Tag: DIY

When it comes to interior design, I’m a big fan of minimalism — which one can notice from the photo of my workplace (and that’s how it looks in real life and not only on the photo).

Long time I wished to build a wireless Qi phone charger right into my desk so that I could charge my mobile by simply laying it down onto the desktop.

There was an issue though. My desktop is a sheet of 10 mm-thick hardened glass, and common wireless chargers only support charging over a distance up to 8 mm.

Recently I have been able to find a solution to this and make it exactly the way I wanted.

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My information kiosk application for Raspberry Pi, known as InfoPi, has finally been given a major makeover.

Four years ago I posted about InfoPi’s initial implementation. Let’s see what the new version brings.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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