Hacking, Flashing, Routing, Bridging, And More Fun Covertly Installing Gizmos At the Parents’ House (Part 1)
Today’s blog topic will cover one REALLY long topic, so expect it to be split up into at least two parts.
Blog-related quick-hitters:
- As a fan of The Office, I am appalled at myself for the fact that I have yet to watch last Thursday’s episode!
I am ashamed of myself, and I don’t even have a good reason for not watching it yet! Well, unless you consider Spurs-Hornets, Korean BBQ, Olive Garden, Mother’s Day Weekend, etc., to be “good” reasons.
(Office fans may start booing me.)
- For a similar reason, I did not watch Game 3 of Lakers-Jazz. I was 99% sure that the Lakers were going to lose that game, not that that is a good reason to skip it, right?
(Laker fans may start booing me.)
Non-blog-related quick-hitters:
- File this under the fall-out-of-your-chair-laughing department:
So my sister (the one that doesn’t have karmic powers) visited us on Friday, and after settling in, she asked if she could grab some MP3s off my computer and upload them onto her iPod. I said sure, and went to go look for the USB cable.
After a few minutes, I couldn’t find it, but my sister spotted the wall charger…except that it didn’t register with her that she was using the wall charger. This conversation (slightly exaggerated) followed:
Me: You know you’re plugging your iPod into the wall charger, right?
Her: (blankly) OK. Is that not going to work?
Me: Not unless the data can transfer from the computer’s power supply, through the surge protector, and through the charger!
Eventually, she blamed lack of sleep and hyperglycemia—she bought an iced coffee from McDonald’s that was supposed to be sugar free vanilla, but was not—for the mistake. Uh-huh.
- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,350. I better start spending some money; I gotta do my part to stimulate the economy! 
(Tangent: I won’t be getting a stimulus check until mid-June! Booooooooooo.)
Current toothpaste-o-meter: a whole hell of a lot. Same with deodorant. I’m going to start selling this stuff to my neighbors real soon.
I better move on before I get too inundated with material. On with the topic at hand!
- A few months back, Staples had a great deal on the Sony LocationFree Base Station LF-B10 (think “SlingBox Lite”). I bought one as soon as it was for sale, thinking that I was going to hook up the device to my own cable box and use it whenever I was out of town.
It took me a day or so to realize how dumb of an idea this was. The only times I’m out of town are when I go to Monterey Park, or the much less frequent trips up to Sacto. If I’m in Monterey Park, there are three TVs to choose from that all have cable boxes. If I’m in Sacto, I’ll need a high speed connection to use the LF-B10 anyway.
I then decided that I would hook up the LF-B10 to my sister’s cable box. That’s when I discovered that the LF-B10 had an Ethernet port, making use of the device pretty complicated; I’d have to run about 50′ of Ethernet cable from my home router to the LF-B10. Compounding the problem was the fact that her TV is used frequently.
(Background: The LF-B10 works by connecting directly to your cable box via a composite cable. From a remote computer, you can log in to the LF-B10 and view the device’s live video stream, and you can even change the channel on the cable box using the included IR adapter that affixes to the front of the cable box. Of course, if somebody should change the channel on the cable box while you’re accessing it remotely, you’re stuck watching what they switch to, unless you cruelly change the channel back :P).
So I determined that installing the LF-B10 on my sister’s cable box was a terrible idea, due to all the “traffic.” That’s when I decided to hook it up to my mom’s cable box, which is HARDLY used.
(She has a $1,000—at the time of purchase—Samsung LCD HDTV that she hardly uses, either, in the sense that 99% of her TV-watching is of SD broadcasts or DVDs. Sad, huh?)
Unfortunately, it would have taken a lot of Ethernet cabling to hook up the LF-B10 to the home router. That’s when I got the great idea to purchase an Ethernet to wireless adapter. The idea was quickly sunk, though, until I heard of the Fonera.
Now, I knew that DD-WRT capable routers could be used as wireless bridges (Ethernet to wireless adapters), but I wasn’t going to fork up ~ $50 for a Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL just for this ability. $15 and a bit (or so I thought) of elbow grease for the same functionality? Why not?
If only it were that simple…
(Part 2 to come later!)