Maynard scores some speed

A few years ago when we got an HDTV, I went out and bought a Mac mini because the sales woman told me I could easily connect a computer to our TV. Since then, the Mac mini (affectionately known as “Maynard”) has served as our media center on which we watch movies and listen to music in the living room. It’s been a great media center because for my buck, you just can’t beat OS X (I earned early parole for time spent in a Windows world with defragging, reformatting, malware, drivers and hardware incompatibilities, etc. etc.). I operate Maynard by either logging into it remotely from either my Macbook Pro or Elise’s Macbook and using OS X’s Share Screen, or my nifty iPhone app, Air Mouse Pro, or, most often, my Logitech diNovo Edge wireless keyboard with it’s swanky little trackpad. Maynard is our great little digital hub, however, the one thing we were really lacking was internet speed.

Our house was built before high speed internet was mainstay and, thankfully, wireless internet has prevented us from having our house expensively re-wired with ethernet cables. Unfortunately our router is in the office some 50-feet away from Maynard in the living room. Between the wireless router and Maynard are lots of walls, and Maynard is tucked away in an entertainment center where he gets a very weak wireless internet signal:

So last week I bought 100-feet of CAT-5e cable on Amazon for $10 and spent the better part of yesterday running said cable through the attic, down the wall to plug in to Maynard’s ethernet port and down an exterior wall on the other side of the house to the Airport Extreme in the office.

Now we have some speed. And Maynard can proudly tout the fastest connectivity in our house:

So now we can easily watch Apple trailers, YouTube and Hulu. And it only cost me a case of Mesothelioma from being in the attic for 3 hours yesterday!