBook's SSD and the library backup on my SanDisk will be identical once the transfer is complete. This would be a good time to implement such a scheme. I'll test it out and report back.

Even if I don't make a formal note of my added books, it's easy to identify them by looking at the current library (arranged in chronological order) and noting the dates of books that are newer than the time of my last backup. This could be painful if I let too much time elapse before checking because I will have to locate each book's folder in the database and then copy and paste it across. For a few books it's no problem.

ADDENDUM: November 4th 2020

I've tested the folder copying update method out and it works fine. Quick and painless. Definitely the way to go in future. I downloaded Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" after a recommendation by Jeremy Corbyn shown in this tweet.

The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela DavisIn his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.