Fun with acid!

Hello everyone!
today, we are going to play with acid!
It will make concrete bubble, hardened epoxy appear like its boiling, and skin feel like its on fire!

Thermoelectric cooling.

 Alright, most people know the standard cooling methods. air cooling is a tried and true method that has been used for decades. water cooling is now becoming more and more popular, but are there any other methods that can hit lower temps without costing nearly as much as water cooling?

Finished companion cube

 Alright, so here is the final cube. the dimensions are 24.5" x 24.5" x 24.5". it weighs about 85 lbs, and is made from a total of two 8'x4' sheets of .75" MDF. the lights are actually electroluminescent wire.

the story behind this is that i promised i would make the girl of my dreams somehting amazing, and well... this is what i came up with. we are both huge portal fans. so she got a companion cube, a portal themed mix cd with glados telling her how awesome she is, and cake!

Companion cube build part 2

Ok, so this is the second post about the companion cube build. the first post was loading slowly due to how many embedded videos were on it... so i split it up for readability and load speed.

after a long break, i am back! (with companion cube awesomness!)

ok, so this is the process of building post. there will be another post showing off the final product!

as you can see by the picture, the cube is made from a box, and corner pieces, each of which are made from 3 pieces of  .75" MDF

I became tired of having my cell phone die...

Well, i'm sure this has happened to everyone. you wake up, grab something to eat, grab your stuff and drive to work, but you forgot to charge your cellphone overnight, and now you have 12% battery and a long day of moving around ahead of you. Maybe you don’t have a wall socket you can just plug your phone into. No, your phone dies and you have a terrible day because you cant look at seeingbinary when you should be doing something productive.

Problem... solved.

the backpack "boom"box

So, you have seen the 80's boombox to the ear characters, always blasting music, looking like fools. Well, im not ok with the stranded lameness brought by holding a boombox to my ear. so instead, i made this... a backpack with 5 speakers, a 12 inch subwoofer, and a 1200 watt amp. Overkill? I THINK NOT! (ok, maybe a little, but its damn awesome)

Evil doom power glove v.1

Ok, so sometimes i like to break away from the annoying task of pc repair / IT junk and make something awesome.
well here it is, a glove that outputs 9500 volts... which is not too bad, but awefuly painful. check out the full post for how to / technical specs!

finished installing my car stereo.

ok, so blog readers, you probably have been missing me. i have been busy. lately, i got 2 certifications + college and high school life all going on at once.

but you guys don't care about that, you care about the awesome things i do. well, anyone who is into audio... i have something to show you. i have been working on my car for the past month, and boy does it sound good!

how to make a quick and easy 5v and 12v power supply.

A good power supply is a must if you do hobby electronics. However a low end variable voltage power supply (like the one pictured to the left) can cost  more than $100. most of the time, electronics need 3.3v, 5v or 12v. so in this tutorial, ill show you how to make a bad ass 12v and 5v power supply.

12v line: 198 watts, 12v@16.5amp
5v line: 5 watts, 5v@1amp

Know the specs: Graphic cards.

If you are into playing video games, rendering 3d animation, or editing large video files, a high end graphics card is a must. Graphic cards are responsible to draw what you see on your screen at around 60 times a second. Due to their power, a lot of programs are using the GPU (graphics processing unit) in collaboration with the CPU to crunch numbers.

Know the Specs: RAM

Cool, so you need to buy 8 gigs of ram. well, obviously 8 gigs is better than 4 gigs, but what about if one type of ram has 10-10-10-30 timings and the other has 9-9-9-27? what do all the numbers mean? well... they are rarely explained and unless you try to hard to find them, no one seems to tell you.

Know the Specs: CPU

Do you know all there is about the cpu?

a good network monitoring solution, and how this mess happened.

ok... so as you know, i do a lot of tech based stuff. i set up servers for the net admin at my school, i configure a lot of computers, and most of the time it all goes swell and dandy. but sometimes stuff breaks, and when it breaks... it's usually is something big. for example, a server going down that controls your DNS / Wins server... or a switch going bad and 1/2 of a building looses all connectivity.

how to prevent all this? enter Nagios!

The Hard Drive Speaker

ok, so what happens when a nerd has a dead hard drive and too much free time in school? simple -- he makes a speaker out of it!

Expect a break in posts.

on Friday, me and my friend decided to ride our bikes down to McDonalds... we stopped at a crosswalk, but the light was not changing fast enough, so he rode across to the median. there was heavy traffic in the other two lains, so he decided to ride back, but a van parked in the tun lain, blocking his view of traffic (and the traffics view of him)
he puched off to come back over to where i was without checking for oncoming traffic, and rode right out in front of a van. the van had no time to break, and hit him going full speed (about 45 mph). he was not wearing a helmet.

that's that a skull does to a windshield in a 45 MPH collision.

New keyboard.

Hello everyone, just wanted to give an update....
before, i was using a razer lychosa keyboard.... if u dont know what they look like, they are quite shiny and nice too look at.

wifi anyone?

when people look at wireless routers they sometimes ask linksys or d-link, wireless b, g or n... but have you ever asked yourself what the TX output wattage is? how many external antennas you can hook up, or how far you can send a 2.4ghz signal without an external amplifier?

well, thats what i think of every day..... i need rage, range is the name of the game, and im here to win it.
when you boil it all down, most routers are the same..... other than the number of antennas, however... most routers now have internal antennas (ill cover that later)... so usually u can only find routers with 2 external antennas. thus, its all about the antennas!

18 dBi tx antenna (top) and a 13dBi rx antenna (bottom)

SSH and you #2 - doing it right.

ok, so if you followed my previous tutorial with freeSSHd, you might have noticed some pesky errors....
when i wrote that, i was testing everything on a LAN network, and it all seemed to go well.... but i recently started using it at college and i was baffled to see an error every 2 minutes or so.

in this tutorial, we will talk about how to set up winSSHd.... as the name implies, it is win (well, its for windows).  some of this tutorial will be the same as the last, however the majority of it involving hosting has changed.

battlefield 3

i know i usually do tech tutorials....but....