The right tools for the right job: Get a 110-punchdown tool (or one with 66 and 110 blades) for $60-70. Don't bother with the stupid plastic ones that come with the cat5 wall jacks-- you need one that's spring loaded and sets the wires with a nice solid THUNK. You can get the wall plates and inserts from any big box store now, and Radio Shock (sic) and some hardware stores. Screw terminals- gaa. You want me to strip and fan out 8 wires (no cheating by just doing the blue, and green pairs) and then mess around with a little screw driver? No thanks. I can terminate about 5 to 7 of them per hour, including the occasional re-do, with a punch tool. 'Sides, if you want to work the best, you have to maintain the twist right up to the terminals. Try that with screws. I run gigabit over my home-terminated jacks and home-made jumpers all the time, and I don't have any errors or retries at my switch ports.

What he said! Besides the coax was probably for TV antenna or cable TV and as such is 75 ohm impedance. That's no fracking good for 10Base2 (ethernet over coax) and it might not work with some types of balun (coax to twisted pair widgets). Use the coax to drag in a pull-string or a cat5e run. That's the best use for it. Unless you need to equip locations for OTR or cable TV.

Indeed, one can purchase a few vital components (boards) and create a SDR (software defined radio) and from there, you write your own radio, as in code. Here's one http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3911104852.html for US $85k. Too much? Try this: http://www.flex-radio.com/ where you'll find lots of options.

SMART is SMART, platform independent. Your OS's way of sending SMART commands to the drive and getting the results back may vary; the venerable smartctl on the command line is the one I'm most familiar with.

In PC's, some of the BIOSs have an option to enable SMART. Most of them simply send the "-a on" command to enable the drives SMART processes. Many also do a "-H" for a basic health check of the drive, and squawk at you during the post if it fails. I'm wondering if the mac does something very similar. If so, a delay of about a second or maybe less is about right.

Use of smartctl -h /dev/sda is a good measure of how the drive is, but it's very basic. Then again, it sure beats a poke in the eye with a sharp SIMM. Or a drive that dies without any warning.

I use 3Ware raid controllers and SMART can "look through" the controller to the individual drives and run tests, read back the logs, etc. There's some fussiness at first setting it up (tell smart that the drive is type 3ware,n where n is the disk number, and refer to it as /dev/twe1, twe2, etc for SMART purposes) but it's not hard.

I have my 8506 controller's drives all getting short tests every night and all getting long tests early AM every Sunday morning.

I'm a big believer in the Smart tools and I'm pretty sure I've headed off major data loss twice now on drives that started to fail and were replaced before going completely sideways. Not to mention the box of 80gb drives I bought at a swap a few years ago for about $10 a drive. The few that failed SMART out of the box became paperweights and test/temporary drives, even though they seem to work. A few of the SMART failure went toes-up a short time later. The ones that passed are still humming along happily.