Hi Thomas,
I drilled my own holes in the plate, then marked and drilled the holes in the
cover. You don't need very big bolts. I used #6 bolts (with washers on the cover
side) to fasten the two together. 3/4 inch long, IIRC.
Ah, OK. You changed the rules ;-) I've been trying to recall what the
wet location covers, etc. that *I've* used looked like (without actually
removing one from its mounts) and how you made use of that. :-/
I used blue, mainly because thats the only ones I could get at the time. (The
RJ-25s where almond/beige.) And they matched the cable I used (the jacket was
blue.
)
My other half wanted white. Until I pointed out how hard it would
be to look at two similar looking connectors (RJ11&45) and get the
"right one", without careful examination and thought about the
connector IN YOUR HAND. (I've been cherry picking red "patch cords"
and putting them in the laptop cases to drive home this issue)
Just a note: my preference is gray-jacketed cable for voice, blue for data.
Color-coding saves a lot of confusion, yes?
I ran (white) CAT3 for phone and (blue or grey) CAT5 for the network
stuff (that's what I had on hand). Or course, the RG6Q is obviously
recognizable (black and *thick*!).
I had thought about running two CAT5's to each drop (instead of a
CAT5 and a CAT3) to be even *more* "future safe". But, seeing that
the CAT3's would be terminated in an entirely different place
than the CAT5's (i.e., not suitable for adding a network switch
near the punchdown panels at a later date), it seemed best to just
live with the three different cable types.
The wife and I discussed at one point that if we ever built a house, we would
not run coax everywhere.
Coax as in "CATV".
Instead, we would set up a low-end-ish tower with four
video capture cards in it and enough hard drive capacity for about 200 hours of
recording, install openSUSE on it (the hardware requirements for openSUSE are
minimal), then set it up as as a video recorder. Attached to the capture cards
were to be standard, non-DVR satellite receivers (DirecTV or Dish, whichever was
to best value) set up so the PC could control them.
Since we would pretty much have a PC where we wanted to watch "TV", including
the living room, this would not be a problem. Since we also rip our CDs and DVDs
to my computer (it has the HDD capacity), setting up a media server made sense.
With the satellite receivers connected to the "video capture" tower, which would
have been set up to allow us to transfer those recordings we wanted to keep long
term to the media server, we effectively would have created our own four-channel
This is exactly what I've been doing. Though extending it to encompas
audio and automation, as well.
I got tired of all the little piles of "consumer kit" cluttering up
the house. DVD player, "stereo" amplifier, CD player, TV tuner, TV,
speakers, etc. in each bedroom, family room, living room, etc. (Gee,
what if I want to sit outside and watch TV? Weather is always
"fine"...)
So, I ran CAT5 *everywhere* when we were remodeling (e.g., there are
four separate drops in the living room alone -- so the TV can sit in
any corner, etc.). But, I got nervous about NOT having phone and
CATV in those places: what happens when you sell the house and the
new owners aren't as "tech savvy"? ("Martha, where do we plug in the
PHONE?? And where is the cable TV connection???!").
"Wire is cheap" so I ran one of everything (if you don't need/use it,
replace the wall plate with "whatever" is appropriate and push the
wire back into the wall cavity). There are drops that feed speakers
mounted in the ceiling for background music, audio announcements
("Someone is at the front door"), etc.
I also ran CAT5 drops to the four corners of the house (think: PTZ IP
cameras), front porch (so you can see who is at the door!), etc.
And, additional specific drops for other "special needs" (e.g., to
the irrigation system controller, HVAC controller, etc.). There are
drops for bluetooth modules scattered around the house/property to
allow roaming devices to be "located" (I.e., I can wear a BT earpiece
or use a BT enabled PDA or cell phone to "talk" to the house as well
as having it figure out where I am: "Ah, he wants to watch _Buckaroo
Banzai_ in the *family* room..." -- location-aware computing)
Toys for retirement! :>
(actually, there are several different technologies involved that
I am exploring or developing for clients... being a guinea pig is
a great test platform!)
DVR. (If you have a satellite-provider provided DVR receiver and forget to pay
the bill you won't be able to watch any recorded material once your service is
cut off. The DVR functions are disabled along with the regular view-only
function. I suspect cable equipment works the same, yes?)
I think there are some older Tivo's that will work even after the
subscription has expired ("disabled"). I am thinking of one sitting
in a friend's shop... I will have to examine it and see, for sure.
But, MythTV or any of the commercial DVR software packages (usually
come with "camera cards") would also work (dubious quality). Content
providers don't want you having (legitimate!) copies of content.
They'd rather have you pay for *each* viewing of that content!
I've been accumulating (ahem) "broken" DTV STBs with an eye towards
a poor man's multichannel OTA DVR. The tuner is the tough part.
Once you've got the signal off the airwaves, the rest is just busy
work.
One that many folks share ;-)
And I agree with you on the utilities being stuck in the last century.
<shrug> No pressure on them to change.
