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Re-patched the office connection because a third of the RJ45s here have the second and third pairs swapped. Dafuq… I wish someone could explain that to me.

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And, look ma no wires! ($15 remote inside box above light switch in lobby)

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The ramp up to the parking deck. Metal box in back on left is where all the telco connections and Interwebz come in.

I’m hoping we sell the place before I have to pay for hidden cable runs.

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Now there are some fun options, but all are gonna take some work. That's our office dead ahead.

It pains us that the parking bar installer ran that BX-like shit for the power he needed to the box up on the right that hosts the driveway safety sensors. Though that probably gives you a hint about what a headache it would have been to fish wires behind that wall.

(law here requires annoying noise and flashy lights every time a vehicle goes in and out)

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Rectaltronics said:
Re-patched the office connection because a third of the RJ45s here have the second and third pairs swapped. Dafuq… I wish someone could explain that to me.

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Looks like old phone wiring- perhaps could be a knob-head installer or somebody moved the lines around so the desk phones would be more convenient.
 
Rectaltronics said:
Thanks!


I like how you think. :deal

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I've always loved gadgetry, it's fascinating to male something that performs a different but more purposeful task out of something that is capable but wasn't designed to do what you've decided to modify it to do. You did that with the gate system. When I was in middle school my older sister used to be on the 4 party home phone line a lot and I was curious what the hell she was talking about all the time. So I took an old transistor AM radio apart, found the amplifier section of the board (it was really easy to identify then, today it would just be one of many chips) and separated it from the tuner, then mounted the speaker from the radio in a cigar box along with the amp board and a headphone jack connected to the input of the amp portion of the board. I had my Dad take me to Radio Shack and I bought a suction-cup "phone listening device", plugged it into the input jack and stuck it on the side of the phone base while she was stretching out the 20 foot cord on our house phone and listened in on her stupid conversations.
 
gpounce said:
Looks like old phone wiring- perhaps could be a knob-head installer or somebody moved the lines around so the desk phones would be more convenient.
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So... the wiring here is by US standards maybe a bit odd. They used Cat5e (fourteen or fifteen years ago now) for both the Ethernet runs and for the phone wiring in this building. Which is smart. AND, (but?) all the jacks are RJ45s. Got a phone? Then you plug the RJ11 cord into the RJ45 jack! :lol2 Seriously. Bizarre but it does work as long as you push it in far enough.

I don't think we've ever had a tenant with more than two lines. In fact we were the only ones with even as many as two lines. Now it's one Korean POTS line plus one Magicjack so we can have a US number while in Korea.

We have seven apartments here and this issue affects multiple jacks across multiple apartments including one jack (at least? who knows...) in our own apartment. So I'm thinking there were two installers and one was a knob-head and the other was not. I can't think of any rationale to have some jacks wired with the exact same two pairs switched. And you'd think with the color coding on the jacks it would be tougher to fuck up...

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Idiot installers are always likely OTOH old-school cat3 installs could mix phone and ethernet in the same jack- old 10baseT stuff- that would be late 80's early 90's. The color coding suggests an intentional swap. Maybe to accomodate a single-line phone to a multi-line jack. It really looks like old analog telecom stuff.
 
gpounce said:
Idiot installers are always likely OTOH old-school cat3 installs could mix phone and ethernet in the same jack- old 10baseT stuff- that would be late 80's early 90's. The color coding suggests an intentional swap. Maybe to accomodate a single-line phone to a multi-line jack. It really looks like old analog telecom stuff.
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Hmmm. This was around '08 or '09. Interesting. I know around that time it was still challenging to find installers who understood both analog and digital basics. Thanks for chiming in. PS, buy an RJ45 here today, it looks the same. Zero change.
 
So much of my creativity nowadays winds up being kind of modular I guess.

I wrote a page about how I got rid of one silly contraption I made for automating things here with WiFi.


In my defense, when I bought the Wemo, smart outlets were not a thing in Korea. Or maybe my Coupang-fu was just not worthy. And, I didn't have the sense to check Amazon's German site. Dammit. But as long as Wemo's servers weren't "down for maintenance" it was good enough for gubmit work.

ETA: Siri/Alexa integration with IoT stuff is way cool but they need to integrate it with location sharing so we don't need three different phrases to unlock or open doors in three separate places.

Have fun everyone!

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Thank you.
So far, what you see is pretty much the extent of displaying them, except in and around my home.
I need to start selling some, but I’m not sure I want to discover just how little my time is worth! There are WAY too many hours spent on some of these.
 
It's a sickness, marveling at the bike with the nitrous bottle and realizing the valve is controlled by nothing more than a leaf switch riding a cam attached to the end of the shaft that operates the carburetor's butterflies. Ingenious.

Then staring at the control boxes for stuff like our access controls and thinking for hours hey what can I do with those terminals.

But more practical stuff awaits.

Thanks all! More soon...
 
fatherwes said:
Just a couple of my favourites.
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Dude, I love these. The bus grill is super cool. Love the spoon band 😁 The animals are look great, too. Love how you worked the edges of the sting rays. Really see that graceful motion they have when moving. Very cool ideas, man. Thanks for sharing these.
 
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