Items Tagged With diary

We've been running a 10/100 Ethernet switch in the Automated Home since we moved in nearly 10 years ago.  With more devices on the LAN - currently nearing 40 IP address used (see the list below) and with ever larger files moving around our network, the time has come to upgrade to a 10/100/1000 gigabit switch...

We’ve had our Sonos setup for nearly three years now and it continues to be a joy to own and use.  Our original setup of 2 x ZP100s (the zone players with built in amplifiers) was recently added to with a third un-amp’d ZP80.  The new ZonePlayer was swapped for the ZP100 in the AV room where amplification was not required as it was already plugged into our home cinema system.  So the plan was to utilise the now spare ZP100 as a zone in the en-suite bathroom off our main bedroom...

Old Timer
Since ripping and centralising all our DVDs and CDs a few years ago our "Jukebox" server had grown and grown and was in need of replacement. With 5 years of digital photographs taking up 10s of gigabytes alone and ripped DVDs taking anywhere from 3gig to 9gig each!, no matter how much disk space you have it never seems quite enough.

The donated ancient motherboard and RAM that I had received three years ago had performed well. Despite being a lowly Pentium Pro 200 with 128meg, it had coped admirably with serving multiple PCs, Xboxes and other IP clients. However the drive bay configuration in the old AT rackmount case (that had been "modified" with a hacksaw to allow the ATX board to be fitted) meant there was no room left to add any more hard disks, and keeping the drives that were already in there cool was becoming a major issue too...

I have had CCTV at home for 8 years now in one form or another. Over that time camera performance has increased, whilst prices have fallen. Par for the course where most technology is concerned I suppose. A year or so ago I bought a Samsung CCTV switcher from eBay to view our cameras by modulating its output round all the TVs in the house. Using its simple timer it switched between each camera at a set interval, while this worked it was frustrating as the camera you wanted to view was rarely the one that was on the screen at that particular moment in time. The eBay acquired switcher died a month or so ago and so the search for the “upgrade” was on...

After taking TEN YEARS to get planning permission we finally "cut the first sod" on St Patrick's Day (17th March 1998). Here's a pictorial record of the building progress...