[Richard]

I was very glad to hear that the operation went ahead OK and that it appears to have been successful. I do not know how soon the hospital get patients up and about after that operation. It used to be weeks but I have heard that in some places and cases it is even the same day.

I am glad that you had your connections issue to keep you occupied and that you feel you have reached the right conclusion about what to connect and how it should be done. What amazes me is that however hard one tries to adopt a nice orderly set of cable layouts, the following day they are like a bunch of randy snakes all trying to get together with each other. It takes hours to sort them out yet will repeat until you give up trying. Those cable wraps can be useful and really do help until a wire becomes unplugged or, the real horror you need to make a change when the wires seek their revenge for being ordered.

I hope this evening’s visit goes well.

[Richard]

Those flavoured brews of different types are very much a personal taste thing. I have been pressured to try, but my tastes  have not shifted at all. There is a tiny case to be made for some fruit flavour drinks, but the rest are less attractive than tap water for me. I stressed the ‘for me’ because I totally accept that tastes are a very personal issue.

My daughter has decided to go vegan so another nightmare. The results are an increasing flow of dishes, ‘slop’ I am happy to decline. For me they trade the flavours of the main ingredients for some unpleasant ‘seasoning’. I would prefer raw vegetables, (where practical – not with such as potatoes) to those prepared concoctions. It causes some strains…

[Richard]

I try to use skimmed milk 50/50 with water in my tea. I need a large volume of fluid to control other issues so use 400ml mugs of weak brew. Tea with breakfast probably sees me close to 1.5 litres already. Evenings are my nemesis. I avoided alcohol last night due to a possible conflict with tablets, but I nibbled more nuts than I wanted. I must do better tonight

[Richard]

I would worry less about the tea and more about the sugar. I stopped the sugar a long time ago but a pale tea, not too much skimmed milk has very little impact on weight but a great effect on how full you feel. The real impact for me is the frequent times when I feel put down by all that goes wrong on every front, so come the evening when I can all too easily swap the tea for something stronger, then the urge to snack can be the real killer. The Christmas period saw several pound slide back on, well six to be accurate. This was not festive eating and entertaining, but being limited on what I could do and having a number of challenges on various family fronts. The evenings became a disturbing depressing and painful time. with the impact on my resolve. Maybe the effort of pushing them back into their boxes will help me.

Changing you life style’s relationship with food is the key to weight management and usually this is the hardest battle. It takes weeks of resolve and is best seen as a process rather than a sudden step change. Stick with a well thought out plan, identify the challenges and try to work round them.

[Richard]

Yes, it now feels well constructed and cohesive and above all natural to use.

(Though it took me a while to spot the <Contact> button, it was just not quite where I was looking, – silly me.)

[Richard]

I did some research and while not conclusive a number of clear potential issues emerged with different causes. I know that they run their own protocol(s) which is/are quite independent of TCP IP. They should not be cross over between the two and yes this imposes both overheads and demands on the carrying structure.

1) Buildings served by more than one phase will almost certainly run into issues at some point for at least two possible reasons. While this is rare in the UK it could happen and certainly does in some other countries. (I know that the UK has rules about socket separation in such cases, but I do not want to go there.)

1.1) Home Plug will not normally work across phases unless very special arrangements are built into the specific installation to bridge the low level transport between the two or three phases in question. The problem is really almost defined by the name, Home Plug. Three phase is normally intended for industrial installations, Home Plug for home use on a single phase.

1.2) High capacity devices demanding considerable power may also produce a ‘noisy’ mains this may blind the likes of Home Plug or cause severe distortions to the protocol rending them unusable without special considerations.

2) Installations where noisy electrical equipment is also operated. This refers to domestic type installations such as homes where the likes of tumble driers, fridges and other electrically noisy devices can range from elderly electric drills, vacuum cleaners and right across the spectrum of dodgy devices all have been known to cause intermittent troubles.. It can also apply where industrial users are co-located such as with flats over such properties or where other noisy devices may be operated in close proximity. Welders were always considered a potential cause of troubles for less tolerant devices.

3) Some manufactures have tried to mitigate some of these effects by not using the Live/Line connection but instead using the neutral and earth. Of course if the earth is noisy or even worse if the earth is noisy or degraded, (a broken or missing earth continuity counts as severely degraded) then results may be poor. (Other effects might also be encountered and having the coroner and undertaker on speed dial for someone could be wise.) Real world studies have shown improvement in Home Plug style devices from using such ‘modified’ kit. Other issues are less easily controlled.

4) At one time, dimmers, some types of fluorescent installations, especially when operating in sub optimal ways  and even some LEDs were a source of considerable electrical noise and as such could swamp the private protocol used by Home plug devices. In severe cases they can and did swamp other devices such as radio, TV, etc. as well.

5) Bad electrical installations in general where neglect, original poor installation, doubtful modifications or degradation of the set up can all limit, degrade, or make operation unreliable. No one is still using the likes of double cotton covered rubber insulated wiring are they? Overhead distribution subject to damp or noise pick up could also be an issue in some cases, though the damp discharge noise might be filtered out via the local distribution transformer(s).

6) Some types of filtering device, e.g. UPS, surge protectors, isolating transformers and even some trip devices have been suggested as possible hazards for the likes of Home Plugs. In most cases remaining on one side of the device might ease  potential issues and in any case they would normally be ‘hard’ issues and more easily investigated than intermittent issues.

As a general rule I suspect that anything more than an occasional reset suggests the presence of undesirable influences within the system and it would be wise to professionally investigate the issue(s).

[Richard]

I can understand and take on board your point about a hard restart often clearing many IT woes, it has been learned and the lessons oft repeated the hard way.

I did wonder if some of the issues were down to early protocol versions, early implementations and some variable manufacturing efforts in the past. As these device should exist down at OSI level 1 and on the NAT side of the router, I am not sure why an ISP issue should affect them. I could see power brown outs or cuts or other NAT events, router restarts possibly but no real reason for them to mess with level 1 unless the protocol was poor at rebuilding broken links or even maintaining their viability. The one big issue in all of this is the state of the in building power wiring and any sources of messing that could be introduced by the in building devices.

I do know that some years back signalling over transmission power lines caused external issues (and had to accept issues injected into data paths). Signal leakage was a cause for concern as the long often runs could form very effective long aerials.

[Richard]

Got that one.

Edit addition:

I looked within seconds of you having done something, so I thought that I would see if it was now A-OK for the ‘others’, well for me anyway: it is well done and thank you from us all.

[Richard]

I am a bit confused. Why would a home plug need an IP address let alone a DHCP one as it is simply replacing a wire? As it is nothing much more than a form of loop extender should it not simply use its own protocol to look for and chat to mates it can find? If it finds anyone ‘out there’ shouldn’t it pass along any suitable messages transparently, (i.e. stripped of any home plug ‘private’ protocol) to the end device(s) they serve and leave them to do the cleverer stuff about link protocols? They came pre-configured without knowledge of their deployment and just happily chatted to each other when plugged in and before any higher level stuff was attempted

Having said that, I had a hell of a time years ago when a super intelligent modems were supplied to provide a private wire function. The damned things kept reading and acting on control characters intended for conversations between the end devices. Rendering it back to being a ‘supper thick’ modem cured that problem, but it took a number of commands to down grade it to work as needed. I needed to avoid confusing the terminal points while trying to reset the modems, oh what joy that was, – not!

I hope home plugs would not suffer that issue.

[Richard]

Yes it was that number, but shows as apparently fully installed with no optional updates. My wife’s PC showed nothing due at all, though daughter’s machine does show updates pending. (The user is the challenge there, not the machine…)

All three run Home not pro versions which I understood allowed more leeway on updates.

[Richard]

Interesting, my pc installed the patch last night and completed things over night. My wife’s largely identical machine says nothing is available this morning. I will have to check out the registry entries.

So far my machine feels little different as Dave suspected would be the case. If anything it might even be a little crisper, though this could be due to the effects of a reboot that was perhaps overdue.

[Richard]

The TP-Link kit came tonight, it went in without a set up and works as intended. Thanks for all the reassurances from everyone. I wonder if I should add a few more ports to other rooms. That is one to think about perhaps.

[Richard]

Dave thank you. Darn it I have just lost the first try at a post! Try again. This tends to substantiate the closed in shelter story, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/05/a4079405.shtml

My mother’s brother was a design engineer and a ‘stress department head’ according to family folk lore. He was in a very close by shelter so saw a great deal of the carnage and, like most was very badly affected. Mother did not know the full details but whispers may not have helped anyone back then. Perhaps they did dig out most of what they could, I do not know; filling in the scar might have helped to ease the pain of those left.

My other uncle was my father’s brother and an inspector so he may well have been in a different area when the bombs fell. It is his long service watch I now wear.

Addendum, I always felt that there was an implied suggestion that someone might still have survived the initial blast and not been pulled out Your linked accounts and other knowledge make it very clear that could never have been the case, so one ghost can be laid to rest.

[Richard]

There are a few others abandoned where they fell across the globe. I am not surprised they were noisy with two thumping great radial engines banging away to keep them and their freight airborne.

A couple of relations worked for the Bristol Aeroplane Company during and post war. One wartime bomb fell on a shelter there I was told they never attempted to dig out the victims, that upset a few of the family at the time. I believe there is a memorial plaque there now.

I have their long service watch from one of the relations, it is currently my daily wrist watch

[Richard]

I used my camcorder to copy a lot of analogue tapes to digital and then a PC package to record them for DVDs. The initial set up can be a challenge, but once set up you can spend many happy hours(?) letting them run through. Whatever you use it is the initial set up that takes the time. The quality is down to the quality of the original plus any errors the set up can stuff  into the flow.

[Richard]

Glad you have it fixed I think and believe from your comments.

Personal update, I did a very temporary wired connection to my troubled location, it was not pretty but it completely solved our issue so the so called  TP-Link TL-PA7020PKIT V2 2-Port Giga is now ordered and should be here on Thursday.

[Richard]

I have heard it said many times that once you get past the 2 week or 14 day point things settle down quite well. We largely gave up on sugar years ago. So much so that three or four Olympics later we still had a packet advertising the chance to win a trip to somewhere, Atlanta I think. What does for my weight management issues are troubles with family health issues and the stress and impacts that they cause. Wine just becomes too appealing as another shower of nasty stuff descends and a nice bit of ‘that lovely cheese would go a treat on something with a bit of snap and bite‘. A week later as the fog starts to clear, 6 pounds /  3 KG or so have miraculously been found. Christmas saw substantially reduced physical activity after my operations so couple that with a few other issues and it is time to regroup for a new battle of my bulge.

 

 

[Richard]

Marc, sorry to have hijacked your thread, but I suspect that somewhere in this lot there is a crumb of an answer to your question. I suspect that for whatever reason the link is not up to supporting the services you need for the reliable TV.

As an experiment can you provide a temporary wired access to eliminate link issues and highlight any other issues?

[Richard]

Ah, wind funnels. There was a power station, (in Yorkshire) I believe that was close to several hills and sat in a valley. One day a strong wind blew, strong but well below the design limits for the cooling towers. Suddenly the towers blew away and everyone was shocked.

The hills and valley walls had formed a lovely venturi. The wind did not blow the towers down, but the wind assisted by the shape of the landscape produced a vacuum just like that in a carburettor, Rather than suck up petrol like in an engine as it rushed over the top of the towers it sucked them apart.

Hills and tall buildings can dangerously interact with winds, take care. The combination near cliffs and sea can and does kill.

[Richard]

Steve, thanks for the reassurance, I will try to give it a whirl over the next few weeks. I had/have two medical appointments today the first went well and I have sign off on my eyes. Happily some other daughter issues appear to be declining in severity and she was able to get out of the house for something she has been unable to do for months. With luck my ‘time budget’ might get a little relief, though next week is set to be hectic with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday already booked up with appointments, so timing deliveries could become an issue.

Amazon might not be the cheapest, but their support package has always sorted me out well, I will start looking at the available options. Our electrical wiring should be sound enough, various parts have been tested and always passed over the last 25 years.

Thank you to all who commented.

[Author]

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