More House Wiring
Saturday was challenging. We took advantage of the cold to climb in the attic and run a whole bunch of Ethernet. My roof is really low. The high point is about 5ft and I’m 6ft. I’m really sore. In two hours, we ran 7 cables. The new computer room (closet) needs at least a wire for Internet. I took the opportunity to add a lot more wires. A wire to the kitchen for that AppleTV, which is on the other side of the living room. Two for one.
There were a few discoveries. Like the box of Ethernet cable I left up there from last time, plus wire cutter and a drill. We used up that 500ft box and another 50ft of additional cable. I drilled one hole for the computer to discover that the boards were 6-8″ thick. When we went to run the Kitchen cable there was already a hole drilled. That really saved a lot of energy at the end. It would have been difficult with all the air vents and chimney.
All the major locations have a run to the attic hole. Some locations have other runs. Like between the old and new computer rooms and the new computer room and the kitchen. Though that last one was a mistake. Measure before you cut. The attic hole is close to the house phone line, before it splits. I’m very excited to cut it and rewire the house phones through a DSL filter and put the DSL router closer to the telephone box. So, all the runs to the attic are for getting Internet from one spot. I’ll drop a battery backup up there and run the DSL router, wired Router/Firewall, and Pogoplug off it. I’m really excited at the prospect of faster Internet by cutting out all the interference from the house telephone wiring.
The wall wired Ethernet should make it easier to plug in most anything. At this point, the house is basically networked. Yay.
Links to DVD Covers
It can be challenging to find cover art for DVDs. Three sites seem to get just about everything for me.
Cdcovers.cc - Contains fan scanned DVD covers. Many are non-english and non-US and in a wide variety of resolutions.
Amazon.com - has small images and some have this zoom feature that makes them unobtainable and Flash-y.
Netflix - seems to have everything, but only in tiny 5 kb files. Last resort.
Just right click the image and save it. Don’t forget to crop it. Backsides from CDCovers and white edging from Amazon.com are annoying and unnecessary. Macs make this exceedingly easy with Preview.