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News and Comment March 2022

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12 March (Part 1) - Taxes up

Believe it or not, I found the time to listen to last Wednesday’s full Council meeting at which next year’s Council Tax was jacked up by as much as is legal. A number of things struck me as worthy of comment but the intervening days have faded my recollections. I seem to recall that Councillor Richard Diment made his points in a reasonable fashion while the usual suspects were mainly interested in playing politics

The spare several hours which writing a formal report would take has eluded me, bogged down as I have been by reinforcing the house with more copper. Fortunately the Labour Group has put out a Press Statement which can be a stop gap report. It will be posted as a separate blog so as not to allow my waffling to detract from its importance.

Testing kitThe recabling was a a bit of an ordeal. Over many years, every time I redecorated a room I installed wired network access points. 29 of them in total although only eleven are in regular use. My mistake was not to allow POE (Power Over Ethernet) to be a simple and easy choice.

20 years ago I did not know what POE was and in later years the price of the equipment required was a disincentive. Making it available at selected outlets on a hard wired system presented challenges not helped by the fact that my detailed notes and graphics of how the cabling was originally set up had gone AWOL.

In retrospect it would have been easier to throw away an expensive switch and buy the POE version so that the power could be switched on in software rather than my cost free but time consuming solution. I must have been up and down stairs 100 times while sending a test signal up one cable to see where it emerged; and again when it didn’t.

The new VOIP phones work too, after I worked out what Session Initiation Protocol pass through was and disabled it. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

There are two unidentified cables left over. Sooner or later I will find something that no longer works but for now it will have to do.

 

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