As long as there has been electronics, there has been the problem of how to keep them cool.  Unfortunately, the problem gets more complex the smaller that computers get and what works for one PC might not work for others.  This is clearly the obstacle to overcome when trying to cool down a settop box.  Read more to find out how I was able to pull it off very well for a little over $10 in parts and still maintain all my hair.

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Ok, so not long after I published the article on  the hardware teardown of the Seagate Dockstar, I couldn’t help myself  so I started working on things to do with this device.  I did a lot of research in regards to the capabilities of the Dockstar, including being able to push a customized Linux OS on the device.  Once I saw the article at Hackaday that covers exactly how to replace the OS, I knew I had to do it for myself.  There are two ways to perform this upgrade however in order to capture syslog output and to be able to get to the bootloader, a serial port is required.  Just about all of the sites will describe the pins needed to make the connection, however none of them detail how to do it very clearly and none of them address the issue of aesthetics.  Read on for my method of adding a serial port to the Dockstar without affecting the look of the device.

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I know it’s been a while so here’s another post.  In this post, I’ll go over the hardware in this gun style barcode scanner that holds a real helium-neon laser tube with power supply! Although this post only covers the basic modding, there’s nothing to stop you from gutting the gun and using the HeNe tube for your own nefarious plan. (continue reading…)

I know it’s been a while since I posted, and I do apologize.  Life has definitely not been kind to me in the regards of time however I have not forgotten anything. I have two major posts coming up hopefully within the next week, however here’s a quick article about a trick I discovered while working on a project with a friend.  The project was to see if their content filter could be broken in their chat application andthrough a little bit of HTML know-how and some PHP code, I was able to crank out a generator to do just that.  Read more to find out the details. (continue reading…)

In this post, we’ll be going over the basics of using an old regular PC-gameport joystick with Parallax’s Basic Stamp powered Boe-Bot.  This howto will have all the information you need to get started including code, schematics and a parts list.  We will be covering how the joystick is wired and how to go about interfacing it with the Boe-Bot for an easy to use and easy to expand analog control method for your Boe-Bot.  Next step, world domination! (continue reading…)

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Well, the Christmas/Yule break is over with and it’s time to get cracking.   If you were like me this holiday season, you were either placed in the position if needing to do a hard drive upgrade for someone else or you received a new hard drive of your own that warrants upgrading.  The CloneZilla site didn’t contain very clear instructions for what to do so I decided to write this howto documenting the process. In this howto, I will cover using the free application “CloneZilla” to perform a hard drive upgrade on a test installation of Windows XP from 4GB to a 10GB drive.

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In this post, we will show what was necessary on how to get access into the BR24BP battery pack for APC’s BackUPS RS/XS series of battery backups.  Read more for additional details, caveats and some good to know general informaton on how you can replace the stock batteries in the battery pack with your own batteries to save money and time.

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In this post, we’ll cover step-by-step how to add a SD cardslot to your Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT and how to configure it in the DD-WRT UI.    Granted, this has been done a lot already, however there is a significant lack of information on how to do it on the older V2′s.  Read more for the complete step-by-step guide. (continue reading…)

Well, the world is abuzz with all things twitter so I figured that I’d join the fray.  But rather than tweeting about farts being blasted into an office chair or a toilet that twitters or even a tweeting toaster, I decided to do something useful with this thing called Twitter.  I have APCUPSd running on a Linux box that tweets when the server detects a change in power.  Read more to find out how you can incorporate this into your linux server.

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This howto will cover performing the necessary steps for configuring Ubuntu Server 9.04 to distribute pxelinux images over the network for you to use to install Ubuntu or your favorite Linux distribution over the network. No more fumbling for installation CDs or boot floppies!
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