Your Warranty Is Void.com

The reason I haven’t written any more about my fun with the Dockstar was that due to an unfortunate set of circumstances I was left with a bricked dockstar. (read: I did something stupid.)  After performing a lot of research and thanks to a bunch of people over at the PlugApps.com Forum site who helped me, I was able to get it running.  Read more for a complete list of what you will need including how to build an adapter and where to get the needed JTAG kit. (continue reading…)

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 was given a very interesting product by a friend of mine that happened to catch a good deal on woot.com a few days ago.  Apparently Seagate has made a network fileserver device for their Freeagent Go line of portable USB drives called the Freeagent DockStar. (I can only think that this is a play on Battlestar Galactica’s Baystar – a cylon “aircraft-carrier” of sorts.)  When I went to look for pictures online of the hardware, I was dismayed to find nothing about the inside of the little thing.  So here they are in all their exposed glory, the innards of the Seagate Dockstar.

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Image courtesy of Parallax.com

Hello Everyone!   If you’ve been in a Radio Shack sometime in the last year or so, you’ll know that Radio Shack and Parallax have teamed up to bring some variety to the parts drawers.  This once $50 serial RFID reader kit is now $10 at Radio shack although it only comes with two tags.  Read more for additional details about the Serial RFID reader now on sale! (continue reading…)

Well, after taking a bit of time to think about the site and all the hard work I’ve put into it, I decided to do some site work and created a Facebook page and a Twitter account so you can be informed of the next update. For facebook click here and for Twitter, follow @WarrantyIsVoid.  I’m still in the process of fleshing out both profiles so it might be a bit, but for now, I’m up and running.

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…)

While writing up the review for the Samsung Moment versus the Palm Pre, I happened to find out that Sprint has now released Android 2.1 (Eclair) for the Moment.  Guess now I have to start over again, but the up side is that this is a very significant update from Samsung’s initial release, Android 1.5.

You can download the update from Sprint at http://shop.sprint.com/en/software_downloads/pda_smartphone/samsung_moment.shtml

Please note: According to the instructions available at the link above, you will need to use a Windows PC to apply the update to your phone.  I will be posting a mirror shortly and it will show up in the “Download Files” page at the top of this page.

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…)

Well my life has been busy as all get out and I do have a new post in the works however I’m taking a quick break because I have a new toy that makes for a far better story.

I have recently gotten my hands on a new Samsung Moment on the Sprint network. Within the next few days, I will post all the gory details from this Android n00b and will be offering a comparison against the other smartphone I have, the Palm Pre.