Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

I recently read an article in Popular Mechanics discussing the disgusting things the author had run into while crawling through a crawlspace in an old house. An easy to relate to article for my former techs who had to pull cat5e cable through some particularly hazardous crawl spaces. One week they might be pulling cable through the crawlspace in a 200 year old farmhouse with spiders the size of computer mice and the next they were on 30 foot ladders hanging onto steel beams for dear life. If you are going to do diy cabling plan ahead. If you have walkie talkies break them out. The headset variety are very handy since they keep your hands free. We experimented with the g.i. joe version years back. Do your best to keep your cat5e cable away from a.c. cables and most definitely try not to run them over fluorescent light fixtures. Get a good, bright lantern or flashlight in order to see the skin puncturing obstacles in your way. Wiring one business we found we had to go above three old cei...

Home networking can be a pain. Wireless is wonderful when it works. Hardwired networks always work faster but sometimes getting from point A to point B involves running wires through the shower or up the chimney. Face it, most of our homes were not built for ease of wiring post construction. I have had mixed results with wireless, my present Linksys wireless router works well with my Trendnet USB wireless NIC and my built in wirele ss in my PDA and my laptop. I get less than stellar results at my son’s home with the same equipment. Woe is me, what to do, what to do? Networking through the electrical outlets is finally coming of age. Not only does it work, it works well. It wasn’t that long ago that we first tested this technology, back when I still owned a computer business. It was so so. Now with the advances here and those coming soon we are looking at 200 Mbps throughput now and 400 Mbps throughput in the next year. Very respectable, quicker than wireless and theoretically with freq...