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fun with a DWL-800AP+
Wednesday, December 8 2004
Over in Redhook today I made my first practical use of the DWL-800AP+ (complete with the DWL-810AP+ firmware but not the fabled "power hack"). I used it to connect a computer in a remote building to the network in a church and its accompanying rectory a couple hundred feet away. In the past I'd always made such connections using physical wire, but this case would have required a particularly long span of ethernet which would have had to have been buried. My experiments with the DWL-800+ had proven its capabilities as a good long-range 802.11b device. In addition to its markedly better power and its ability to add a whole network wirelessly, a huge advantage of the DWL-800AP+ over a conventional wireless card or USB adapter is that it communicates via an ethernet wire, which has much greater range than something like a USB cable (or, for that matter, a PCI or PCMCIA interface). So when I found that the DWL-800AP+ wasn't perfectly reliable in the remote building, I simply created an ethernet cable long enough to reach to another outbuilding closer to the wireless access point and set it up to pick up the signal from there.
Today, by the way, was the first time I ever used an ethernet cable crimper to make my own cables. This might seem surprising given all the wire I've run in various houses, but in the past I've always just spliced (using soldered connections) the ends of an ethernet cable onto the ends of whatever cable I've run. I was surprised and delighted by how easy wire crimping was; it's going to make my future networking projects go much more quickly. I know I sound like an idiot to have just discovered this, but it brings up an important point that most people don't consciously realize: learning, particularly of the self-directed variety, isn't a smooth process. There are parts of our knowledge and experience that hang back, resistant to change, and when these break free they shudder everything around them, like a glacier violating the terms of its checkmate against a rock ledge.
Once I start painting, it's hard to stop. This evening I painted a picture of Lulu the cat based on a picture I took many months ago. This was sort of intended as another gift for Gretchen for the Chanukah season, but in the end we didn't even exchange any gifts.
these paintings are small, about 6 by 9 inches
The painting of Julius and Clarence, done mostly yesterday.
The painting of Lulu, done today. You can tell what a bitch she is in this picture.
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