I wish my roku had an ethernet port, and yes, agreed, everything that can be plugged in is best plugged in, that alone relieves congestion of the wireless networks in your house. Save it for your phone tablet or when you need to take the laptop into the toilet… Have I shared too much?
Wireless is a convenience with its own set of drawbacks baked right in. It would be easy enough to make a router with a radio so powerful you could extend its signal a city block, but that would necessarily interfere with every other radio out there.
In reliability and speed, wifi has always been the backwards tech.
Really? My provider’s name is Telnor, We’re like ISP buddies! 
Make sure you don’t plug them into a powerbar. Only directly into the wall. You want as few points of interference between the units as possible.
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Replace the sacrificial anode in your water heater if it’s more than ten years old, and install a heavy gauge jumper wire between the inlet and outlet pipes. I use eight gauge solid copper (with solid bronze clamps, not the galvanized ferrous ones. I’d solder the copper directly before I’d use a steel clamp.) Then check for continuity to electrical earth ground from the pipe leading to the dishwasher.
Totally serious. You could save more than a few thousand dollars… if your copper is pinholing, you could get leaks in very inaccessible areas, that in turn could cause massive structural damage before you noticed them.
Copper will not pinhole if done properly. If you get even one pinhole, you need to check your grounds and the anode in the water heater, because there’s something electrical going on.
Hrmm, that’s something interesting to look in to. Is that an issue even if it was the cold water pipe that pinholed?
Yes. It’s most likely your main ground has come loose, or that it was using a ferrous clamp that has rotted out galvanically due to some incidental electrical nonsense (possibly involving phones or other things using the piping for a system ground). If you don’t address it you can expect more pinholes!
You need jumpers across your water meter*, your water heater, and any non-conducting pipe repairs that have been done. It’s worth your while to pay the extra cost of bronze, brass or copper clamps with brass screws so you won’t have to do them over every decade or two.
You won’t need a plumber for any of this, although you might want an electrician if it turns out that your ground connection inside the electrical panel is a fist-sized ball of rust. Don’t ask an electrician to do the jumper wires.
Copper plumbing is awesome; it’s oligodynamic, and will last hundreds of years if minimally maintained, so in the long term it is the most cost-effective and safe way to deliver water to your family. But you have to keep your grounding in order.
* Forgot to mention the meter before, because I don’t have one, I’ve got a well.
Yup. My dad, recently got a new desk for his PC in the den where our router is. He thought he’d do me a favor and plug my powerline network adapter into his brand spanking new power-cleaning UPS! Too bad that powerline networks basically rely on a dirty power signal, since they are a dirty power signal piggybacking on the harmonics.
He’s an electrician and immediately realized what was wrong when I explained it to him. He even moved the adapter to an outlet that was on a circuit directly adjacent to the circuit that feeds my room.
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My previous place - the only house I have ever “owned” - had coax going to practically every room for cable television. I don’t have a television. So what I did was order a few nice RJ45 wall plates and replace all of the coax with CAT5E (salvaged from my previous job). For the first floor I just poked it up from the basement. The second floor was trickier. IIRC I tied the CAT5E to some existing coax and pulled it up through the wall. It was nice!
I am living in a squat again (yea!) where there was exposed wiring anyway, it was much easier to set up. Actually, I made all of the wiring here neater.
I wouldn’t mind doing it, but I refuse the bureaucracy which is involved with having a “real” company. I would do it for my friends, but since I live in a horrible suburb I haven’t had any meatspace friends for many years. Also, I don’t drive. But it’s amazing how many jobs need to be done, while people can’t secure employment.
True enough except that they never ask for the router back if I change ISPs or if they upgrade the service. In theory they do sell it to you and there is a list price of NOK900 (USD 150) on the router I have now but in practice they are always so keen to get you to upgrade that they waive the charge.
Of course there is no way for the customer to find out what any of these services actually cost to provide and of course the ISP has to pay for the router so they must somehow pass on the cost to the users as a group.
There seems to be three schools of ugly router design.
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Old school ugly:It’s a plastic box with lights and pokey bits. Deal with it. We’re engineers, we don’t care.
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Apple/google ugly: yeah, it’s a plastic box with lights, but we’re doing our best to hide the pokey bits and make it look like a minimalistic brick or cylinder so it feels vaguely modern instead of something from the Windows 95 era.
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Cyberpunk hover drone / stealth fighter / squid robot from the matrix ugly. So tactical. Such bristling. Wow. I think it’s the ugliest trend so far.
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God, so ugly. Will these ever look retro cool? Can taste work that weirdly?
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Hey, if you’ve got an idea on how to make 8 external antennas look cool, I’d like to hear it!
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I’ve occasionally suggested to people that an elderly router loaded with DD-WRT makes a nice wireless access point, and it’s a way to avoid paying the really exorbitant price microsoft was charging for the xbox 360 wireless adapter. I had never really thought about the router turning to crap while still appearing to be basically functional as being a mode of failure I needed to worry about.
Now I’m kind of curious about what component in a router degrades such that it leaves the device apparently operational, but compromised
If I ever needed that much wi-fi power I think I’d prefer my mega router to be built into a single friggin’ giant antenna (say, about the size and shape of this thing and build it into the decor somehow. In a pinch you could it use to beat people with, or emergency pole dance or something. Now that’s tactical!
(I am not an engineer, interior decorator, martial artist, or pole dancer. Do not attempt.)
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Water in the wifi, what could ever go wrong?
If waterproof speakers and cellphones are a thing, why not a wifi router?
Sure. Just seeing the track record for router manufacturers on everything else, I wonder how reliable the waterproofing would be…
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