Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to get an outside wireless access point set up at the house. Earlier this year Jen bought a BirdBuddy and struggled to get it to connect quickly or reliably; we get great reception and all rooms of the house from one router, but because our house is covered in thick sheets of Eisenhower-era aluminum siding, the effect is that of a Faraday cage: wireless signal doesn’t penetrate the outside of the house easily. I’ve done a couple of experiments with various off the shelf plugin repeaters but none of them are able to extend the signal past the back door, so I decided I was going to have to get serious and buy an outside unit. In order to make this work, I knew I was going to have to employ what is called power over ethernet, where the network signal and power both run on the same wire. This avoids having to run an extension cord outside, installation of an outside electrical box, or other dumb/expensive solutions.

Thus began a tumble down the rabbit hole of trying to find something that worked. The first one I bought was the same brand as our TP-Link router. But it came with a special name, which basically meant it was a commercial level unit which required the installation of a special app on my phone and all sorts of other nonsense to get it to work. I have an aversion to installing random janky security nightmare apps just to accomplish what should be a simple web-based task, so that unit got packaged back up and returned.

The next one I tried was another name brand, which got a bunch of good ratings online. I unboxed it, set the whole thing up, and found that the little power over ethernet injector that came with it was dead. So I had Amazon ship me a $10 injector, and when I plugged that in, I found that the repeater was still dead. This was really getting frustrating. I boxed that one up, returned it, and found a third unit with one of those word-jumble Amazon names that actually wound up being cheaper than the first two. While I wasn’t as impressed with the weather resistance of its design, I did a test run inside the house and was pleased to see that it powered right up. I mounted it outside under the porch and configured it via its built-in web interface, which is As Things Should Be.

Then can the next step: getting Jen’s BirdBuddy to see it and work with it. In order to change the network access point on the camera, you basically have to reset the whole thing. I also found out that it does not like 5GHz frequency, so I had to shut that down on the router. After doing that and connecting it to the new access point, we found that nothing had changed: the network indicator still spun and spun when we requested a livestream. I’m thinking that there may be something wrong with the BirdBuddy itself, but I will say it is nice to finally have the outside access point. It’s within line of sight of the garage, which means I don’t have to walk back into the house to load a website. More research on the BirdBuddy is required.

In the living room, I’ve been assembling a simple entertainment center based around an old Denon head unit and turntable I’ve had kicking around. We took the old IKEA cabinet from my rowhome in Canton and put some new legs on it, which raised it up off the floor and gave it a more mid-century modern feel to fit in with the rest of our furniture. I hooked up a pair of bookshelf speakers I scored at a yard sale and one of dad’s old subwoofers underneath to get good sound. The turntable is a really nice Technics unit from the mildew house we went through years ago, and I splurged on a new needle for it. After doing a test spin, I found that the signal going to the head was super weak. It turned out the Denon did not have a photograph preamp, so I had to pick one of those up from the jungle site. Once that was in, I spun a copy of Steely Dan’s Aja, and it sounds really good. Next, I had to find a DC power unit for dad’s circa 1993 portable Kenwood CD player. I was able to find one in the pile of orphan power units at work and got that hooked up. Then I put a separate cable in for an iPod, and with that, we’ve got a working functional sound system in the living room.

Last week I drove north to go look at some inexpensive Insta360 cameras, which were being sold for $10/ea via Marketplace. These were first-gen units which happen to be extremely small, with the drawback being a short recording time: 30 seconds at regular speed, or up until the internal 8GB card filled on timelapse. They were cheap, so I bought four, and charged them up when I got home. Getting them to mount to my laptop took some doing; I had to reformat their internal drives and do a firmware update, and was able to get them to connect reliably. After doing some trickery I was able to install an older version of the Insta360 app on my old iPhone 6, but couldn’t get the cameras to sync with the phone, so there’s no way to update things like their internal clocks, default recording modes, or other settings. Thankfully though, they do record and hold a battery charge, and I was able to do some recording with them, then use the Insta360 app on my laptop to edit and export decent-quality video. They’ll be good for short recordings or time-lapse shots hanging off the back of the truck, and if they fall off I won’t be too upset.