DIY Wired Network
January 26th, 2008My Xbox had a wireless connection to the home network through a wireless network bridge for a while, but somehow the connection was just lacking, especially when I used the thing as an extender for Windows Media Center. I needed to get a direct connection between my Xbox in the basement and the home router in the family room, but I wasn’t about to pay someone to install cables in the wall for me. The family room is right above the TV room in the basement, so I figured it would be pretty easy to rig something up. First I thought I could just follow the TV cables around, because I when I unscrewed a receptacle in my room, it looked like empty space in the wall. 
It must have been the only one in the house like that. An unused cable in the basement was pretty tightly-packed. 
There was also a receptacle in the family room that had three cables in it, likely for some old cable system. There was just no working with it. The two black cables seemed to go up, while the only cable going down was white. 
Enter a new idea! We have speakers in the family room that are fed from a stereo in the basement. Their cables go through holes where the wall and floor meet (hidden by the baseboards), into the ceiling of the basement, and on top of the ceiling tiles of the basement to the stereo.
I knew what to do. 
Yeah, well my mom drilled the hole, but I could have done it myself! 
So then I fed the cable through the hole . . . 
. . . and then removed some ceiling tiles in the basement and fearlessly dug around for it blindly in the insulation in the top of the basement wall. 
Remember the unused black cable I was talking about? It was at this point that my dad and I discovered that we could find it at the top of the ceiling. The plan was to attach a string to the end of the black cable where it comes out the wall, pull it out from the top of the ceiling, and then attach the Ethernet cable to the string at the top of the wall and pull the string out from the wall until the Ethernet cable popped through. Great plan, except that the string came undone halfway through. After a good 30 minutes of fussing around, trying to make the cable go through the insulation (make the sharp turns that the old cable took down to the hole) we decided on another solution.
I routed the cable along the top of the wall, which would be out of sight when the ceiling tiles were put back into place. 
I brought it down right above the TV. 
It wasn’t the best solution, but it worked! I hooked the cable up to an old 4-port network hub, and brought one cable to the Xbox, and another one to my dad’s computer, so that he could use a wired connection instead of wireless. 
Even though my desktop computer’s connection to the network is still wireless, since I made the one segment of the data trail for Media Center wired, the performance of the Xbox as an extender for Windows Media Center has increased noticeably.
This is me excited. 
A wired Ethernet house the easy way?
January 19th, 2008I want a super fast connection between my desktop computer in my room and my Xbox 360 in the basement. Having such a connection would mean that I could listen to music, view my photo library, watch recorded TV and podcasts, and even pause, fast-forward, and rewind live TV from my Xbox thought it’s Extender for Media Center functionality–all without hiccups in performance.
One option is D-Links amazing but equally expensive new router, plus a media bridge for the Xbox, plus an adapter for my desktop. The bottom line? More than $500. Ouch. I need something a little less expensive.
The best choice for performance has been and always will be a wired connection. The problem is that I can’t just run wires along the base of the walls on the floors. As I was thinking about how to easily get ethernet cables into the wall, I had an idea:
There are outlets like this all over the house. This one goes from my room, up to the attic. There’s another one that goes from my attic down to the family room, where the router is, and there’s another one that goes from there to the basement! For a quick and messy solution, all I would have to do is drop a cable down from the upper receptacles and catch it through the lower ones below. When I want to do a more polished job I can just cut a somewhat square-ish hole in the wall, like the cable guy did, and drill an Ethernet faceplate directly into the drywall.
I’m going to have to try that.