Categories
woodworking

DIY wooden shoe rack (part 2)

Previously I wrote about a shoe rack that I’m making for my wife. The initial design had two flaws. First some shoes tended to slide of the shelf. Secondly there was a space between the stands and some shelfs. As a consequence the whole structure was unstable. Yesterday I disassembled the rack. Then I cut […]

Categories
electronics Make:Electronics

Breadboard malfunction (redo experiment 29 and 30 of Make:Electronics)

During experiment 29 and 30 of Make:Electronics I noticed that the circuit were very susceptible to noise to the point that it really interfered with the experiments. While thinking about it I suspected that something was wrong with the breadboard. I decided to redo both experiments with a another breadboard (but without the low pass […]

Categories
PC

Harddisk repair of a laptop (finished)

In my last entry I wrote about a laptop from a friend that had a damaged harddisk. Yesterday I had some time to replace the harddisk with a new one. Replacing components from a modern laptop can be very cumbersome nowadays. It also requires special equipment. I used the tools from a Velleman repair kit […]

Categories
PC

Harddisk repair of a laptop

I friend gave an ASUS X750L laptop to me for repair. While gaming he smashed the laptop with his hand (which is not a very smart thing to do). After this incident the laptop became very slow or so he told me. I booted the laptop to see what was going on an I heard […]

Categories
electronics Make:Electronics

Fuzz: experiment 30 of Make:Electronics

After some refurbishing around the house I’m finally back with Make:Electronics. In experiment 30 I used most of the circuitry from experiment 29. The idea is to create a distorted sound. The base of an NPN transitor receives the output from the 555 timer thus controlling the base of another NPN transistor (see fig 5-55 […]

Categories
woodworking

DIY wooden shoe rack

We are refurbishing the top floor of our house. My wife’s wardrobe is on this floor. She has a lot of shoe’s although she claims that she doesn’t have enough 😉 Anyway the shoes no longer fit in her wardrobe so I promised her to make a nice shoe rack. This shoe rack can free […]

Categories
general PC

Create an instructable (at Instructables)

After having built the OpenELEC mediastreamer I felt the urge to create an instruction for the community. This blog isn’t very suitable for that. I have been looking at Instructables for a while now. Sometimes I landed on their website when I searched for something to make or I just browsed the instructables to get […]

Categories
PC

OpenELEC on a DIY streaming media box

IMPORTANT: OpenELEC has been discontinued since 2017. Instead of OpenELEC I can recommend LibreELEC. In previous entries I wrote about planning and building a DIY streaming media box running OpenELEC. I used several PC components that I already had spare (motherboard, processor and memory) and was able to built a very capable OpenELEC machine for […]

Categories
Linux open source PC

DIY streaming media box: building it.

Building the streaming media box consists of a hardware and a software part. Building the hardware is relatively easy. With these modern PC components you can’t do much wrong. First I inserted the 4Gb DDR3 memory into the motherboard. In my earlier post on this topic I mentioned that I already had a MSI mini-ITX […]

Categories
PC

DIY streaming media box: the components

As described in my last post I’m building a streaming media box running Kodi. I finally received the components I needed to complete the build (together with the motherboard, 4Gb memory and a Celeron G1610 processor that I had spare). As a case I chose the LC-1410mi from LC-Power. It’s a small black case with […]