{"id":257,"date":"2005-04-16T12:55:57","date_gmt":"2005-04-16T20:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/12\/how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-vi\/"},"modified":"2005-04-16T12:56:25","modified_gmt":"2005-04-16T20:56:25","slug":"how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-vi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/16\/how-i-killed-my-answering-machine-part-vi\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Killed My Answering Machine: Part VI"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the sixth of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how complicated.<\/em><\/p>\n

Part VI: Ethernot<\/strong><\/p>\n

My TurboNet card still wasn’t working. I got to know all the various log files on the TiVo drive, looking for anything that would indicate what was wrong. Again trying to eliminate some pieces, I brought the TiVo into the study and connected it directly into my router. Ding! The light came on for TurboNet and things looked happy. I set the TiVo’s phone number to “,#401” which caused it to “dial-up” over the ethernet connection and the update completed. It was fast too. <\/p>\n

This seemed to indicate that the wireless bridge I bought was the problem. I looked closer at the specs for the TurboNet and the wireless bridge and I thought I figured out why. The bridge was 10 base-T ethernet only and the TurboNet was well, turbo: 100 base-T according to its web page. Aha!<\/p>\n

I posted a message on the support board about my discovery<\/a>. Realizing that my wireless bridge wasn’t going to work, I decided to buy another one. I could always sell the bridge at work. <\/p>\n

Since I knew my Linksys WRT54G router worked fine, I made one last trip to Fry’s to get another one, which can be set up to work as a bridge. It would also be faster and if I got more devices that needed networking in the living room, it would be easier to plug them in as well. <\/p>\n

I went and grabbed a router but it wasn’t the same price as before. It was $10 more. The guy at the desk said that I could get the rebate at the counter, but when I went there they said there wasn’t one. Knowing I could get it on Amazon for cheaper, I left, ending my streak of positive Fry’s experiences. I went home and ordered it from Amazon. The trip wasn’t completely unproductive; I did place a cache<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Soon after I got a response to my question on the SiliconDust forum. The TurboNet was 10 AND 100 BaseT, so it should have worked with bridge. He said I might want to try a crossover cable. Of course I thought this suggestion was silly. I was using the cable that came with the bridge. Why wouldn’t they give you a crossover cable if that’s what you needed? And it worked with my laptop, so that couldn’t be it. <\/p>\n

That was it. The guy on the forum said that my laptop probably had an auto-sensing ethernet card, which means it didn’t need a crossover cable; it would detect if the wires were crossed and cross them over internally. I went back to my big bag of cables and pulled out a crossover cable. The green light came on. It worked. I’m a dope.<\/p>\n

Next, Part VII: The Damage<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the sixth of seven parts of the story of how I killed my answering machine. How complicated can it be to replace a simple little device with something a little more geeky? About 17 months, $500 and countless hours – that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how complicated. Part VI: Ethernot My TurboNet card still wasn’t working. I …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘How I Killed My Answering Machine: Part VI’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boulter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}