hiding home theater equipment

About a month ago, I went through some rewiring and moving of my home theater equipment to help declutter our house. Most folks who read this can look over at a pile of components and wires somewhere in the living room. It may be in a nice cabinet or next to the TV, but it is usually less than ideal. I had spent lots of time trying to "manage" the cables with wire ties or sleeves, and I even made custom length cables to minimize the dangling mess behind and inside the cabinet.

We had a perfectly good tv stand from bombay made of very nice solid wood and antiqued metal which had served well the past 9 years. However, It was made for very few components and also made to hold the TV. I had reconfigured it just to have the 6 component devices raised up on two shelves to be reachable by the Remote (DISH DVR, Apple TV, DVD player, VCR, AV Reciever, and Harmony Remote). This left an unsatisfying area underneath about 2 feet high and 12 cubic feet in size where you could see wires dangling behind. This took up a good corner of our living room and was one of the first things I noticed when looking out the great windows in that room. Not the most beautiful thing to have in that spot, no matter how much I like gadgets.

This detailed description is only meant to convey my desire to move these items into a more organized and less visible area. I had seen expensive home theater cabinets that would conceal these devices, but I could not justify buying some custom and expensive furniture to hide them. The cheap ones started at $300 and the better ones were far more. Even if I repurposed another kind of cabinet, that's still money that didn't need to be spent.

So I looked around the room and noticed a cabinet on the opposite of the kitchen bar that is visible from the living room. It was used to store seasonal dishes that we never used, and was in a position where opening the door would make items inside visible from the couch. The inside dimensions were also just the right size for the 19 inch components. This was a prime location, except for power, wiring, ventilation, and the size of the door (only 13 inches wide).

Well, not to let any of that stop me, I embarked on a week long quest to get all the panels and route wires from the current locations on the opposite side of the living room to the new cabinet. Installed a new power outlet in the basement that was reachable from this location, tapping it off of a circuit in the kitchen. I reused the coaxial cable I had installed for component video and used a spare coax cable to carry signal to the subwoofer. I routed several lines of cat 5 to the cabinet for phone and networking, moving my router and dsl modem into that area as well.

The speakers were a bigger job, and part of that is still pending. They were hardwired when the house was built, but only with 22 gauge two conductor intercom wire. I picked up a spool of decent 16 gauge speaker wire (discontinued at Lowes and on sale for half price) that I'd like to use to replace that eventually. For now, there is a ugly but functional patch from the cabinet to the oringial wiring location with a single cat 5 line. I have not pushed the configuration much, but it is not bad for background music.

The new setup is not totally beautiful, an needs to have the door open when it runs for ventilation and IR control, but having all that stuff out of sight does greatly improve the look of the living room. It is surprising how much difference something like that can make for a room.

Now to get rid of the giant rear projection TV, and replace it with something less obvious like a hidden projector. For now, Tracy has simply covered it up with a red cloth to help with the fung shui of the room.

OCS for pidgin on linux

My employer moved from Jabber to Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) a few months back, and I had been stuck using a web based client on linux since there was no real support for the protocol that OCS uses (SIPE) over a TLS channel in a Linux IM client.

However the folks working on the pigdin-sipe plugin released a new version that I have it running with my current ubuntu setup at work. I am posting this here in the hope that someone will find it useful.

Caveats:

1. You may not have your presence set initially, and you may need to either sign in with the web client (Communicator Web Access) or on a windows system.
   


2. Some of my co-workers have reported seeing a message that I am on a device that can't "recieve instant messages". I am not sure why this might be.
   

Process:

1. install the basic required packages:
   
   
   • build-essential
     
   • automake
     
   • pkg-config
     
   • libglib2.0-dev
     
   • libgtk2.0-dev
     
   • pidgin-dev
     
   • libpurple-dev
     
   • libtool
     
   • intltool
     
   • comerr-dev
   
   
2. Download the latest source from the SIPE project on sourceforge. As of this article that was pidgin-sipe-1.3.3.tar.bz2.
3. Unpack the bzip2 archive and build the package with the following commands:
   
   • tar xjf pidgin-sipe-1.3.3.tar.bz2
     
   • cd pidgin-sipe-1.3.3
     
   • ./autogen.sh
     
   • ./configure --prefix=/usr
   • make
   • sudo make install
     
   
   


4. Run pidgin and add a new account with the protocol "Microsoft LCS/OCS"
5. Set the username to your email address and enter your windows domain password.
6. Under the advanced tab, set the conenction type to TLS since Auto doesn't seem to work at the moment.
   
7. Also in the advanced tab, set the Auth user and Auth domain to your windows domain credentials.
8. Once you save this, you may be prompted to accept the certificate for your server.
9. Then you should have your contacts list appear. People on your list may be prompted to allow you to see their presence again.