Tag: DIY
How to power on a laptop without opening the lid
At home I’m using my laptop in a kind of a stationary setup. It has all the peripheral devices, like a 4K display, a keyboard, a mouse etc., constantly attached to it.
This is pretty neat and looks as follows:
DIY postcards
As it turns out, you can make postcards yourself.
Furthermore, they will feel much more special and, with a bit of luck, prettier than ones from the store!
Bigger pictures are under the cut.
How to pyromark your jo, bokken, or tanto
It’s a short how-to on inscribing your jo (wooden stick), tanto (wooden dagger), bokken (wooden sword)—or anything else made of wood—with an arbitrary text or image.
Fixing whining noise from a DC adapter
I’ve stumbled upon a cute and convenient DC adapter the other day, with four USB charging ports (up to 4800 mA total), a power socket, and a tablet stand. All of that for less than € 15.
A bit later turned out there’s a pitfall, too: it produced annoying whining noise. The noise was quiet but clearly audible in silence, especially while the adapter was unloaded.
Ambient backlighting for Samsung LED TV
Being quite happy with my 75 inch whopper Samsung UE75HU7500, the only thing I wanted to do about it was giving it ambient backlighting. When watching TV in complete darkness your eyes get quickly tired because of the stark contrast between the bright screen and its dark surroundings. Even though this device features an ambient light sensor, which is used to automatically adjust the screen brightness, the contrast is still all too harsh.
InfoPi ‣ InfoPi (a.k.a. DIY Google Now)
When a geek gets bored, he usually dives into home automation. And when there’s nothing more left to automate, he blogs about it.
When leaving my house I usually check the weather forecast for today and if there are any train disruptions. The thing is, it takes precious time and I’m usually in a hurry. Therefore the idea of having all the useful information on a single display was in the air for quite a while. Recently I’ve finally got to implement it. Please meet InfoPi.
Upgrade of Koss PortaPro headphones
I managed to upgrade the best-selling Koss PortaPro headphones using a couple of items I’ve bought on eBay. The headphones are some ten years old now, yet sturdy and rocking, and now have become even better:
Replacing HDD with SSD in iMac 2010
It’s been exactly four delightful years when the HDD in my iMac 27” informed me it couldn’t take it any longer. “Disk I/O error”, it said.
At that moment I already had plans to upgrade it with an SSD (solid-state drive). Those are much snappier and completely silent since there are no moving parts inside.
How to add an external power supply to a USB hub
I’ve been looking for quite a while for a USB hub that would match the design of my iMac. For those who own an iMac a USB hub is a must-have, since Apple have moved all available ports, including even the headphone one, to its back side. Which is in my opinion a typical example of design gone totally wrong.