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How to make a Physical Gmail Notifier at j4mie dot org

How to make a Physical Gmail Notifier at j4mie dot org
Or: how to turn this.. into this.. I was given a lovely glowing cube by the generous people at Linden Labs as a freebie at a job fair yesterday, and I decided that it was far too attractive to simply sit there on a shelf, pulsating forlornly until its batteries went flat. How about making it useful, while maintaining its visual appeal? The following guide is deliberately fairly high-level, because the exact details will vary depending on your operating system and particular hardware setup. I did this with my Mac, but hopefully there'll be enough information here for you make it work on your system, perhaps with a little Googling. If you don't happen to have a glowing cube lying around, you can modify this to work with almost any output device you could think of, from a simple LED, or a buzzer, to something far more clever like moving a servo (Gmail Notifier Robot, anyone?) The basic system has three components: Hardware Connected up to the Boarduino for testing: Software <?

15 Incredible Do-It-Yourself Gadgets You Wish You Made 15 Incredible Do-It-Yourself Gadgets You Wish You Made For those of you who are DIY fans out there, we’ve got a special treat for you this week! Ordered from least to most difficult projects to undertake, this list of hot DIY gadgets is going to blow your mind! The most notable is the Vertipod DIY One-Man Hoverflyer and most resourceful is the Laser Listening device. Check them all out below! DIY Laser Home Defence SystemEver wanted to secure your home the way the spooks at the CIA and other high-security agencies do?

How to Make a Disco Ball With CDs Edit Article Edited by Flickety, Krystle, Sondra C, Rabbit8888 and 43 others You can still dance to old CDs even if you don't like the music on them any more. Ad Steps 1Find your unwanted CDs. 8Done. Tips You can color the pieces with permanent marker to give the ball a multi-colored effect.Some CDs are silver on both sides; keep the shiny side out when gluing such CD pieces.Get a toy motor (for example, one from building block sets) to turn your disco ball. Warnings The CD pieces may be sharp.When using a hot glue gun, keep a bowl of ice water handy for dipping in your finger in immediately if burned, to ward off the pain.

DIY: The First-Timer&#039;s Guide to Building a Computer from Scratch Make Bath Bombs and Fizzies - Main If you’re a beginner to making bath bombs, here is a quick overview of the ingredients and process. You will see that there’s nothing to it — seriously. Three whole ingredients for the basic bath bomb! Of course, it’s pretty boring, but this is the foundation of bath bombing. Everything else, the color, fragrance, oils, corn starch, etc, is just icing on the cake, so to speak. Ingredients 2 cups Baking Soda 1 cup Citric Acid (Sour Salt) Spray Bottle with Tap Water Optional: 5 – 20 drops liquid food coloring Optional: 1 or 2 teaspoons of massage oil, grapeseed oil, olive oil, or almond oil Optional: 1 tsp. skin-safe fragrance oil Why do I say those last three are optional? Combine your oil, fragrance, and dry ingredients in a large, wide mixing bowl. Start with two or three spritzes of water into the bowl, and rub the mix between your palms. When the bath bomb mix packs easily, but still doesn’t feel wet, it’s time to mold ‘em. I have to warn you, plastic stuff doesn’t make the best molds.

Build the Perfect PC! Step-by-Step Illustrated How-To Guide Maker’s Mark is of course the name of a fine Kentucky bourbon whiskey, but the phrase also applies to the stamp that skilled artisans apply to their creations. When you’ve finished building your custom PC, we’d encourage you to stamp it with your own maker’s mark; after all, the one-of-a-kind creation you’ll have wrought will have nothing in common with the mass-produced rigs that mainstream manufacturers churn out by the millions. That’s one of the most exciting aspects of our hobby. Thanks to the relatively open architecture that IBM stumbled into oh so many years ago (and has likely regretted ever since), we can rebuild and retune our creations again and again, boosting their performance and postponing their obsolescence. Intel has AMD on the run in the CPU front, but AMD is poking Nvidia in the behind in the graphics processor market. Jump to: Motherboards Videocards CPU Coolers & Cases Build-It Guide Overclocking Intel and AMD It's a Good Year For CPUs Stop. Nehalem Q & A

Hacker&#039;s Bench .com DIY Led Mood Lamp Update (10/2009): Steve Rougier improved the software and schematics, see Conclusion below After making my pyramid mood light with 12 high power leds, i decided to make a bigger and better version, without the emphasis on the low budget.. After all, the pyramid mood lamp was more of a proof of concept with its shortcomings. I wanted the new mood lamp to be more powerful, so it could also be used in daylight conditions. I did this by using a z-power 3 watt RGB power led. Offcourse a video says more than pictures, so here you can see the different operation modes. I also was not that satisfied with the diffused look of my previous led lamp in the shape of a pyramid. And i found the perfect housing! They come in two sizes: 31 and 45 cm high. Here is a list of the components i used for making the led mood lamp. Here you see the z-power led mounted on a heatsink i took from an old video card. To avoid a shortcircuit i first dipped the screw heads in some silicon paste and left it to dry.

9 Kick-Ass DIY Projects to Get Your Hack On These 9 amazing DIY projects will give new meaning to your old hardware Techies are too often tempted by the lure of new technology, leaving perfectly good hardware drifting in the wake of compulsive upgrading. And while we love getting new gadgets as much as the next geek, we also like how a new purchase gives us the opportunity to take apart and tinker with our older gear in the Lab. Whether it’s by soldering circuit boards or loading open-source firmware, we pride ourselves on being able to stretch the lifespan of older electronics by performing undocumented (and sometimes warranty-breaking) hardware hacks. The projects we’ve included here range from relatively safe software tweaks to more challenging technical exercises. So, let’s get hacking! A simple first modification for budding do-it-yourselfers is to alter a non-USB gadget so that it can be run off of USB power from your computer. First, a quick primer on USB power. Case-Fan Desk-Fan (image A) (image B) (image C) (image D)

How-To: Rackmount your gear for cheap Our simple network rack is an easy project that can really clean up a home network installation. Just a few square feet of floor space now keeps our cable modem firewall, Ethernet switch, server, wireless AP, KVM, monitor, keyboard and UPS neatly tucked away -- in a (decently well ventilated) closet, for example. It's also built to support rack mount hardware of shallow depth, like a router (the real kind) or network switch, so if you want to clear off that folding table in the basement, check out today's how-to. For today's How-To you'll need: kitchen rack from Target ($30) 3/4-inch wide, 1/2-inch deep aluminum channel ($6.50) 11/64 drill bit 1/4-inch drill bit m5 x 0.8 tap ($3.50) four 1-1/2-inch 1/4 x 20 bolts, washers and nuts ($1) m5 x 0.8 rack mounting screws (probably came with your rack mountable hardware) We bought this rack at Target for about $30. Standard rack mounting machine screws are metric 5mm x .8. Marking the channel for the mounting holes is easy. Comments

The hardware keylogger page. Try a hardware keyboard logger device! Program the keylogger microcontroller firmware first. Start your programmer software, pick the AT89C2051, and burn the flash with the binary file or the hex version. You may also recompile the source using the source code and an 8051 compiler. Soldering is probably the most difficult part of the project, as the keylogger hardware should be made as small as possible. Solder the components together starting from the microcontroller and the EEPROM. Before pulling the thermal tubing around the hardware keylogger, a good idea is to let some glue or resin in between the components, to make the device more rigid.

HOW-TO: Rebuild your laptop battery - Engadget - www.engadget.com Admit it. Come out of denial. You know your laptop that was supercool 2 years ago now gets 15 minutes of battery life. It sucks and we all share the same problem eventually. Laptop batteries (and many others) will start to lose their total charging capacity after awhile. So what do you have to do? Now before we go any further, let me issue a warning. Allright so lets get started. ....which will reveal something like below. Individual cells. If you have a powerbook like me, itll look like this: So. Get out your xacto knife, wire cutters, etc. for this. Take out all the metal contacts etc. until you have yourself a blank battery tray. Chances are your battery cells will come with wires on there for connecting it to something. Next, you need to get contact going. Almost there. Much thanks to electronics lab, and reader [surfer] for the tips and pics! Comments

GRYNX » Part 2 - New IR LED The problem The solution The components The result Disclaimer The problem So, in part 1 I tried to use 10 regular IR LED’s (CQY99) as illumination for my modified Philips PCVC740k webcam. The solution So, I found a LED called HSDL-4220 with a brother called HSDL-4230. The continuous electrical specifications for them are 875nm centre, max 100mA, 1.5V. Now, let’s have a look at the test rig and the pictures of the emitted light from the IR LED’s. GRYNX » Webcam in the dark, IR Have you ever been using a webcam in a room with low light? Or have you ever wanted to have a webcam monitoring your dog, driveway or baby? Well, I have - both. Using a webcam in a room with low light usually works bad, and in most cases it doesn’t work at all. But what do you do if you have even less light? Professional spy cams and night goggles use an infrared light source and then use a camera with high sensitivity without the IR filter and then the camera will record the IR light as visible light. So, what I thought was - why not remove the IR filter from my Philips PCVC740 and then build my own IR light source? Try this - set up your webcam or digital camera and then point a remote control towards the lens at the same time as you look at the resulting picture on the computer or LCD viewfinder.

projects - mini-itx cluster The "Mini-Cluster"By Glen Gardner, USA - Posted on 25 February, 2004 Introduction Early supercomputers used parallel processing and distributed computing and to link processors together in a single machine. The machine runs FreeBSD 4.8, and MPICH 1.2.5.2. The "Mini-Cluster" I built a Mini-ITX based massively parallel cluster named PROTEUS. The construction is simple and inexpensive. The controlling node has a 160 GB ATA-133 HDD, and the computational nodes use 340 MB IBM microdrives in compact flash to IDE adapters. Each motherboard is powered by a Morex DC-DC converter, and the entire cluster is powered by a rather large 12V DC switching power supply. With the exception of the metalwork, power wiring, and power/reset switching, everything is off the shelf. The original 6 node configuration. The completed 12 node cluster. This image shows the power use (60 watts) at idle for 6 nodes. Power and Cooling Hardware Construction The cluster is built in two nearly identical racks.

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