Items Tagged With tutorials

Submission by Steve Edwards - I recently changed my central heating boiler and took the time to set it up to be controlled by X10 via homevision, for local control I had a X10 Maxi controller in the kitchen...

Submission by Steve Jones - I wanted to improve the control of my central heating system by utilising my home automation controller (HomeVisionPro) whilst still retaining the original central heating timer so it could easily be switched back on if the controller was down or if I needed to take HV out if we moved...

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...

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...