Nick the Geek and his toys. [Nick]

Hi folks. It's the old man here. Sarah gets to post much more than me, and she posts about things people are probably interested in. I want to post about something I'm proud of. You see, in this house, we are geeks. We love our computers, we love our internet access. Our lives are stored on computer files and web sites, from financial information to photographs, to documents we've created for various purposes.

When we first moved to Michigan, before we even got our stuff from the moving van, we had the cable guy out here hooking up the network connection. (Don't tell anyone, but if you remove the modem-only trap at the interface mounted outside your house, you can get free cable TV from it.) Anyway, we got the network connected and had the cable modem put in the only place we could think of at the time, in our living room. Next to the fireplace. On the floor. Then I connected the wireless router and bingo, the laptop (which belonged to the University of Illinois and was returned after I finished my degree) was connected. But we also have internet phone service from Vonage, so connected the telephone interface to the wireless router (which had four wired ports). There were only two outlets there, so I had to plug in a power strip as well. All in our living room next to the fireplace, on the floor. Very ugly. But it was only temporary I told myself.

Well, we had a desktop computer we keep in the living room, but there was no room for it in that corner, so we put it in the opposite corner, I installed a wireless desksop card in it, and bingo, it was wirelessly connected. The main desktop machine was in the basement, out of easy reach of the wirelss, and it wouldn't work with our existing wireless card. SO I had another wireless router... no big deal, bridge it with the first one, placing it in a location in the basement where it could receive a signal from the one upstairs. Then wire the main desktop to the wirelessly-bridged wireless router. So every computer in our house was wirelessly connected to the internet. Lest the tech-savvy among you cringe, I at least was using WEP or Wired Equivalent Privacy (it isn't wired-equivalent at all) and MAC Address filtering to keep people off my network and more or less not snooping my packets, which sounds much naughtier than it is. And anyway, it was temporary, right?

Well, that was December of 2006. In March of 2008 I finally decided this temporary situation was ridiculous. It wasn't safe to have my information travling wirelessly all the time, and the bridged connections were flaky, sometimes not working at all. I decided to undertake the wiring of my house. First things first, of course, I spent weeks researching equipment, tools and methods. I bought a 54" long 1/2" drill bit for drilling holes through the flooring inside the wall cavity. I bought a box of Cat6 cable, patch cords, a punch-down tool, RJ45 blocks and a network tester. (Some of that is pictured.) I bought a new Linksys wired router. I bought a network-attached storage disk housing and 500GB drive. I watched videos on youtube, I read web sites. I drew up plans. I walked over the plans in my head, planning each step. I was finally ready.

I won't go in to all the gory details, but I will show you some of the results. First, I ran cabling from the location of my future network center to each location I wanted to have a network jack. That involved drilling holes in my floor joists and pulling cable along 25-foot span in some cases. That was a lot of up and down the stepstool, buffing up my legs. Then I had to cut holes in the walls about the size of my faceplates. I used metal clips that clipped onto the wallboard opening and provided a place for the faceplates to screw into. With the gaping hole in the wall, hopefully at a location between studs, I had to insert the long drill bit and drill a hole through the subfloor into the basement. Then I used the fish tape and fished it through the hole, went into the basement, connected the fish tape to the cat6 cable and pulled it up through the floor and wall. Then I had to strip the wiring and punch down the wires into the RJ45 block, attach it to the face plate and screw the face plate in. Look at that picture. Notice the quite straight and level installation of my network jack as compared to the professionally-installed electrical outlet which is cockeyed. Yeah I'm proud of that.

I installed two jacks in the 'dining' room, which is in quotes because we don't really use it for dining, but it is where the kids' computer and the wireless router live. I installed one jack in each of the three bedrooms. The ones in the boys rooms aren't used yet, but I'm probably going to teach dan how to build his own computer within the next year, so he'll probably have one in his room. Did I mention that I built our two desktop computers from parts? That is a cool thing everyone should try at least once. Anyway, I also installed two jacks in our kitchen (pictured above), one for the phone interface and one for a possible kitchen computer someday.

That done, I built the shelf unit downstairs. It hangs from the ceiling joists by 2x4s. I attached some cheap shelving (yeah, it is cockeyed but I can fix that 'someday'). The vertical black bit is where all the network wiring comes in, and is connected to the punch-down block. The yellow cables are the patch cords which connect to the jacks on the Wired router (on the right, under the cable modem). I'm proud of that wiring. On the left, the 110 block labeled "CAT 5" is all the actual telephone wiring in the house. That was all left hanging when we moved in, so I bought the 110 block and mounted it, and then punched down all the wiring. I stll have a little more to do, but since we don't have old-timey phone service :) it won't happen for a while. You can seel all the RG-6 cable (the black TV cables) on the right-ish side, coming down behind the plywood unit. Those aren't connected to anything yet either, but I will be buying a distribution block and wiring those up someday soon as well, for the sake of completeness.

So now, both of our desktop computers are wired, and the network connections are far more reliable. The wireless router now sits atop the computer desk for the kid's computer. I still need to kick it in the butt occasionally by restarting it. Plus now I still have a second one in reserve in case one kicks the bucket. Oh, I also upgraded to WPA2 (WIFI protected access).
Now the wireless router is only used for wirelesss networking, with the new laptop I bought with grant money*. It's nice because now I can actually use the computer network I built without feeling like I'm kicking my wife or kids off the computer. I removed Windows Vista Home Premium edition and have installed Ubuntu Linux 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex". I have it skinned so it looks like a Mac. If you've read this far then you are either a geek or my Mom. Well probably not my Mom-she probably won't read this far. So you're probably a geek, which means I can tell you that this thing is SO COOL. It has 3GB of ram and a dual-core processor. It has more memory and disk space than my office computer does. I just can't get Ubuntu to print to my shared windows printer yet, but that's basically the last hurdle.

Well I'm done showing off. I hope you're all still awake. Sarah will resume posting stuff y'all care about shortly.

* Let me make perfectly clear that this laptop belongs to Central Michigan University and that the money spent on it was not my own.