So for about fifteen years this has been my TV/movie watching sitch — I’m over here, and the computer that plays the stuff is over there *points at bookcase*.
And I control this with this handy li’l keyboard.
Now, when I first started this thing, I went through about half a dozen keyboards until I found this one. Most mini keyboards have a pitiful range — like a metre at most. But this one (which is not Bluetooth, but uses a USB dongle) works pretty well.
That is, normally it has, like, a 98% success rate. Which would be infuriatingly low for a normal keyboard, but since I’m just using this as a “remote” — i.e., to stop/start movies and control the volume etc — it’s not that bad.
But! On random days, it drops to 70% or so. It does not seem to be correlated to anything I can find — not the battery charge, and not… well, that’s all I can think should affect this, because I’m stationary and the dongle is stationary.
A neighbour blasting a microwave for hours on end? Or a wifi AP gone wild that spams the entire spectrum? Comic radiation? TEH RUSSIANS?!?!?
So I’ve lived with this mysterious phenomenon for years, but like I said — it’s annoying, but it’s not maddening. Just push the “start” button once more. There you go.
But this week I decided to do something about it.
I don’t want to snake a … 15-metre-long USB cable (it’s only four metres as the crow flies, but I’d have to nail it up along the walls around the room), but I wondered whether a generic USB-over-wireless thing exists, and sorta — they used to, but not really any more. And… I’d be exchanging an unreliable wireless thing with another wireless thing of unknown reliability. And! This would presumably introduce more latency, which is something you don’t want in a keyboard, really.
But then a friend suggested using a USB->cat5 thing. But… do I have cat5 here?
I do! I’d forgotten! I have an extra one that’s not in use! (The two other ones in use there are for music distribution.)
And USB->cat5 things exist! Still! Several different ones, some powered and some bus powered. So I went with a bus powered one.
So you just plug your USB device in one end…
… and then the other end into a USB port on the computer.
And it works! I’m amazed. I mean, it supplies the power to the dongle via the cat5 cable! Sick!
I still have to tidy up some cabling in the bookcase, but other than that, seems like I’m done — the dongle receiver for the keyboard is now about half a metre from where I’m sitting, so it now seems to work ~100%?
At least today.
The future is here, old man!