Monthly Archives: August 2006

Routers with Hard Drives? What a great idea

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Asus are the first out of the gate with one:

A big sell to me is: Hide one in your attic or coal house and you have a theft proof network drive.

This device also comes with Bittorrent, ftp etc capable client and servers, although no podcatcher support which would make it a done deal for me. Bittorrent support may help marketing, but I the main appeal for many is an always on Samba Share – right now I need a (noisy) PC running to share media between my xbmcs (the xbox’s SMB server implementation is single threaded and cannot run in parallel with xbmc). Podcast support + SMB server would allow me to part another PC for eBay (I am down to three today); but without both those options I am skipping the ~$270 device for now. By Xmas I predict similar devices will also pull down podcasts and IPTV via RSS.

Before this router appeared I was close to buying another used xbox (~$90 on Craig’s list [Aug 2006]) and running a SMB share via linux on one. In case you have not heard; it is now child’s place to hack an (original) xbox without a chip/ special game/ memory card etc. A used xbox makes a very cheap linux server or 1080i capable media center. That reminds me I have some used xbox games to sell on eBay… who has time for games anyway?

Cat-5 Wiring: Order matters – Duh!

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This may be common knowledge to everyone but me. In our new house I made two long cat-5 cables to span from a switch to the 2nd xmbc xbox and a PC in a remote bedroom. Well neither (longish) cable would work on either xbox, but they did work on my newest PC which has a built in TBase1000 chipset.

Today while recovering from a few mild Lariam days I am fixing a few loose ends at home. One is those pesky cat-5 cables. After following this image found on wikipedia the two cables now work perfectly:

 

It would appear that the order of the wires is very important. Of course I learned about twisted pairs in high school, and have taken three technical degrees. I just assumed that like colors go together in pairs, but it is not the case for Cat-5 at least. Apparently for TBase100 only two pairs are used and I guess the way I wired them signals were interfering at the ~100MHz transmission rates.

Hopefully this helps someone out there for the same frustration I had - are maybe everyone else reads instructions? It is also worth pointing out that Cat-5e is fine for TBase1000 – it works in my other house using el-cheapo Home Depot Cat5e Riser cable and it is a documented IEEE standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable

Google is in Atlanta (and hiring)

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It is interesting to learn that Google believes Atlanta important enough to have a real office here now. Cool as Google is they are actually in the city too, unlike Microsoft who recently moved to the SUV swamped suburbs of North Atlanta. The Atlanta office seems mainly to be sales staff but they are also hiring engineers:


http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/google-in-atl.html


I wonder how long until we meet an ATL Googler at our Architects meeting? If they want to make real tech-connections in town, I imagine it will not be long.