Category: Tech

3D Printers. They’re everywhere. They’re expensive. They’re cantankerous.  They’re smelly. And I WANT ONE! So I bought one. Cheapest I could find. A DIY kit in China for ¥1,000 ($158). I think it was the cheapest printer anywhere. When I received the very heavy box and opened it up, I thought “OMG what have I done!?” It’s a black acrylic box about 32cm on a side. There were about 200 screws, nuts, and washers along with wires, motors, rods, switches, a motherboard, power supply and LED control panel, etc. I had also ordered 250g of Red PLA filament. That was missing. Continue Reading →

IoT, or Internet of Things. We’ve been hearing a lot about that lately: how common household devices are becoming connected to the Internet to make our lives easier and costlier. Of course we’ve also been reading a lot about how insecure these IoT devices can be: Are We Creating An Insecure Internet of Things (IoT)? Security Challenges and Concerns Schneier on ‘really bad’ IoT security: ‘It’s going to come crashing down’ Take these 6 security measures to protect your IoT devices from hackers And many, many more. So, anyway, ignoring all this I blissfully went about looking for a smart Continue Reading →

Backstory Many months ago I bought a cheap refurbished Linksys E1550 Wireless Router. I wanted it so I could install DD-WRT  firmware and get some needed additional functionality not found on the stock Linksys firmware. If you know where I live, then you know what I needed… At any rate, I did all the right things and followed the directions for my router by flashing the mini-E1550 firmware, then flashing the big-nv60k firmware. All went well, it even showed the feature I wanted, yet I could not get it to work. Seeing as the ‘suggested’ firmware was over 3 years Continue Reading →

And again, and again, and again…. (Another tail of trials and tribulations) Last Oct (2014), Google announced a new Nexus phone, the Nexus 6. Code named ‘Shamu’, because its a massive whale of a phone: 5.96″ screen, quad-core CPU and a 3220 mAh battery. It was time for a new phone. My Galaxy Nexus was showing its age, not only in performance, but in display. The Super AMOLED screen was showing darker and darker gray lines across the screen that made viewing very hard and irritating.   So while I waited the 3 LONG months for someone (Google, Motorola, Amazon, Continue Reading →

It was a dark and stormy night… naa It was the best of times…. ack A long time ago in a…. ugh Way back when, in a land far away… (to many of you), we arrived in Shanghai. One of the first things I set out to do was build my mother-in-law a new PC. Her old system was from before the turn of the century and actually wouldn’t run anymore. So I set out on a goal to make it as small as possible and my wife set the goal of making it as cheaply as possible. Still struggling Continue Reading →