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Surge Protector on Coax - Bad idea?
It seems that most surge protectors that are a bit more expensive than the run of the mill ones have ports for coax, Ethernet and phone lines to provide surge protection for these items. I've always ignored the Ethernet and phone line ones as I use VOIP and it is unlikely that the VOIP box would generate a surge and same goes for Ethernet. However, when I setup my UPS almost 2 years ago, I figured that connecting the coax for the cable modem into the coax on the UPS would be a good idea in case a surge came in through the cable line, it wouldn't blow up my cable modem.
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Air conditioning in coastal San Diego?
I've lived in a few places in San Diego over the last 20 years; 4 relatively close to the coast and 3 further inland. In that time, I had air conditioning in the places inland, but rarely used it. In fact, when we lived 20 minutes more inland than we do now, I don't recall turning on our A/C for the first few years we lived there; we used ceiling fans and just dealt with the warmer days. So when we bought our house and remodeled it, adding A/C didn't even cross my mind. We're pretty close to the coast, and I figured we'd get a coastal breeze. Within the first year of living here, I knew that this was a bad decision. It turns out that last year was the hottest year on record in San Diego with 12 days over 90 degrees at the airport whereas there are normally 1-2 days over 90 degrees. I thought maybe I had become a wimp and couldn't take the heat (well, that still may be true), but the facts confirmed that I wasn't completely crazy.
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EdgeRouter Lite and VPN Connections
When I was going through a variety of routers before I ended up with the EdgeRouter Lite, I found that my connection to my work VPN would drop several times a day which became quite annoying. The connection was a standard Cisco IPSec VPN connection using the built in Mac VPN Client. I've setup VPNs before (site to site using Cisco boxes) as well as a VPN Server (OS X), so I do have some experience with VPNs. I tried to tweak settings (OS X's VPN client is built on top of raccoon) to no avail.
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Review: Ubiquiti Networks EdgeRouter Lite
Earlier this year I started to have problems with my Internet connection. As most people do, I blamed my cable company. I filed a trouble ticket and a technician came out. He checked the signals, replaced a few connectors and called it good. After he came out, I still experienced blips where I completely lost connectivity for up to 30 seconds. The tech suggested I try replacing my router. As I've never had problems with Apple routers (I have a Time Capsule), I basically said "whatever".