In the UK, pull the socket front off and look what the wires actually are.
I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think.
If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it.
As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
That's also a good point that the Network hardware does not care about cable categories.
If it plugs into your card the card goes "OK, lets see if 1000baseT fits on this?" the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.
At the turn of the century I was putting new Cisco gear into a building (which has since burned down, not related) that had been built a long time ago and so it didn't have Cat 5e cables. I was fitting switches which were state of the art at the time (IPv6 experiments), and they didn't have a 100Mbit option because that was legacy, so you'd plug this ancient looking 1980s cable designed for 10baseT into a switch, and in most cases once it's connected the switch and the network card at the far end both go "Aha link, can I do 1000baseT over this?" and conclude yeah, Gigabit just works. There is a setting to say "No, only do 10baseT" but why set it? Users don't want slow Internet.
Unless somebody went very cheap and strung literal bellwire (which was never rated for a telephone but would probably work) or your distances are very long, you will almost certainly get 100Mb and if there actually are four pairs you will most likely get Gigabit.
> the cables don't have a little chip or anything saying "I'm not suitable for high speed" the card will figure out whether this looks plausible and just do it.
You're actually wrong on all of that ^^
The cables actually have a rating to say what they are suitable to. See the markings on the cable: category Cat5/Cat5e/Cat6 + frequency range 100/250 Mhz + insulation UTP/FTP/STP/mix.
Ethernet cards don't negotiate, they typically only check whether the pairs can transmit any signal. You could end up in a situation where they go for gigabit and it doesn't work well.
Fortunately, the main issue for signal transmission is loss over distance. Ethernet is designed to work over 100m every time in a noisy industrial environment. You've got a pretty good chance for it to work on a short run, even with poor cables.
The alternatives being discussed ADSL/VDSL/G.hn actually detect the capability of the medium and adjust the transmission rates and frequency to give the maximum possible speed. IMO they are much more advanced technologically and much more interesting. (Ethernet is doing exactly 250 Mbps on one pair, G.hn can do up to 1700 Mbps on the same pair, automatically adjusted, the article is getting 1300 Mbps which is insane!)
Worthwhile to point out: The Cat5 cable required for gigabit Ethernet is merely twisted pairs with no insulation, which is pretty much a dumb basic cable (with 8 wires). That's why any cable can work in practice.
I don't know how possible it is to find a really bad cable (untwisted) and it might work on a short length anyway. (Your 1980s office cabling must have been 8 wires if you were able to get gigabit later, so it was far beyond basic phone wires or Cat1 from the time).
Sure, they will have been bundles of 4 pairs and I suppose we could say that is a matter of luck, it will have been installed from the outset in anticipation of networking - there's a period in the late 1980s when everybody is iterating on what will soon become 10baseT and the people in that building would have known all about it - but there's no reason back then to know 4 pairs will be an auspicious choice rather than 3 or 6.
So yes, those cables though they weren't Cat 5e because it didn't exist when they were manufactured, also were not basic phone cables, and I believe when the building was formally opened it had "ground breaking" 10Mbit Ethernet to every laboratory.
Even if the cable is cat 5, telephone sockets are often daisy-chained from room to room. So it can still be a pain to get a point to point connection if it goes through several sockets.
Short two wires on one end, go to the other end with a multimeter and test for continuity between those two wires on your lowest resistance range. If it is infinity then no connection. If it is some low number then there is a connection
I like a light editor with syntax highlighting and basic linting. Last time I was coding regularly I used VS code, but had only the default plugins. I only used it for basic text input. I always ran git and my code from the terminal. Does that help?
Try claude. It's basically the cli agent everyone is catching up to.
Start prompting it for annoying shit "Set up a project layout for X", then write things yourself inside that - the fun stuff or stuff you care about.
Then use it for refactors or extrapolation "I wrote this thing that works, but this old file is still in old format, do what I did there"
It's very good for helping with design of just above layperson knowledge. "I have this problem organizing xyz, what's a good pattern for this?"
or just "I want to do a project that does xyz, but dont know where to start, let's chat about it"
Some of these 'chatty' queries can be done in web, but having it on CLI is great b/c it'll just say "Can I do this for you" and you can easily delegate parts of the plan.
Give it a shot. That's pretty low level agentic use, and yes, it will demolish procrastination and startup inertia.
I don't see the issue with Operating systems or programming languages. There are FOSS alternatives and since they are run locally have no connection outside of the EU.
You are missing the big picture who develops them, pays the salaries of people in the trenches, implement LSPs, and whatever else around the ecosystems.
Example, Java, .NET, Go and co are FOSS, how long do you think they will keep on going without their overlords?
For complete alternatives we need to go back to the cold war days, where programming languages were driven by vendor neutral standards, and there were several to buy from.
As it is, it suffices to take the air out of existing FOSS options.
Even if you quickly point out to GCC and clang, one reason why they have dropped implementation velocity from existing ISO revisions is due to a few well known big corps focusing on their own offerings, while other vendors seldom upstream stuff as they focus on clang.
EDIT: As I missed this on the first comment, same applies to the big FOSS OS projects, most contributions to the major Linux distros, or the BSDs come from non European companies, there is naturally something like SuSE, but then we get into the whole who is allowed to contribute, security, backdoors and related stuff.
People are still running on Java 1.8, which was released in 2014. If no more Java work happened, that'd be unfortunate, but realistically we'd all be fine.
For the OS stuff wouldn't a European distribution of Linux do. Worst case if Europe could no longer get access to patches it could fork it. OK Europe might get behind, but that doesn't seem like an immediate issue, in the same way that not having AWS would be?
On programming languages it is a concern how popular .net and Java are in Europe. However being stuck on the current state of Python is less of a worry. I feel like I was always 10 years behind on needing new features.
Edit: I concede my .net concerns do pull through to Linux. If you were selling Linux solutions to Government or big business, I fear Redhat might be chosen before Suse and Ubuntu
The EU is asking for information on how to support open source, as they currently do through NLNET. It seems to prefer decentralised open source to the hyper-capitalism we got from American tech. Both have their downsides, of course.
And of course you get just as much snobbery from your own class about wanting to climb.
It is possible for a working class person to become Middle class. But you have to be born to the Upper Classes. You can get some way by sending your Children to public school (The perverse name for the most exclusive private schools!). The kids might make it, but you will always be 'new money'.
There is the famous case in the Korean War at the Battle of Imjin River where the British commander of the Gloucestershire regiment reported to an American General, 'Things are a bit sticky, sir'. The American General thought that meant a good thing, like they were holding the line, when in fact they were fighting a heroic last stand outnumbered 25:1!
Intersting. I used to be a professional woodworker, and can't stand the wood working channels. I love This Old Tony though.
I feel like doing a channel that brings in the reality of being a chippy. Tools that look like they were used outside in all weathers, having to make do with the tools you have with you. The crap timber that we have to deal with...I won't ever get around to it though.
A lot of the woodtubers are playing the influencer game for sponsors and views and their content devolves into product placement and reviews. The machinist channels are largely devoid of that with one main exception.
I have seen electricians use cat 5 to carry phone lines several times. It is a mixture between having cat5 already in stock, and future proofing I think.
If it is cat 5 then just put an RJ45 socket on it.
As others have said, you can also try running ethernet on a phone line, you might not get gigabit, but you might get more than what is coming into your house!
The third point is you may be able to use the phone cable to fish a cat 5 through (depending on where it is). Electricians tend to be very good at this!
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