For the past couple of days my office has been blissfully, almost eerily silent. Silent like I’ve not heard in several years. It’s enough to make me want some kind of background sounds, which is something that I’ve never wanted previously.
This newfound silence has been brought about by a combination of things. It cool enough outside that the door is closed. The mighty Fujitsu Halycon air conditioner is taking a much needed break. Today, it’s not so cool that I need a heater.
Most significantly, I’ve turned off the 24-port Netgear switch that serves as our network core. The other day I swapped an older 10/100 switch into service so I could clean out the old Netgear unit. Racked and untouched for along while, it was terribly dusty inside & out.
This old Netgear GS524T has two built-in 40mm fans. They’ve been making noise forever. It’s been getting steadily worse. The 10/00 switch that I have as backup is fanless, so the familiar whine of the wee fans has been silenced for now.
Just now, staring at the approaching holidays, I don’t really want to spend on a new & much better switch, so I think I will replace the fans in the old one. It’s a $20-30 project. I’m told that folks do this routinely in the case of Ubiquiti switches. They replace the noisy stock fans with quieter fans from Noctua.
From 3am this morning our home network has been offline. This was expected. Comcast, our primary access provider, was quite good about notifying us of a planned fiber upgrade. The process has been taking areas of the neighborhood offline briefly…
Occasionally something crosses my path that looks like a fun toy. I find myself wishing I had a project to justify the purchase. Such is the case with the Ubiquiti LBE-5AC-GEN2-US LiteBeam Wireless Bridge.
A pair of these devices form a long-range wireless bridge operating in unlicensed spectrum. It fits right in with our existing Unifi Cloud Key and AC Pro Wi-Fi APs. Best of all, at under $70 per end, it’s really affordable.
Ideally, I’d use a pair of these radios to gain access to the Tachus fiber internet service that runs up Harvard Ave. That’s 1.43 miles (2.29 km) due west of our home. The Ubiquiti setup tool shows that we could achieve 250 Mbps over that link.
Power-over-Ethernet is for more than IP phones, Wi-Fi access points and surveillance cameras. It can be used anywhere there’s a low-power device that would benefit from continuous power and the reliability of Ethernet connectivity. Assuming your network switch (or POE injector) is connected to a UPS, POE allows the attached devices to remain powered in the event of a power failure.
In my home and office, I use POE to connect and power a number of Raspberry Pi single-board computers configured as music players. The RPi3 B+ isn’t natively POE capable, so I use a POE splitter like the one pictured here.
Another option would be to use a POE HAT installed right in the RPi. However, a POE HAT cannot be used along with another HAT, like the Hi-Fi Berry audio interfaces that I use for music playback.
Now and then I discover a product that inspires my imagination. I’ve long dreamt of very sophisticated, whole house audio. In fact, whole property would be a better characterization. The ability to put any sounds I like anywhere. Not to…
