Tutorial

When I was using a Mac as my media center player I liked that you could “remote desktop” into it; basically VNC and got the existing desktop. This meant I could use my local keyboard and monitor to control the machine that was 20ft away across the room from me, in the odd case where the command line wasn’t sufficient. As MacOS went on these occurrences got more frequent… as did the BROKENNESS of the VNC server; I would frequently just get a black screen.

The problem I use the Ookla Speedtest CLI in a cron job to get an idea of the speed of my internet connection (Verizon FIOS), and spot if there are problems. Why? Because why not :-) It let’s me draw graphs like this. However, recently I was starting to get error messages that the command wasn’t able to reach speedtest.net to get the configuration. It wasn’t happening every time; sometimes it would go hours without issue, other times it would fail 3 or 4 times in succession.