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  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

The Do-It-Yourself Tool Shed Thread vs Duct Tape Fixes EVERYTHING

i have worked my carcass like i would a rented mule all my adult years. two houses completely remodeled and sold for profit . am now in the third and final which is a cardboard castle (manufactured) but everything works and i don't have to do much in the line of maintainence . first shack was a hundred year old pile of bricks and the second was a fifty year old pile of sticks. it was all done while working a 40 hour job as a machinist. they were both HUD shacks and remarkably cheap and fucked up.
this new one was bought cash from what i had amassed working like a mad man. not owing a dime to anyone is tonic for the soul. my blue collar ass is busted up badly from all the work and industrial accidents . drunk ass crane operators have 2x crushed me with loads, etc. but still life is sweet regardless of the chronic pains. all in all working like it was going out of style is a good, good thing.
 
Home theatre cabling... :D

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tambo: kindly answer my question about which type of ethernet cable you've used, please!

and let's see the finished faceplates too.
 
Alright, keep yer keks on! I was holding off replying until I'd done the plastering.

I went for Cat 5e. I briefly considered Cat 6/6A and how I might feel incomplete or less of a man if I didn't install it... but I don't really have any serious 10GBASE-T network traffic. And by the time I do, we'll have probably moved on, so some other fucker can have the joy of networking the house. Didn't seem to be worth the additional money.

Faceplates... well, the other half insisted on kitting the house out with black nickel / black iridium faceplates for the socketry and switches... which kinda limits you when looking for complementary faceplates for other utilities. I was lucky to find a stereo speaker faceplate that was almost identical. However, faceplates with network points, F-type connectors for satellite cable or anything specialised are hard to come by - particularly if you want them to match the existing outlets.

In the end, I stopped trying to find something exact and went with a modular grid solution. Essentially, it's a black nickel frame with black plastic 25mm/50mm inserts. Works very well. I'm happy with the results.
 
excellent stuff. so where's the router and how many rooms have you wired for ethernet? like I told you, I've got my living room and upstairs computer room wired up semi-permanently, as well as a wire up to the NAS in a cupboard. it's not as invisible as yours, but pretty close. I love it. :)

nearly all of mine is cat5e as well, except for the newest one which is 6e. there was very little difference in price so I thought why not. our next house *will* be done in 6e all over to get ready for fibre and whatever else comes next. I'll be too fucking old to crawl about the floor again by the time that happens. ;)

btw, the vendor called 'Rhinocables' on ebay is brilliant - very cheap and miraculous next day delivery even up to Scotland.
 
The router is upstairs in the office. All cables (including two from the bedroom) go back to that point where the terminate at another faceplate.

The router has four ethernet ports (plus one for the modem), so, at present, I'm just manually switching them as and when I need to (because two are permanently in use with the main computer and server). The intention was to buy a switch, but I can't be arsed doing that at the moment (besides, they seem kinda expensive).

The rest of the house is wireless as the demands are much less (internet and music).
 
gigabit router? we're all gigabit wired and 'N' wifi here, which has definitely turned out to be an excellent and reasonably "future" proofed investment.

btw - i'm seeing gigabit switches on ebay for about £15, and 10/100 ones for about half that.
 
uhhh... good question! :D

The newer computers and media players will. My main computer is more 'organic' in its build.

I get in excess of 50mb/s on Usenet though, so I'm guessing it's fine.

cletus said:
tambo, that's the wrong wall doofus, it's the wall opposite. Doh! :D
Click to expand...
Funnily enough... we've just reversed the layout of the lounge, so yeah, most of those outlets were on the other side of the room originally! :D
 
gigabit infrastructure is massively worth it for large data amounts of data transfer and movie streaming, and although it's not realistic to expect the fully advertised performance at all times, it certainly eliminates any bottlenecks.

I assumed that my reasonably new Dell desktop and both of our even newer Dell laptops came with gigabit NICs as standard, but I was wrong! they're all 10/100, which is a standard that the marketing scumbags in the computer industry have lately started to describe as 'Fast Ethernet'. not in this fucking day and age it isn't!

so I upgraded my new desktop (and an older one) with gigabit PCI NICs which cost £5.97 each from amazon.

similarly, I also initially assumed that both our laptops came with 'N' internal wi-fi - wrong, yet again!!! so that problem was taken care of with these USB adaptors, £9.29 from amazon. they work flawlessly, and are so tiny you can leave them plugged in all the time.

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on my own laptop, I also bought a USB wired ethernet adapter dongle, £23.99 from amazon, for those occasions when wi-fi doesn't suffice. it is bottlenecked by the fact its maximum throughput is USB 2.0 speed, but that's theoretically almost 5 times as fast as 10/100 so it's worth the upgrade. (and yet again, the marketing scumbags deceitfully call it a 'gigabit adapter', which it clearly isn't. I knew this before I bought it though.


so yeah, it's been a bit of a journey getting our network up to scratch, but it's been totally worth it.


if you need any more excruciating details on any aspect of this, please don't hesitate to let me know (and I apologise if I'm teaching my granny how to suck eggs). i'll give you a call at 3 in the morning and tell you everything else you need to know, if you like? ;)


this post has been brought to you by the OCD Gigabit Awareness Agency. :D
 
just bought a 5L tub of engine oil from Halfords (£21.99), and they were giving away a set of 8 Halfords Professional screwdrivers, free with each tub!

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bargain! and very nice quality too. (now I have about 379 screwdrivers in my collection.)

plus they'd mispriced the oil on the shelf at £21.99 - it should have been £26.99 - DOUBLE BARGAIN! :D
 
i half assed a cat condo and am still in the process of adding another level to it. its not much to look at but the cats love it and use it as their main scratching post now (which makes it a success by default). i had no idea what i was supposed to be doing with the carpet so it s def all janky lol.
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any advice on how to make the carpet not look like crap when i staple it down would be appreciated. maybe im cutting it with too dull a blade?
 
also please to give me love to the monkeys fist knot. i even put a cat toy ball with a little bell inside there. the cats completely ignore it.
 
^ Yeah, you have to use a very sharp blade, and one smooth cut. Best bet is to cut off a little (about an inch or two) at a time with slow, steady pressure.

Looks excellent though. :D

How much did it cost you compared with a comparable sized, pre-fab cat condo?
 
the pre fabs are obviously much cooler looking, but i built mine out of scrap. the carpet i got cost like $8 and i still have enough left for another shelf and a few 1x4s that cost very little. the prefabs cost $150-200, im about $60 in, including the staple gun that i had to buy and i have more wood (flat pieces i can fashion into shelves AND 1x4s for support stands) more carpet, more rope to wrap around wood for scratching and more carpet. the cats love it as they can get up high and be king of the post. ill prolly buy a brand new razor for cutting the carpet from now on. thanks for the tip. like i said, im prolly going to make this one a little taller with another higher shelf and then start on another separate one and figure out a cool way to connect them. i rub catnip on them every week or so just to keep the cats interested in doing their scratching there. its all super low tech too, L brackets and wood screws do the trick for support and i use staples to keep the carpet in place
 
I just ordered a new welding helmet. Cause my old one is getting beat up, and my friend wants to make a metal sculpture, but can not weld, so I am going to do the welding for her as she directs the placement of the metal members. I am going to be using gas tungsten arc welding with a mix of argon and helium as shielding gas to weld the aluminum members.
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