This weekend I was able to do a few tasks I always said I wanted to do, but never really could convince myself that I would find the time to do them. These projects involved cutting wires, fishing wires through walls and insulation, moving furniture, de-cluttering wires, and completely wiping my computer’s hard drive and doing a clean macOS install.

I’m impressed at least.

As you may recall the outdoor webcam was hardwired  to an (old) Airport Express via a POE injector.  The (old) Airport Express was then plugged into an outlet in the basement, and connected to the main wireless network. It was a hack. A temporary solution to something it took me 2 years to clean up.

Now the cable that comes from the outdoor webcam goes up through the floor of the basement right where it comes in the house. Then it comes out right behind the entertainment center in the living room where it connects to the POE injector and the network switch connected directly to the Airport Extreme. A much cleaner solution.

In order to get that done I cut a few dozen feet of old wire from when we had Dish Network, and even an old telephone cord. That knot of cabling was unsightly, and even more so with the entertainment cabinet now up on legs. Once they were gone I was able to fish a wire coat hanger up through the hole in the floor and up into the box in the wall. It took a few tries, but with a little help from my wife we were able to get it done.

Then this morning I did something I have been threatening to do for many months, but was always a little afraid to start. I completely reformatted the hard drive on the iMac, and reinstalled macOS. The threatening I mention was more planning then shaking a fist at the machine each time it failed at something.  I made backups. I wrote long detailed instructions on how the camera worked, and I took screenshots.  I copied important files to off-site cloud backups, and I made sure I had a few good Time Machine backups.  I used Notes to create a list of Must Have software, and I ticked off the list slowly over the day.

Right after installing Dropbox and 1Password, I got the webcam and all of its processes up and running.  Not too much down time, but today’s timelapse won’t be much, and I forgot to enable the daylight timelapse until it was dark, so that likely will be missing completely.  But everything should be back to normal by Tuesday, and so far everything is humming along.

Fingers crossed.