And Winter Has Arrived.

It is a delightful 23° or so outside this afternoon, there isn't a cloud in the sky but the wind out of the south west has that wintry feel about it.  So the cooler weather has now arrived with these being typical autumn conditions.  The 13° overnight means the quilt is in use on the bed.

It will need to get a little cooler and then we will press the doona into action.  You can tell the nights are getting cooler as the pool has dropped sharply to around 17°.

The Ethernet over Powerline (EoP) unit I bought and was using, though it served its purpose, it wasn't a strong and continuous connection.  It was usually fine for regular movie and TV Show watching but when I wanted to move a big file to the Nvidia Shield, invariably it dropped out a little after copying over around 200mb.  I would get a pop up on screen telling me the transfer had stopped and to check the network connection.

A few times a movie we were watching from a file on the Seagate Cloud drive would just stop and freeze as if the connection had been lost.  Then around 20 seconds later it would begin to work again and we would continue our watching.

I did some research on the TP-Link EoP and discovered a small utility program on the TP-Link website that enabled me to set it up a little better.  The fastest transfer speed via EoP was a round 4MBps, 5GHz wireless gave me 12MBps and ordinary 2.4GHz gave me around 2MBps.  After the 'tune-up' there wasn't any freezing of movies or TV Shows, it all worked perfectly again.

It's not that far from the modem router to the Nvidia Shield but there is a wall in the way.

Well, not any more!  The photo above shows one of the two new Brush Wall Plates I installed today costing around $8 each from Bunnings.  I now have a direct connection  from the router in the Computer Room to the Nvidia Shield in the lounge.  It took around an hour or so to cut the 2 sets of holes in the wall and to fit the 2 brush plates.

Cutting the holes was the most difficult as I had to move the computer table and ALL the wires and power leads attaching stuff so I could get to the wall.  The lounge room was a little easier!

I watched a YouTube Video beforehand which showed how to do it and almost everything went to plan.

There was nothing in the YouTube video about the sheet of 3 play wood just behind the plaster in the computer room!.  But my trusty drill and a pruning saw saw me get through that OK.  I now have come to expect that not everything will go smoothly to plan and that there will be some hiccup along the way.

After setting it all up I transferred a 2GB file from my PC to the Nvidia Shield very quickly indeed.

So with everything back in place I switched stuff back again and everything worked ..... except we had limited internet connection!

It appeared that in moving the computer table and all the wires something had happened to the wires connecting the ADSL from the wall plug to the modem router.  I replaced the line filter and the telephone lead and now things are working pretty well again.

As I said earlier, things very rarely go perfectly to plan!

And keep your eyes on Gum Tree for a hardly used 1 month old TP-Link EoP setup at a good price.