Peter Kupfer's Blog

Moving my AT&T U-Verse Around: What I Learned

We are currently remodeling (really just painting) our office to turn it into IKup’s new “Big Boy” room and this necessitated that we move our AT&T U-Verse gateway (router) to a different location. We decided to move it to the living room next to the TV which had several benefits for us. First it allows us to hook up our blue ray player in the living room to the Internet for streaming of movies and Pandora, second it allowed us to put the network printer in the kitchen and receive a strong enough signal for it to work.

However, we were left with a problem. We decided during all of this to add a TV and blue ray player to the bedroom in the back of the house, but now the gateway that sends the TV signals is in the front of house, instead of in the next room like before. The new LG BD570 Network Blu-Ray Disc Player was going to be hooked up via WiFi, so that just left the TV. This seemed simple enough, the TV to the living room before this was running from the office to the living room via a coax cable in the basement, so I should just be able to run the TV back the opposite way to the bed room.

This was a fine idea, except what when I tried, recorded shows did not show up on the box in the bedroom. In the U-Verse system you have a DVR box where you can pause live TV and where all of your recorded shows are stored. This box can be attached to the gateway via coax with no problem since the recorded shows are stored on it. If you want to watch TV in other rooms you receive a Set Top Box (STB) from AT&T. You can watch live TV (but can’t pause) and recorded TV on the STB, but only (as I learned today) if you connecte the STB via an Ethernet cable (not the coax). This is actually pretty cool that the video signals run via Ethernet cable and not coax.

Additionally, I learned (I think) that you can only have the coax or the Ethernet cable hooked up to one of the U-Verse boxes, but not both. It seems to only be able to handle one link. I am not exactly sure if this is true, but it seems to be.

So, I had one 50′ cable I could run through the wall, across the basement, back up to the bedroom and to the STB. This was pretty easy because the coax was already in place and I just had to follow it backwards. Sadly, this cord was about 10′ short. At first I thought to try and use a router to fix the problem, but I didn’t really want to have to keep the router plugged in all the time. (Plus, when I tried it, it didn’t work.) So, I wanted to install a Cat 5 wall plate to basically just extend the cable. I headed to Home Depot to purchase said wall plate.

The front of the wall plate looks simple enough as shown below, but the back blew my mind!

This picture shows the finished product but there were eight wires on the back of the wall plate and the colors of the wall plate wires did not match the colors of the wires in the Cat 5 cable!?! And, GE didn’t supply any instructions!! So, thanks to Google, I found a tutorial at Servers Servers to explain all of the colors of the wires to connect. And even then, I had to follow a slightly different set of instructions down in the comments of that page because of my setup.

Once I had the wires connected to the wall plate, I plugged in the Ethernet cable to the new wall plate to the U-Verse STB and all was well. Hopefully this will help you find a way to fix any problem you are experiencing.

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Fixing my File Sharing with XP and Vista: A Thank You

Today I was trying to network between mine and my wife’s laptop. This was easy when we both had Windows XP. Now, she has Vista and I still have XP. I thought I had set up the networking properly, but alas, it wasn’t working. I enlisted the help of my good friend Google and found the blog of the Proud Geek. The Proud Geek had a great post about just this issue and after following the instructions, I was good to go.

What was tripping me up was what user to use on the sharing screen. I ended up setting the user to Everyone. This seems dangerous, but I have a WEP on my network so neighbors can’t get on and modify our files, so it was all good.

Thanks Proud Geek.

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Software Review — Font Creator — Edit and Create Fonts

After making my own font at yourfonts.com I decided to try out another program that the company has, FontCreator. FontCreator is a program created by High-Logic. The program is a very powerful font editing and creating software and its features can be found on these other sites: Genius Share, ilham-links.

What these two sites don’t do, is they don’t try out the program at all or see if it works. I chose to take the new font I made earlier and try to make it a little better. The original font has several unaligned characters and different sized character. I wanted to make them uniform and lined up nicely. Here is the font as it stood after I created it:

So, the capitals looked okay, but it looks like the lowercase g, m, q, r, & w need to be corrected. In Font Creator you are able to Continue Reading…

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Web App Wednesday — 18 March — ShareTabs

Today’s web app is a nice tool for sharing multiple links with others at the same time and can be found at http://www.sharetabs.com/. Here is a useful example: Say you were researching the applications of Twitter in an educational setting. You may have found several links you want to share with a colleague, but don’t want to send an e-mail (or a tweet) with all of those links. Enter ShareTabs.

To create a simple link you head over to the ShareTabs site and paste the links into the text box as shown below.

From here you simply Continue Reading…

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Web App Wednesday — Kwout

I am a big fan of screen shots when I am trying to explain a technology topic. This might range from reporting a bug to a website or typing up documentation for my students. When I am working offline I have been using MWSnap which is a free screen capture program that has some nice features above and beyond Window’s print screen.  While MWSnap works well, there a web application that is even better for taking screen shots of on-line content (like web sites). This web application is called Kwout and is located at http://kwout.com/. What sets Kwout apart from other screen capture programs is that when you capture a piece of a website the image you capture becomes an image map embedded with hotlinks from the original web site. Here is an example from Wikipedia of my favorite physicist. If you run your mouse over the hyperlinks in the picture, they are actual links to the actual url. Continue Reading…

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Web App Wednesday — Introduction

Following the Illnois Computer Eductors (ICE) Conference I learned about a lot of new and rising web applications that can be used for education or other purposes. In order to myself, and others, navigate through these resources, I am going to attempt to review one of these sites each week. In general I find this web applications fascinating, but I am always a little leary to use them because I fear that they will disappear tomorrow and all my work will be lost. However, even with that reservation, I still use them and love how many amazing free applications are out there for us to use.

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ICE Conference

Last week I attended the Illinois Computer Educator’s (ICE) Conference in St. Charles, IL. This is the second year I attended the conference. Last year, I went to a pre-conference workshop on how to use pivot tables in Excel, which was interesting, but this year I attended the actual conference. They are many sessions to choose from, and I chose to focus mostly on sessions about new web 2.0 tools (which aren’t all actually web 2.0) and how to implement them.

On a side note, I would like to define web 2.0. Web 2.0 technologies are technologies that utilize two-way information. Continue Reading…

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