More Ethernet over Power

Since the first pair of TP Link Powerlink adapters had proved successful I decided to add a third to feed the new kitchen PC (more of that later).

I picked up another single adapter from Amazon and it arrived quickly and set up was an absolute breeze.  Just plug the adapter into a vacant 3 pin socket, plug in the supplied ethernet cable and push the sync button for a couple of seconds on the new adapter and do the same for one of the existing ones.  Hey presto all works.

It's still not as fast as full blown ethernet but it has improved the video streaming quality and reliability significantly - plus it's much easier to chuck files around the network.

Darling Buds Car Show 2012

Pop Larkin's 1926 Rolls Royce

We visited Buss Farm for the 2012 Darling Buds Classic Car Show today and, despite the weather's best efforts, had a good day out.  Here are a few more photos to give a flavour of the event:

Kent Air Ambulance

The Mainframe Computer (in the barn)

Military Vehicles

GMC CCKW

M35 Deuce and a half

Hot Rods

Some Earlier Classic Cars

 Riley Kestrel

 Ford Model A

 MG TD

Some Jaguars

XK140

E Type (Series 3)

Mark 2

Land Rovers

Some Minis

MGs

 Midget

 MGA

MGC GT

Triumphs

 Vitesse

TR6

GT5 Mark 2

Some Sporty Fords

 Escort RS2000

 Sierra XR4i

 

Capri 3.0S

Plus a couple of Lotus Cortinas

More Modern Classics

 Fire up the Quattro!

VW Golf GTi (Hairdresser's Special?)

And Some Bikes

Dredd

As a fan of the character here's hoping this will be good when it's released in September...

Jolicloud

Way back in 2008 I picked up an Asus Eee PC as an experiment and had some fun messing about with it; however, it came a poor second as a usable device once the iPad came along.  My other half has been using it ever since as her around the house web browsing device.

Unfortunately the netbook has been getting slower and slower, so I decided to try installing a new lighter OS on it to see how it would fare.

After some research I chose Jolicloud as it seemed to have the least hassle install and the features we needed.  I downloaded the ISO and created a bootable SD card from it and then tried that on the Eee PC.  All the hardware (microphone, sound, webcam etc.) seemed to work straight out of the box and so I installed it on the internal drive but alongside the original Xandros.

So far everything seems to be working pretty well and the machine is fairly zippy.  I'll provide some updates once we have tried it out for a while in real life conditions.

Ethernet over Power

For some reason I can't manage to pin down my wifi router will not operate at 802.11n - it always finds some reason to drop down to b/g instead.  This makes moving big files around a really slow process.

Not having ethernet cabling in our new house means I had one of four choices: (1) put up with slow wifi (frustrating but cheap), (2) buy a new wifi router (more expense and not guaranteed to fix the problem), (3) install ethernet cabling (not very straightforward and so probably rather expensive), or (4) try ethernet over my mains cabling.

I plumped for option (4) and picked up a set of TP-Link powerline adapters from Amazon.

They arrived today, came with a couple of short but useful ethernet cables and were an absolute breeze to set up.  Obviously they're not as fast as proper ethernet but it's a significant improvement in both speed and reliability.