(no subject)

Life ending cramps. *whine* Life not worth living. Also, holy God, does my uterus need to stop that shit.

Computers and Me

Spent half of last night resetting the network to better facilitate full-house coverage, because my hobbies with cramps and low grade misery are not as other people's and also, I got to get out a wrench and my screwdrivers. There is partial working, but still not enough.

After googling, here is what I have learned:

1.) Access point/repeaters are not cheap and wtf is the point of a second access point when you have to ethernet cable it to the first router? Call me crazy, but if I have to run a cable across the house to hook to the repeater to get coverage for that part of the house, the point of wirelessness is lost. And yes, I did ask if I could wire the walls and I can still hear the laughter.

There has got to be a better way to do this.

2.) Set up Shareport to hook the backup drive directly to the router. Way too slow--I call 1 MB/sec slow, God, the world I live in--but I want a NAS. Badly. What I don't know is which one. I'm not philosophically opposed to RAID and I'd rather invest in an enclosure, but holy God, the choices. It would make my life easier if I could move all the media onto that and everyone plays with it from there. Not to mention backups.

3.) I am no closer to solving the problem with hooking the bluray and TV to the internet, both of which come with ethernet, and so far as I can tell, neither have the ability to use a USB wireless adapter. What the fuck? First world problems whatever, if they are going to create tech that actually requires internet access to update it--and the bluray has to be updated or it won't work--then either give it internal wireless or fucking make an adapter. People who buy things like this are tech sluts. We will do this happily. We like buying these things to play with and figuring out how it's set up. Good God.



4.) Testing of the fans with the Targus cooler continues. Results, not screenshoted, just remebered.

A.) I ran it with Winrar, which is a dark hell of darkness on CPU use. Everything kept pretty cool except the CPU chips, with a top temp of 94 until I adjusted the notebook cooler so the fans were running directly beneath tehe CPU, at which time it went to and stayed at 83 average. Despite this, the bottom remained relatively cool. Winrar ran for an hour before it was done, then everything went back down to settle around 63.

2.) I can flip off my internal fan and run it with just the notebook pad with no degradation in performance or overheating, unless I'm using the CPU heavily. The following programs are open: Winword, iTunes, Firefox, Trillian, and my Soundblaster Expresscard. The biggest offenders are the Expresscard and iTunes running for CPU use together, while Firefox takes the most memory.



Things Not Computer Related

Cramps. Send help. Send like, IDK, porn, okay? Or the Marines. Same diff.

I need an emo!Adam icon to express my pain. Or a Pete Wentz. Something with darkness of soul combined with minimalism

Comments

[peanutgallery79.livejournal.com]

You can connect via ethernet cable to your laptop if you use the 85Mbps Powerline Fast Ethernet Adapter Kit, or connect wirelessly if you get the 85Mbps Powerline Wireless Access Point as your second box. If you need the higher speed of the 200Mbps system, you'll need to connect a third party wireless router to the second box.

[peanutgallery79.livejournal.com]

ps - make sure all the electrical sockets you want to use for the powerline system belong to the same circuit breaker, I know my house is wired with four different ones.

[amireal.livejournal.com]

Can you expand on that? *also nominates you for geniushood*

[peanutgallery79.livejournal.com]

As far as I can make out - being not any kind of electrician - when the powerline or homeplug companies say circuit breaker, they actually mean electrical power phase. This here (http://electrical.about.com/od/panelsdistribution/a/breakerpanels.htm) explains it so much better than ever I could. I have four instead of the standard two because we had the electrical wiring of the house upgraded and I believe we have two main electrical feeds off the street.

You could either try and figure out what rooms belong to the same phase by looking at your panel, or by actually buying a powerline kit and figuring it out by trial and error, which is what I did lol. Also, if you don't have a connection with the powerline unit/box plugged into a specific outlet, unplug it and try again with it plugged in upside down.

I don't know how it works if you live in an apartment building with much more complex wiring but the tech-help-before-purchase departments of the companies that sell these things are generally very helpful.

Also, my primary computer is a Mac, so the powerline system is plug-and-play, you may need to install software if you're on a PC. That said, the powerline thing works with all my computers, three macs running osx, one pismo (my pride and joy lol) running sys9, and another three PCs triple booted with xp, linux mint and ubuntu or vista/mint/ubuntu.

Yet another thing to bear in mind when talking to tech help is some powerline or homeplug systems don't work with certain modems or routers, so be sure to tell the tech what you're working with, or plan to upgrade to.

I hope some of that was helpful, and that not all of it was clear as mud : )

[amireal.livejournal.com]

Er, most of that I knew. *G* I meant more details on how being on the same/different circuit affects setting up this power network. How do I deal with that, etc?

I take it you mean that not necessarily one circuit, but one powerline feeding possibly several circuits is the main issue?

i.e. more info pls? Especially how you solutionized everything (What? TOTALLY A WORD!)

(arghh sorry Jenn, just delete the anon comment)

[peanutgallery79.livejournal.com]

more details on how being on the same/different circuit affects setting up this power network

If powerline unit 1 connected to your main modem/router is on circuit A and the room you plug powerline unit 2 is on the same circuit, then yay! you get internets in that room. If the room is on circuit B then absolutely nothing happens.

How do I deal with that

1. Plug in powerline unit 2 in a room on circuit A, connect to that via ethernet cable a wireless router which then provides room on circuit B with a wireless internet connection.

2. Plug powerline unit 2 into an outlet on circuit A closest to an outlet on circuit B. Plug in powerline unit 3 into circuit B outlet and connect both units with ethernet cable. You've now bridged circuits A and B, where powerline unit 3 is a jumping off point for other units on circuit B.

how you solutionized everything

The primary powerline system on circuit A and a bridge to circuit B covers the middle parts of the house, Airport Extreme connected to circuit B covers the east side of the house which is on circuit C, and another Airport Extreme covers the west side of the house which is on circuit D. So the whole house - two storeys and an attic - is covered. I've never taken a laptop into the attic but I'm dead sure that between the two Airports that space is covered : )