Items Tagged With installation

Submission by Paul Gale - Following a post by one of the members of the UKHA_D mailing list, I recently bought a home brew product that enables control of a Sky or Sky+ box from a PC (Windows or Linux) and ultimately, the Internet. I've been looking for something to do this for years so thought I'd share my findings with my fellow HAers...

There have been a couple of nice DIY Cabler Tester projects posted on Digg.com over the last few days...

"Making Ethernet cables is easy, when you have the tool to crimp the connectors. But even then, you can't always be sure that the connector has been properly connected to the cable. Commercial network cable testers can cost £60 or more. Here's an idea for a simple cable tester that costs under £20 if you, or someone handy with a soldering iron, makes it from scratch...

Just noticed this one on digg.com..."It's all to often I hear about people buying a new home that is "wired for the future"... meaning it only has a single Cat5 cable to each room. I don't know why builders cut corners with this since cabling is cheap and you can pull two at a time...

"Our 128 x 64 Serial Graphic LCD Display Terminal provides an outstanding MCE remote front panel display for Windows MCE. Not only does it display the current MCE state, it also allows you to control MCE using the membrane switch overlay...

I've just uploaded the write-up on my new Jukebox/NAS machine at home. There are photos and costs too...

"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...