This is a trivial thing to most of you here, but for me it was a win. I installed an outside WiFi extender on the side of my house. This will be great for my Astro-imaging rig, giving me the freedom to set up on a much wider area of my back yard.
I used an existing hole in the wall to run a cable from the outside unit to a MESH node in the house. The hole wasn’t big enough to run a Cat 6 cable with it’s connector, so I had to cut off the end, feed it through and then put a new connector on that end of the cable. I purchased an Ethernet crimping kit and after a practice run on a spare piece of cable, I managed to get the new connector installed. It was quite fiddly getting the 8 small wires in the right holes, but it was quite satisfying when I eventually got it right. After that I sealed up the hole in the wall… job done.
You ain’t lyin’! Terminating cat cable correctly is one of those, not hard in concept, but has a lot of places it can go wrong. If you got it right the first try, excellent work!
It took me more than a few tries before I had the White-Orange/Orange/White-Green/Blue/White-Blue/Green/White-Brown/Brown order correct after pushing the wires through the connector. It looked very simple on the instruction video I watched!
You can tell I had to work at it because I now have that wire sequence seared into my brain! Also, there was some colorful language involved!
It is a heck of a lot easier to make the connector when you use the pass through type. You pull all the wires through and when you crimp the connector it cuts the wires to length and the outer jacket is pulled all the way forward.
That’s what I used, although getting all the wires to stay in the correct order as I pushed them through the connector was a real challenge. I’m sure it’s something that gets easier with practice. The thing is, I probably won’t have to do it again for years, if ever.
Spent 6 hours in the simulator cockpit of the CH-53 doing real NVG night operations* and of course I had my Vietnam Playlist in my ears the whole time…
Gods, sometimes I love my job very very much.
*as a side note, DCS does NVG very very well.
I felt myself at home, despite the weight and size of the apparatus.
Edit : Today I repeat it. I’ll see if I can post a picture.
I bought a robot lawn mower during Prime Day a couple of days ago. These things can be hit or miss. I and my little yard struggled with finding a logical spot for the mothership that could pick up six satellites. The robot has an internal GPS receiver which is magically corrected down to the centimeter by a separate antenna feeding the mothership. The antenna is attached to a stick mounted in the yard at least 6 feet from the house. Unable to find enough satellites with the stick I decided to mount the thing to the roof and did so temporarily with a zip-tie until either committing or returning.
The mower is a Segway Navimow i110. It is a miracle of friendly engineering. This is the wrong place to sell lawn equipment but if you have a suitable yard and hate mowing, do yourself the favor of at least researching what they can do for you.
Having been sold on the technology I committed to replacing my janky zip-tie set-up with something more permanent that can handle wind, rain, snow and raccoons. Segway makes a nice mount for a reasonable $50. I figured I could save some cash by doing it myself. After driving to home depot to purchase PVC, JB weld, brackets and hardware I was in the hole for…just under $50. Ultimately, working for two hours on a hot roof saved me nothing. But it worked! A satisfying if totally unnecessary project.
Nicely done, and at least your solution looks good and works. If that had been me I would have spent $50 on my own solution,which would probably not have worked and looked terrible. I would then have gone ahead and purchased the manufacturer’s mount and all would be good, except for being an extra $50 out of pocket.
I have learned it’s cheaper for me to skip the DIY part of the equation.
Things I never thought I would be doing today. just had a passenger tell me there is a pigeon on the platform “in a bad way” this is not uncommon …dimwitted pigeons seem to have no sense to get out of the way of trains, normally it’s a bag and bin job …but this one was still alive and kicking, fortunately there is a vet across the road, so managed to persuade the flapping bird into a box and took it to the vet …the vet looked it over and it’s not good and he will put it to sleep
This has been a good week, I feel like I earned this.
On Tuesday my boss called me out of the blue to tell me that the founders had agreed to pay me a bonus (I haven’t asked for one, which probably should tell me that I’ve been selling myself way short again). They haven’t told me how much yet, but heck, I’ll take it. I’ll know after they’ve talked to the tax guy how much they can pay me without running into prohibitively large taxes.
Also, I’m currently consulting for a company on a VST plugin. Their in-house dev tried to do a facelift for the last 1 1/2 years but has made it considerably worse. The thing crashes, produces all kinds of awful audible artifacts and the code is a gordian knot made out of spaghetti, and of course there isn’t a single unit test, zilch.
I studied with the guy who originally had the idea for the plugin (not the guy that ruined it) and he brought me on to consult for them and fix this mess. I’ve been on the project for about 4 weeks including onboarding myself and scoping out all the issues. Today we had a call over a feature validation thing I needed him to do for me and he casually dropped that their team is over the moon, saying that I accomplished more in two weeks than their previous dev had in several months. I really needed to hear this cause a) fixing someone else’s badly written DSP code is a grind and b) they pay a sizeable rate for my service and I gave it a really good try to hit the ground running.
Aaand today, as I already wrote in another thread, the first AAA(ish, maybe AA is more realistic) title incorporating a plugin that (for the most part) I wrote got released. Reviews are currently tanking on Steam, but that’s out of my control (and not the fault of our plugin). Good thing we’re not paid a commission.
For all the general carpiness that’s currently going on in the world, today I’m counting my blessings.
