Sadly, my project wasn't quite as magical as that sounds. A better title probably would be, "running wires without drilling MORE holes."

I'm currently living in a rented house. As with most (all?) rented houses, I can't run around drilling holes wherever I feel like it. I also can't fix anything I see that's broken, which is very strange to me. It's practically a reflex for me to fix broken things I encounter. Unfortunately, this house isn't wired with ethernet cables, and we want wired ethernet in two places. We tried to mess around with ethernet over coax cable a little (something called MoCA) since we had an extra cable modem, but it didn't work out. Here's what I wound up doing.

The house is already wired with coax cables, and it's possible to get to where those wires are run. Fortunately for me, every place the coax cable went through the wall or floor, the hole was oversized. It wasn't enough to push an ethernet cable through, let alone it's plug.

The first trick is to disassemble the ethernet cable instead of the house. I already have an ethernet cable that's pretty hacky, a while back I spliced two really long cables together. I'm sure I've introduced a huge amount of noise into signals going through that cable, but so far I haven't noticed any significant loss of bandwidth or increase in latency.

To get the cable through the hole the coax cable was already in, first I cut one end of my ethernet cable and stripped the insulation (outer plastic shell) off. How much insulation is up to you. Ideally, you should only strip off enough to get the wire through the wall and solder the end you cut off back on immediately after the wires come through the wall. The other side of the floor I was going through was the ceiling of our garage, and I didn't feel like doing mid air soldering that high above my head. I stripped off enough of the wire's insulation to reach the plug I was aiming for, since I was lazy.

The second trick is to use the coax cable (or whatever cable is already there) to help run your new unbundled ethernet cable. I discovered there was enough slack in the coax cable that I could use it to run wires. To test, I made a small sharpie mark on the wire and pulled it through from the other side until I saw the mark. Once I was sure it had enough slack, I taped the unbundled ethernet cables to the coax cable with scotch tape. What kind of tape probably doesn't matter, as long as it holds. I imagine something like electrical tape or duct tape might get stuck inside the hole and make running the wires more difficult. Once the ethernet wires were securely attached to the coax cable in a pattern that fit through the hole, I just pulled the coax cable through. When doing this, I suggest you have one person guiding the ethernet wires in from one side while someone pulls from the other side. I almost lost a couple wires inside the floor when some tape ripped off.

One thing to be very careful about when stripping wires. There's a good chance you'll nick the insulation of the inside wires, I did in a few places. It's probably a good idea to inspect the entire length of the wire as you run it and once you're done, and you should cover any nicks with electrical tape, hot glue, or ideally, heat shrink tube.

While running the wire around other parts of your house, there are other tricks you can use while avoiding drilling holes. Zip ties are great, if you're running along other wires like I was you can just zip tie your new wires to the others. You can also open old zip ties using anything pointy enough (lift the tab that prevents you from pulling it open), and if you're feeling daring you take take out existing mounting screws, rearrange things, and put them back. Personally, I avoided that since running screws in and out would have damaged the holes.

Anyway, this project has a happy and successful ending. A couple hours after I started, I switched my desktop over from a cheap wireless USB adapter to wired internet. It's been running great since than, no hiccups.

I'm currently an undergrad. Being an undergrad, I live in a dorm. Which means my computer is a little exposed, and as can probably be expected will occasionally get pranked. Fortunately for me, it almost never happens anymore since people realized it actually bothered me. Even before they did, it was mainly just people changing my desktop background.

Regardless, I've partly solved the problem of forgetting to lock my computer and someone wondering in to mess with it. I just designed a program which takes a picture when it sees keystrokes after a ten minute break of no input. It's pretty simple, I based it off a keylogger I found online. I used the keylogger to learn how to interface with X and recognize keystrokes. I threw out everything that actually examined what the keystrokes were, and just kept that parts that returned when any sort of keystroke event happened. I put in a last_time variable that remembered the time of the last keystroke. Figuring out how long between keystrokes was as simple as comparing the current time immediately after a keystroke to the last time of a keystroke. If it's over a threshold (currently set to ten minutes), it takes a picture.

The general idea is that I'll notice if someone messes with my computer. When I do, I can look up who it was by browsing a log of images of people who typed at my computer. It seems to be working on my laptop, but I was only testing with a three second delay. I'm pretty sure it'll keep working reliably, but I imagine I could be misusing the X libraries somehow and causing a memory leak. I'll probably have to leave it running for a week or so before I trust it.

Maybe I'll find or make some face recognition software that'll try to guess if the user is someone other than me and notify me if it thinks someone else is using my computer.

That'd be a lot of fun. Especially if I can get text to speech working well remotely...

https://github.com/AlexWillisson/gotcha

Oh also, for everyone interested in my emacs video tutorials: I haven't forgotten them, I'm hoping to make the next one soon. I'm currently on spring break, so I might record it soon. I'm also starting to consider taking the summer off if I don't get a job I'm thrilled about, in which case I definitely should have time.

A few weeks ago, my dad mentioned he'd gotten a book rebound at a local store. He's had them cut the original binding off and put it on some sort of ringed binding so it'd stay open better.

I'm not sure how, but I'd never even considered that as possible before. I've had many books (especially whenever I try to learn piano) that refuse to stay open and are a massive pain to deal with. Recently, I've been reading Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition. It comes awkwardly bound, along the long edge so you have to hold the book with the binding horizontal. It's also pretty big, so it's hard to deal with. To top it all off, to really understand it you have to switch between the commentary and the actual sourcecode every few lines.

After learning about how book rebinding is possible, I decided to see if I could get my copy of the Lions' Commentary bound in a more convenient way.

I've been pitching Code Hero to people around me since I ran across it on Kickstarter, but I hadn't been very confident that it would get funded.

They did it! They posted about half an hour ago when they broke $116k (with the original goal as $100k), and they're at about $119.5k now. If they reach $200k, they'll add multiplayer.

I really think they deserve getting enough funding to do Code Hero well, it's a great idea. Even if it doesn't go very far, it helps push the idea of games teaching coding. Backers get access to a private beta among other rewards, so even if they don't get to $200k you get some kickback for helping fund them. Their kickstarter ends in 37 hours (so a little after Friday 12:01am EST), so if you're thinking about funding them now's the time!

Kickstarter

Their announcement video from when they reached their goal follows the break

Here's a couple kickstarter projects I ran across yesterday, both are worth checking out. Code Hero could use a lot more help, they haven't been getting much funding and look like they deserve it.

Code Hero is a game designed to teach people how to make program. They describe it as a cross between Portal and Minecraft, and the videos I've seen of it look interesting. Basically, you write javascript and "shoot" it. It executes when it hits something. Kickstarter

Double Fine Adventure is a classic point and click adventure game by Double Fine Productions. They're a really cool studio that has made other great games, such as Psychonauts, which, if you've never played, you should get it and try it out right now. It's a lot of fun.

Double Fine Adventure got completely funded in a little over eight hours and is almost at 400% funding now. It doesn't need funding anywhere near as much as Code Hero does, but I figured I'd mention it anyway since it looks like it'll be a lot of fun. As well as making the game without a producer (they decided to try Kickstarter funding instead, and it looks like it's working well), they're also making a documentary of the creation of the game and taking fan input from people who helped fund them.

Videos follow the break