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…which has been appearing for the last six days or so. I got over-excited with solving a problem on my new website and uploaded too many bandwidths – or something like that. What I had managed to do was copy the content of my old Mobile Me website and upload it onto this website as an archive. Naturally I was happy about that, since it meant the content wouldn’t get lost. But having found the solution, I needed to make some changes so that it made sense as an archive, and having made those changes, I uploaded it all again.

Within minutes, I received an email from my web host saying I had used over 85% of my bandwidth limit. Phew, I thought, that was lucky. Just sneaked in.

At five a.m. I received another email (though of course I didn’t see it until a sensible hour of the morning) saying I had used 109% of my limit and to contact system admin. Clearly there was a time delay in the emails, and the 85% was reached with my first upload, with the final one taking me over.

Contacting “system admin” proved difficult since I couldn’t find an email address or phone number for them, so I ended up phoning the sales line, who told me I could pay to upgrade my service to higher or unlimited bandwidth, or wait six days to 1^st November when the new month’s bandwidth allowance started. Since I don’t expect to be uploading anything like that amount of data again (I only have the one archive) I took the cheapskate option.

But I’m back now.

In the interim, I satisfied my techie urges by (i) installing a new printer and making the wireless connection work on both my and Diana’s laptops and (ii) getting a ‘Homeplug’ system to work in our Cornwall house, Treforest.

Treforest is a large house. Unlike the Woking house which is pretty much cubic, where I can site the wi-fi router almost in the middle and reach all rooms with it, Treforest is long and thin with thick stone internal walls. We installed the new Sky broadband router in the breakfast room and the signal just about reached the extension, but not downstairs in the extension – and since downstairs in the extension is where Diana plans to have her study in future, that isn’t very helpful. So I moved the router to the extension, where there are convenient phone and electrical sockets. The signal now does reach downstairs, and back to the breakfast room, but dies before it gets into the sitting room. It wouldn’t reach upstairs to the bedrooms and certainly not into the loft where my future study is currently being constructed. (I didn’t test it, not wanting to take my laptop into a building site.)

This was a problem. I formed a tentative solution of having an ethernet cable put in while the builders are disturbing the upstairs and possibly running another router from the far end of it. Research on the internet showed that this should be possible, but seemed to involve adjusting settings and ensuring that IP addresses weren’t identical and other impenetrable jargon. The relevant chat rooms, once I found them, were full of people with complicated solutions and scathing comments about the hardware the original questioners were using, but I did find a reference to something called a ‘homeplug’ and followed it up.

A homeplug, it transpires, is a technology that allows computer network signals (even HD video) to be transmitted through the electrical wiring of your house or office. You plug a homeplug device  not much larger than a standard three-pin plug into a convenient electrical socket and connect it to your router with an ethernet cable. You then plug another homeplug device into another socket somewhere else in the house and connect it to your computer with an ethernet cable. Or, if you buy the Devolo starter kit that I did, the second homeplug is a wireless access point and you don’t need a cable. It establishes another wi-fi network with its own password. And it’s still only about twice the size of the normal homeplug

That’s it. And it works.

I set it up so that I had the second network live in the breakfast room, then simply unplugged the wireless homeplug, took it and my laptop into the sitting room and plugged it in there. I got connected instantly. The cost for the two plugs, a length of ethernet cable and a CD with the manual and some software was just under £90. If it turns out that my expected location for the wireless homeplug doesn’t reach all the rooms we want it to, we don’t have to faff around with more ethernet cables or signal boosters – we just buy more homeplugs.