Media thread - 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of two round white UFO-looking access points sitting on a table. There's nothing for scale but Ubiquiti's tech specs page says they're 16cm across.

I bought a couple of shiny new Ubiquiti U6+ access points because it turns out our wifi is not super-great particularly in the back room, and completely missed the fact that they're powered by power-over-ethernet ONLY, with no actual other way of getting power into them. Oops.

(Fortunately our Dream Router has two ports that can do PoE, but it'll require some rejiggering of the network at the front of the house, plus we'll have to get a sparky out to run some ethernet cable for the back room.)

Posted on 4 February 2025, 16:26

A photo of a round white UFO-looking UniFi access point mounted on the wall, with an ethernet cable coming out of the bottom of it. There's a blue circle of LED in the middle, looking all cool and futuristic (he says as the table is moved in front of that piece of wall so you can't actually even see the thing is there anyway).

An absolute mess of mostly ethernet cables, plus a power cable, an RCA cable, and a small white D-Link switch sitting on the floor, looking very rat-nesty.

Well, the one for the lounge room was easy because there's already a cable coming straight from the Dream Router to where I wanted to mount the new access point anyway. And with being able to move everything to wireless because there's now a properly solid signal here, and moving the Raspberry Pi directly behind the TV because the only thing it needs to plug into is power and the amplifier, I've been able to clean out a whole rat's nest of cables.

This Power-over-Ethernet thing is pretty sweet, isn't it?

our house darkroom nerd shit

Posted on 4 February 2025, 21:45

The "middle chaos" photo of our home office: there is a standing desk pulled entirely out from the wall, four ethernet cables running from the wall into the router that's sitting under the standing desk, plus a bunch of cables and external hard disks, a Mac mini, and a vacuum cleaner in the middle of the room, as well as a printer sitting on the chair. Beside the standing desk is a bookshelf with the bottom two shelves empty where the printer, Mac mini, and external hard disks live.

The finished glorious neatness: the standing desk is back against the wall, the printer, Mac mini, hard disks, and router are neatly back on the bookshelf, and the big power board has all its power plugs neatly labelled. Four of the cables (the three hard disks and the Raspberry Pi) are actually fed into a cable organiser that takes them up behind the bookshelf, and the four ethernet cables are neatly tied together. The only slightly messy bit are the four power cables coming down from the standing desk into a second powerboard, but even they're mostly tied together.

We had the electrician in yesterday to run a bunch of new ethernet cable for our new network setup with the additional wifi access points. Yesterday evening after dinner we went out and bought two big 12-port Arlec powerboards with two USB-A and two USB-C ports in them to neaten up the lounge room power setup, and the office too because I was going to move the router there but we'd run out of ports on the existing boards. I spent the rest of yesterday evening after we got home doing the lounge room, at lunch today I wall-mounted and tidied up the access point in the back room, and then this evening pulled EVERYTHING in the office apart and redid it all.

Witness the absolute chaos of the middle of it, and then the glorious neatness afterwards, I even labelled all of the power cables to indicate what they're for!

our house darkroom nerd shit tidying and rearranging

Posted on 12 February 2025, 22:41