I’ve been wanting to run Ethernet from my home media center in the living room to my office in the back of the house for a while now, but doing this means running Cat5 cable through the floor, above a drop ceiling in the basement, and up through the office floor. It also means buying a spool of Cat5 cable, the special Crimping Tool, the connectors and boots, plus the special silver lame’ jumpsuit, the goggles, and the propeller beanie (or maybe that’s just me).
This can all get expensive and… fussy. The easier and cheaper way to do this is to get a small spool (or bought per foot length) of Cat5 at your Home Despot, or similar, for the length you need for your run, and then just cut up a short Ethernet cable you already have, splicing the connectors to the two ends of your new cable. It’s not particularly pretty, but it works, and it’s cheap. My run would need to be about 35 feet (that’d cost me less than US$15 in per-foot Cat5 (and I have plenty of spare cables to sacrifice for connectors).
See this simple tutorial on Of Zen and Computing for more details.