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 Up the House — Changing the Landscape

Over the past few days, Gina and I have embarked on a quest to change the front of the house by updating the landscaping. The main tasks include:

• Replace Black Plastic Flower Bed Lining with Bricks
• Remove the Three Bushes and Tree from the Right front of the house
• Remove the rest of the red rocks from the flower beds
• Trim the bottom six feet of the tree to the left of the driveway

We started by pulling out the black plastic trim that used to sit in between the flower beds and the grass. The first half of the trim was still pretty well buried, so that took a little more work to get out, but it was pretty easy. While I did that, Gina started to dig a small trench for the bricks and started to put in the bricks.

While pulling out the second half of trim I started to also remove red rocks and place them into a garbage can. They end up being very heavy after a while. We found some little fire ants in the soil in front of the house and put down the insect killer where ever we saw the insects. We then added some bricks we picked up at Menards to the front of the flower bed.

Once the trench and the bricks were finished, I started to trim back the bushes so we can start to think about removing them. I had one little accident and I got a little careless and ended up cutting through the extension cord. Oops! The hedge trimmer I have was insufficient for the job and I think I will have to borrow a chain saw from someone.

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Good Thing #13 – Baby Proofing

Today I was able to get up the baby gate on top of the basement stairs and put latches on the kitchen cabinets.

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Taking the Long Way Home

I thinks today’s good thing is taking the long way home. We went to a pancake breakfast for the Grayslake Youth Baseball at the Grayslake Firehouse and after wards we walked the long way back to our car. This was nice because we were able to get a quote for Gina’s hair that she wants to have fixed up (the price of this would be a whole different post) and get some information from the heating people that work on our furnace. Neither of these were really pressing needs, but they were issues we had wanted to address and would not have remembered to otherwise.

This reminds me something my friend Alex said to me once. He told me that he was going to live hiss live to always say yes whenever he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do something or not. This is how he ended up taking ball room dancing lessons and ultimately falling in love. I don’t always live by this theory, but it seems to make sense.

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New Couch

I spent a lot of the day watching the Golden Girls to relive Estelle Getty’s humor. I didn’t know she was actually a year younger than Bea Arthur, crazy! That was a fun show, even though I wouldn’t think that I am an anywhere near their target demographic.

The new couch arrived today (at least part of it.) It has a chaise lounge on one end, a love seat in the middle, and it will have a “cuddler” on the other end. They didn’t have the correct configuration in stock, so the last piece will have to come later. Isaac insisted on sitting on it first. He look soooo small on it even though he is growing very fast. I actually just held him for a while tonight after he fell asleep because I didn’t want to put him down.

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House Projects…

The last week has been full of many exciting house projects.

First several shelves have been installed in the house. We purchased these floating shelves from Home Depot. They are nice and they look good because there is no extra visible hardware. We wanted black shelves (and we kind of thought we were buying black ones) but they ended up being espresso.We hung two in the living room and two in Isaac’s room.

I finally fixed the garage door. It was trying to go a little too far when it closes and would reopen. I change the range of the door and now it works.

I have been spraying the lawn with Spurge Power (a post emergent herbicide) in order to kill the clovers that are growing out there. It seems to slowly be working, so hopefully the clovers will be gone soon. They seemed to be taking over the yard.

Lastly, the most important project was adding a cat door to the back screen door. This is so that Belle can go in and out without Gina or I opening the door. I ended up installing it in a bad spot. I put it in a location to cover where Gina burned the screen door when we pulled up the asbestos tile, but I should have put it by the handle so that we could crack the glass door to let the cat in and out in the winter. Jenny Glinka trained her in how to use her door and we greatly appreciate it.

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