New York Renovator

When I gutted and rewired my living room, I installed ethernet cabling (four jacks for the perimeter of the room). It was an added expense to an already very tight budget, but I bit the bullet and did it anyway. The work wasn’t difficult, but it required me to study up to make sure I was doing it correctly, and the parts and components are pricey (it cost me an additional $100 to rig up four jacks in one room).

And BOY am I ever glad I did! You see, I’ve been struggling with our wireless connection and security here are the homestead, and the constant hassles drive me NUTS. My kids have laptops upstairs, and of course there’s no ethernet cabling upstairs (heck, there’s hardly any electricity upstairs yet!). So we rely on wireless for their machines. Their laptops are old and new, with a mix of Windows XP, Vista, and Linux Xandros. I am the chief IT person for the family… and the CONSTANT hair-pulling problems with wireless have me screaming in frustration sometimes!

(If you need a well-written article on the properties and differences between ethernet and wireless, see this very good post here at BestBuy.com).

Of course, you don’t need to have ethernet cables inside the wall cavities to work. You can buy ethernet cables at any store, and plug them in to your router and string them across your room to the computers. But there are a few problems with that, obviously:

• You can only buy cables less than 100 feet long, or your connection quality diminishes.
• You have cables hanging all over the place.
• You can’t string the cables across windows and doorways.
• It all looks just darn ugly .

Well, I have decided that I am going to install ethernet cabling in EVERY room in this house, once we gut it. The problems with the wireless system is driving me crazy! Not to mention that having wireless can cause security problems within your network. EVERY network should be secure (see this post about securing your wireless network), but wireless security is an oxymoron. Hackers are figuring out how to get past the encryption codes to get onto your network, where they can make all sorts of trouble and even get you into trouble with the law. So, essentially, a completely wired system is best. And that’s what I’m doing when I can. Wired is better!

P.S. Remember, before you undertake any project with electricity, or go tearing out your home’s walls, check with a professional and be thoroughly read-up on the projects. Some older homes have toxins like asbestos, lead, etc– treatments for Mesothelioma are very unpleasant. Take extra precautions to know what you are doing, and to be safe in doing it!

Did you know that many newer, souped-up computers are coming without telephone modems installed?? :-p I just found out. I use DSL, so I have not really had any need for a phone modem. But I am tinkering with the phone line (I want to control telephone calls from my computer) and I had to buy a data modem for the computer. It caused me to look afresh at my telephone lines, installation and wiring, and my telephone plan with my phone company (Verizon).

(I also discovered that my telephone account still has an active “Wire Maintenance Plan” that I was getting charged $10 a month for!! Holy cow! Since I rewired my entire living room, including telephone and ethernet, I think I am confident that I don’t need to pay Verizon $10 a month to fix it “in case” something goes wrong. Grr! I’ve been paying that all this time!!).

Anyway… data modems can be pricey! I had a choice of getting an internal or an external modem for my computer. My computer is still under warranty, so I had to choose an external (I would have loved to install an internal!! And they were cheaper!) modem. But, yow, external modems can be as much as $200! So I went “budget” (of course!). Hey– no surpises here– the best stuff I found was at (you guessed it) Buy.com! This is the TRENDnet data modem on sale. Nice price, eh!

Buy.com has great stuff. I am always checking out their weekly sale page for great deals on electronics and supplies. I highly recommend Buy.com– not only are their prices spectacular, so is their customer service, their shipping speed, and the selection! Buy.com allows third-party sellers to sell stuff, which really improves the selection and makes prices much more competitive. So if you need something (anything under the sun, really), try Buy.com before going to those pricey Big Box stores. I love Buy.com!

So, now with my data modem coming in, I can monitor all phone calls from my computer. I’ll have more about that in later posts– but we get a lot of telemarketing calls and I’m going to use some software to *zap* these calls forever!!! Muahahahahahha!!!

Have you ever wondered what your computer keyboard looks like inside? I have. Today I decided to open it up and check it out.

It all started when I saw Apple’s new Aluminum Ultra-Thin keyboard. Oh, it’s a beautiful looking thing. I like flat keyboards. Because I sit at a computer all day, I’m quite fussy about my keyboard (and mouse). The Apple is a little beyond my price range ($80 at BestBuy, $50 from Apple) and I’m not sure how it would function with a PC, so I am waiting for a Windows thin keyboard. I’d read that you can take your own keyboard apart and make your own flat one. I don’t necessarily want a flat shell, I want flat keys– that’s why I like the Apple so much– the keys are shaped like Scrabble tiles, only thinner. It’s very nice to use.

Well, all this dwelling on keyboards brought out the screwdriver and camera. We took apart a very old HP keyboard that went to our Windows ME we got almost ten years ago now. My, how time flies!

Inside the plastic shell are three layers of plastic. Two of the layers are very thin sheets. The top protective layer rests on top of the key matrix, which has small gold dots and lines. The electronc pulses course through the lines and dots. They are activated when you press down the keys.

Behind all this is a thicker layer of rubbery plastic with small plastic pads. The pads are directly correlated to the keys above and the gold dots on the key matrix. This kind of HP keyboard is a rubber dome switch kind. It resembles bubble wrap, in a way, but the plastic is more rubbery and the little domes are firmer. When you press on a key while typing, a small mechanism pushes these little rubber domes down. It works as a plunger to touch the point on the key matrix layer. Your computer registers it all as letters, numbers, and symbols. Pretty amazing, huh?

Some geeks have used only the key matrix as their keyboard. They keep the circuitry intact (I dismantled mine, so that I could see it all in pieces). Then they plug in their flat keyboard and press the gold dots with their fingertips.

I can’t see how a homemade flat keyboard would be very comfortable. I don’t mind the shell, it’s the shape and size of the actual keys that matter to me. But after this, my curiosity was sated! Cool, huh?