Archive for March 27th, 2011

Hidden treasures…

If I’ve given you the impression that the work on the new house has reached some sort of end, or even a turning point then I apologize. We have OODLES of work ahead of us, and usually at least three or four full-blown projects in progress at any given time.

We’ve finished the majority of the work in the front foyer, with the new wiring in place, plastering, painting and so forth, and have our sights set on the living room now.

The living room needed some new wire, a bit of plastering and some “special” demolition. You see, our home inspector had pointed out that from the outside of the house there were two stained glass windows flanking our fireplace, where as on the inside you can see only blank wall.

We’d discussed it, and decided that before we painted the living room we were going to bust the stained glass windows out and return them to their former glory.

As you can see, the first one appears in good shape, and while we’ve still got work to do, we’re excited about the progress.

Home Automation, an new experiment?

So, I keep coming back to Home Automation as the likely destination in my journey of home network, alarm and CCTV installation. The ability to automate and coordinate these components along with lighting and electronics control seems almost too much to resist.

Most of these seem to center around X10 stuff, and I’m thinking I should pick up one of their starter packs and just experiment to get my feet wet.

I’ll admit that the idea of a talking house is fine and good, with my luck it would probably talk back (hell, who am I kidding, I’d program it to talk back).

An important PSA

Home networking upgrades…

As I mentioned here keeping the home networking gear organized has become a somewhat daunting task.

With the upgraded Router and requirement for more UPS I was forced to concede defeat on the “single shelf” plan, and to make a trip down to Home Despot to buy some deeper wider shelves.

Home network

The most frightening part of this was dismantling and disconnecting the existing arrangement, and then putting it back together later.

Happily it worked, and we’ve now got some room for future expansion.

(Assuming I ever get some down time, I’m eventually going to sit down there with a length of Cat5 and a pile of RJ45 connectors and cut new cables to length behind the hardware, theres a lot of space cable back there!)

War…war never changes

Downloaded Fallout: New Vegas – Dead Money, but of course haven’t really played Fallout since my old PS3 died, taking my save games with it.

So replaying FNV, in order to play the DLC.

Yee haw.

Edited to add: (21Mar11) Uh, yeah. Almost entirely linear gameplay, sneaking, unbeatable foes and booby traps. Who the hell was asleep at the switch on this one? Yetch!

Networking woes

It should come as no shock to you, loyal readers, that we are heavily reliant on our home network for our digital entertainment (tv and internet), gaming, telephony and even the new surveillance cameras sit on the end of a length of Cat5.

The router is the heart of this, and recently the heart of our home network began beating erratically.

A few times an hour the router would reset itself disrupting telephone conversations, movies, and internet connections. Not fatal, but certainly irritating (the only thing I hate more than something that doesn’t work, is something that cannot be relied on to work consistently).

Our router was an old D-Link WBR-2310, and it had served like a trooper, but it was undoubtedly time to replace it.

Given the service we had received from the WBR-2310 I went down to the local technology store and bought a D-Link DIR-655, hooked it up and immediately our VoIP began acting strange (every second phone call would lack audio on one end of the conversation). I spent about 5 hours trying to trouble shoot this (problem experienced even in the DMZ) and finally gave up dragging the thing back to the store, where I was upsold to the Linksys E3000.

The extra $30 must have been worth it, because the linksys worked right out of the box (an attribute I can appreciate).

(There is some irony in that the E3000 comes with a USB port and built in UPNP support)