I should have mentioned that yes, there are range extenders and they're probably fine, I just have no experience with them because they annoy the purist in me - one radio hop to the wired network ought to be enough for anyone. Plain repeaters are inexpensive and you can just stick one in, but effectively halve your wireless bandwidth. WDS by contrast is a relatively expensive technology which would require you to start from scratch and buy all the units from a single vendor. Again, I'd start by looking at the placement and performance of the ones you have.

And congratulations on moving in! When's the NetherPilg?

I'd forgotten about Powerline.

Yes, the power line systems work, but . . .
Beware if you have two or three phases for the house supply. It'll most likely cause much frustration should each end of the supposed circuit be on different phases.

Well, I said I'd consider it, there's quite a bit that can go wrong with them; they work best on the same circuit which might rule them out for a given installation; some stop working while an unshielded motor is running, such as a paper shredder or sink disposal or some below-spec appliance. It's usually good to buy from a business with a 30-day unconditional return policy so you can try these things out.

Before going that way the first thing to try is to just move your existing APs, try different channels, fiddling with the antennae, and then move on to testing out more powerful units. Newer 802.11ac units like the one I linked have multiple antennas and beamforming technology and are pretty good at getting a stable connection through walls. That one's Power over Ethernet as well so you don't to position it near a mains socket, though that raises the cost a little more since you need an injector to supply current. (Note also if you ever buy PoE network gear always use an injector that the manufacturer has tested, not whatever's cheap.)

Erm... it's a new house, and has a concrete structure, so there's at least 2 concrete walls/floors between the router (at dijk/road level) and the bedroom (lower floor). I guess we'll have the same problem when I get my top floor office working too. We've got one of the powerline adapter/access points, but I think it's too far away from the router - I need to use another socket. I'll start moving it about later this week when I get time. I don't need an enormous amount of bandwidth downstairs - I only listen to the radio in headphones in bed, that's all. Thanks for all the thinking.... I'll relay it to my technical consultant (aka the windy miller)

I always think new houses should have some accommodation for adding and updating the wiring. I just added ethernet ports in the bedrooms and it was a real pain doing it in a non-destructive, not-unsightly way in this 1915 house. Still don't have a neat way to do it in the living room but since the lazy slobs who installed cable TV for a previous owner just did it by drilling a hole in the hardwood floor, for now I just repurposed that. It's ugly but it's under a cabinet so I can ignore it.

Speaking as a hardwood floor driller of yore, sometimes it is the only way short of removing an entire wall and who needs the walls out at Christmas? The good thing about hardwood is it also comes in dowel form so a hole is only there until the wall has to come out anyway.

But if you don't take the wall out at Christmas how do you get the tree in? I hope you're not suggesting lowering it through the hole in the roof, as that would entail making the hole needlessly large; normally said hole only has to accommodate the tree's upper span.

And just to show me, today I was required to drill one(1) hole in the exposed soleplate of the living room wall so I could finally address the "no ground connection" issue in the sockets we plan on plugging the brand-new, Mrs Stevie for the use of, 48 inch wide flat screen "smart" TV into.

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I wonder if that was why the old Philips 27 inch CRT had a bendy picture all these years; do TV electric gubbins use the ground as a reference of some sort? I dunno. At least we no longer have a current carrying ground now I got the supply upgraded and a proper ground installed. The old ground strap used to work loose from the water pipes and it looked like we had an arc welder running down there. What?

Having made several careful calculations and measurements I sat on the basement stairs, carefully located the groundless cable with Mr Hand and felt the extra-long electrician's drill-bit into place (no line of sight, you see) and by dint of swearing and sheer stick-toitiveness I punched a 5/16ths hole one quarter inch away from the skirting board straight through our hardwood floor. Extra poignancy was lent to this fiasco by my only discovering the fact after feeding four feet of wire through the hole and wondering where it was all going as I couldn't see it in the hole I made in the stairwell wall to do all the wire-fu where no-one would see it. I could hear the wire scratching at the wall but couldn't find it through my access hole (which was perfectly aligned with the junction boxes, so one in the win column even if swamped by the floods of incompetence happening all around me).

The anti-handiman spirits are clearly in your pocket Dan. Well played, sir. Well played.

Now, having run sixty feet of green-clad wire from the socket back to the power distribution center

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I could have lazed-out and run three feet of wire to the nearest circuit with a ground, but then I'd have disconnected that circuit at some point in the future when I'd long forgotten about the TV socket and that would be a juicing waiting in ambush the next time I fiddled with the TV hookup

I'm off out dowel shopping.

Clearly the answer is to manufacture flooring with a regular pattern of what appear to be little round inlays but which are in fact pre-installed dowels; when you need a hole you just tap one out.

(Stevie) "Dowel shopping" sounds like a euphemism for some dubious activity. Don't do it.

And the Flat Screen TV c/w HD cable TV hookup and integration into the WiFi has Mrs Stevie smiling and heaping me with compliments and thank-yous in between bouts of binge Netflix-ing.

Next up: re-introducing surround-sound via the miracle of the wireless soundbar and removing to another place of the DVD player that opens only to close before you can load or unload a disc.

[Dan Re: Pre-made knockouts in the floor] Where's the fun in that? More to the point, where's the clear opportunity to deploy The Rule? Admittedly, this time all I got out of it was a couple of new spiral saw bits "needed" to saw out the hole in the sheetrock (actually, I should pull the 66s and 99s on account of me not being able to come up with an alternative method of cutting such a close-fitting hole without serious danger of cutting the cable too. (A lie, I have a small circular saw made out of an angle grinder that would have done almost as good a job while at the same time posing perhaps the greatest hazard to the user I have ever personally seen in a commercially available tool, and that includes the gas-powered chain-saw mounted on a ten foot pole and that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned McCulloch weed-wacker))

If your new TV supports HDMI-CEC it should work well with your Raspberry Pi. I paid more than the price of a Pi just for a CEC dongle for my XBMC box, but boy is it nice, you can use the TV remote for everything and let all the others moulder in a drawer. (You can sort of achieve the same result with a smartphone or tablet, but then you have to use separate apps for the TV and XBMC, the Viera app is pants, and it's really unhandy to slide between screens to get to the various controls.) It helps if your soundbar is also CEC compatible and connected to the ARC port. It means I can turn off the TV and just listen to music streams on the sound bar. (For that I do need to use the tablet or phone.)

Now if only my supposedly fanless HTPC actually ran stably without a fan. Fear to click: my USB fan hack. (The two sticky-up things to the right are external antennas I bodged onto it because the factory wifi was rubbish and if I'm going to have a Linux box next to a window I'll make it an access point so I can listen to streaming radio while snipping things in the garden.)

eh?

Sorry, should have prefaced that with "[Stevie]".

[Dan] I was lost at "dowel" ;-)

Well, I need something. The Vizio soundbar has it's own remote (intended to be used to configure it before the Vizio TV remote takes control and of greatest use to turn down the stupid levels of "awesome" factory configured into the sub-woofer) is pathetic and doesn't match the aesthetics of the black-with-colored-buttons of the Sony kit (TV and Disc Player) or the Cablevision (A silver ST:TNG phaser-like affair needed to change the cable channels). I finally got the Sony TV remote to control the soundbar, then realized I needed the cable remote to do that, but in making it recognize the telly (so the on/off button would work) ended up not being able to mute the television sound so it doesn't f*ck-up the surround sound panorama.

It is all very trying and a big argument in favor of buying all one manufacturer's kit (the disc player instantly integrated remote-wise with the telly).

The best picture seems to be with Blu-Ray discs, which look staggeringly good, followed by Netflix and other HD netty content, then HD cable and other signals a distant last place. The picture from all the non-disc sources seems (to me) to have the actors standing like cutouts in front of the backdrop. This is probably a matter of dialing down some factory preset. All the preset "modes" I found were eye-hurtingly bad; too bright (refelcting surfaces flared like Novae), too red, cartoonish sharpness etc. Once I killed the red by about 50%, made the sharpness a tad higher and knocked the shine off it all looked very nice indeed.

Everyone else in the extended family (who are all HD ents veterans) will probably feel the picture isn't colorful enough, but as I said to Mrs Stevie, I can't watch a face that has livid blotches all over it so I'd be grateful if she'd move out of my eye-line so I could see the screen to adjust it.

I was also mizled over the wireless bit of the soundbar, which was only between the sub-woofer and the bar, not to each of the satellite speakers as I had been led to believe.

I imagine watching me trying to buy all this stuff was very like watching the sketch from Not the 9 O'Clock News where Mel Smith tries to buy a gramophone and Rowan Atkinson tries not to sell him one.