Latest In Tech » D.I.Y.

Backwoods Home Magazine

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:14:41 +0000

Backwoods Home Magazine is dedicated to the promotion of a more self-reliant living style. Everything from the ammo shortage to how to buy a used mobile home.

iPhone Ringtones

admin — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:16:34 +0000

If you’re not up to making your own ringtones for the iPhone with Garageband you should try out Audiko. Audiko, has pre-made ringtones as mp3s, m4r (for the iPhone), and AMR-nb formatted are all available.

N.B. The file SentMessage.caf is used for the sent SMS tone.

Backup data using Amazon’s S3 on the Mac

admin — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:26:38 +0000

There are other solutions to backups not involving Amazon’s S3. If you insist on using S3, this seems like the easiest solution, the comments hold particular value; suggested usage includes rdiffs and swapping out launchd for Automator and ical.

Read the article here.

Build Your Own UPS

admin — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:12:42 +0000

This article doesn’t need much explanation and I’m eager to attempt it. Mike Howes at Icrontic has written an awesome how-to.

Portable Cygwin

admin — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:26:45 +0000

Cygwin; the Linux like environment for Windows, is another terribly useful application that can be a bit difficult to get installed properly (at least for us Cygwin novices). You can find some pretty good advice here. If you’re looking to get Cygwin installed on a USB drive look no further; download cygwin for USB, and unzip it in your USB drive’s root directory. All the credit for this Cygwin install goes to these directions and their creator. In order to get this running properly, you’ll need to do two things.

As I mentioned before; unzip Cygwin for USB in the root directory of your USB drive
Rename the directory /cygwin/home/userName to your new user name
Open the file /cygwin/etc/profile with notepad
Find the two references to userName and change them to your new user name

Run the X.bat to start cygwin, run uninstall.bat after ending your session (more on that can be found at the scripts site)

Make Skype Portable

admin — Mon, 07 May 2007 03:58:30 +0000

Through the magic of the Internet, this post, other people’s hard work, and l33t ninja haxor skills I bring you a portable skype install (for Windows). You could do this yourself pretty easily by following these directions.

Download Skype
Install Skype to a folder any folder, I prefer a folder called “skype” on the Desktop.
Create a new text file labeled skype.bat
Paste the following in to the text file and save it:
@echo off
set APPDATA=%~dp0Application Data
if not exist “%~dp0Application Data” mkdir “%~dp0Application Data”
set USERPROFILE=%~dp0
set ALLUSERSPROFILE=%~dp0
echo Starting Skype…
start %~dp0skype.exe
put skype.bat in the same folder as your skype install
Double click on the bat file to run Skype

Even easier; download and unzip SkypePortable on a USB drive.

I couldn’t resist linking to Make’s “skyppod”

Rebuild Laptop Batteries

admin — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:50:34 +0000

Jay’s Technical Talk has a step by step tutorial on how to rebuild your laptop battery. Since it happens to every good laptop, it’s worth knowing how to do this. While a replacement battery costs over $100.00 Li-Ion cells cost under $6. Replacing internal cells is not for the faint of heart; soldering and is involved. With a little work you could end up with a higher capacity battery than when you started.

Battery Rebuilding Tutorial

DIY Handcranked Cell Phone Charger

admin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:37:58 +0000

It’s official, I’ve added a D.I.Y. category. As I’ve said before, nothing is better than D.I.Y. well maybe free is better. All you need is one of those hand-cranked flashlights, a screw driver, an old cell phone charger (car) and some soldering skills.

The Hole – video powered by Metacafe

Link via Gizmodo

Turn the iPod Mini Into A Flash-based Player

admin — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 02:16:30 +0000

Boy, I like me some DIY. With CF cards still growing in size, and shrinking in cost this makes pretty good sense. CF cards use less juice than a harddrive, take more of a beating, and come in sizes of up to 16 GB. If you’ve got an old iPod-mini lying around why not convert it to compact flash?

Link via Gizmodo