Archive for the ‘free’ Category

Make a gadget screen protector on the cheap

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

I recently became the proud owner of a Sprint HTC Touch, and as such I wanted to protect the screen from getting scratched up. But my not-so-fat wallet protested at the $20 for commercial screen protectors.

I mean, it is plastic right? $20 is a lot in my opinion. But even if you do go that route, it is still cheap insurance. I chose to find my own way, and I came across this article on instructables.com http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-your-own-screen-protector./

I added my own spin on things, since I didn’t want to use the soapy water solution.

After placing the tape, I used a credit card to smooth it from one end to the other to lay it down while removing air bubbles. Worked out pretty well.

After its placed its just a simple step of cutting the excess off…

And that is it. You just protected your gadget for free (if you had the tape laying around like I did).

I hope this helps some of you. With today’s economy, we need more tips like these.

Meat: On my screen

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

I just finished up a little pop-art-esk wallpaper. I offer it for free here under the Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons License
MEAT by Peter Peterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Turn that old router into a SUPER ROUTER!

Monday, September 21st, 2009

super router

I begin this post with a dilemma: Your wireless router is on one end of your estate, and your nerd-o-phile self wants to get online whilst on the other end of your estate, which is in fact out of wireless range.

Lets imagine for a second that your wireless apparatus is working fine, and there are no hard lines to run from one side of you house to the other.
Now, lets discuss your options in this hypothetical scenario.

Option 1: You could run some cat-5 to all corners of your property/home.

Option 2: You could move your modem and router to a more central location which would also involve running more ethernet cable to your computer(s) unless you moved those as well.

Option 3: You could hack one of your old routers to make a wireless repeater, there by expanding your wireless range and raise your geek factor by at least 2.
I don’t know about you, but, option 3 sounds the cheapest, and the most fun and rewarding. I have been facing this exact dilemma for some time now, and finally got around to doing something about it.
I decided to use a linux based firmware that has been around for some time and has a big community of followers and developers, which means that information is abundant; DD-WRT.

DD-WRT replaces the software on your router with a chock full of features you might expect to find in $400-$600 units. Depending on your router, the process of installing it can vary, make sure you find a detailed write up on installing it on your particular model.

Mine is a Linksys WRT-150N v1.1, a fairly new model which was replaced by my Airport Extreme (I needed wireless printing, storage). Here are the steps I took:

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