Oaken Gearbox

There are likely many ways to complete this task. The method below uses GIMP 2.8.8, an opensource (and free) competitor to Adobe's Photoshop and a pretty generic Cannon Scanner. Scan your artwork in Black and White (not greyscale) at twice your intended resolution (I chose 600dpi, the highest offered by my scanner software) and save to a format of your choice. I used .tif because there is no quality loss, but it's not really very important for this application. Don't be alarmed if the result has ugly, jagged edges and extraneous stray pixels. We'll take care of that later. Your scan will look something like this Open the saved file in GIMP. Rotate if needed. Note GIMP's "Select by color" feature didn't seem to work if I didn't first rotate the image (presumably a bug?). Crop out the unwanted margins. Select Image>Mode>RGB Color Go to Image Size and set the resolution to half of what it was before. This will eliminate a lot of ...

 I was recently given a 1st Gen Nook Simple Touch by  Barnes & Noble. Since used books are relatively cheap and I only read 3 or 4 a year, I've never seen the need to own an eReader. That being said I love a good gadget, and the NST is simple, easy to customize, and surprisingly capable given its age and limited intent. Essentially, the NST is a very simple tablet running Android 1.2.1. Although many apps in the Play Store are not compatible with such an old version of Android, many still work and often old .apks can be found and side-loaded to your Nook (including the Kindle App, where ebooks are generally cheaper that from B&N). Below are various steps I took to set up my Nook. 1. Connect to my home WiFi network. Oddly enough this took longer than anything else I did. Due to its older hardware, the Nook Simple Touch is not compatible with Wireless N at 5GHz. When I first tried to connect, it showed my network, allowed me to type in my password, even connect...

If you've ever bought anything from a smoker, you know exactly how hard that smell is to lose. I recently bought an older ThinkPad on Craigslist with this problem. Every time the fan kicked on, my living room was filled with the smell of stale cigarettes. The fix took some effort, but it did work. I first disassembled the whole case and removed the fan. I found some very good instructions for my particular model that helped me accomplish this without doing permanent damage. If you've worked on computer hardware at all, you're probably familiar with the grey scum that accumulates on fans and vents. Well this one was full of a black scum (ash? nicotine?). I wiped it as clean as I could with wet Q-Tips. After all the scum was gone I sprayed the whole thing, including the nearby foam inserts with pine scented air freshener. After reassembly, it now smells like air freshener, a big improvement over cigarettes. It did seem to make the fan noisier, though, so I would reco...

Although the big tech companies like Google, Apple, & Microsoft spend a lot of time creating "ecosystems" that integrate all their products and services slickly together, I, like a lot people tend to pick and choose and end up with a conglomeration that doesn't always play nice together. When I got my Android phone a couple years ago, I discovered Google Calendar Sync, a light utility that can be installed on a Windows Computer and pull calendar events from Outlook and add them to Google Calendar (and therefore your Android), as well as the other way around. I've been told this also works for iPhone. I don't have one, but as long as you can use Google Calendar on an iPhone I don't see why it wouldn't. When I recently got a new work laptop and tried to reinstall this handy utility, I discovered this program is no longer available for download from Google. http://support.google.com/calendar/answer/94020?hl=en (c'mon, Google, remember, don...

Ever wondered how to add an auxiliary input to an old stereo/tape player using nothing but a soldering iron and some old headphones? Then stop reading right now and head over  here . Just want to learn a little more about how analog audio equipment works and doesn't work? Then read on to hear a little of what I've picked up over the years. Last week the cassette adapter I was using in my car to listen music from my phone gave out on the left channel. I was pretty sure it was just a break in the cable, since I was able to get sound back by holding the wire just right, so I decided to give repairing it a shot. I started by cutting the earbuds off an old set of airline headphones and stripping them back to bare wires on the ends. When I opened up the cassette, I was surprised to find not two, but three wires soldered to the tape head. Some quick research revealed that the third wire is a signal ground , which makes contact with a ground pin inside your iPod or...

The first question you may be asking is what exactly is an "unlocked" smartphone? The second is probably "Why should I care?" The answer to the second question is that you could save hundreds of dollars per year on your phone bill by using an unlocked phone on a smaller carrier. The first question is a bit more complicated. If you're like most Americans with a smartphone, you probably have an Apple or Android device that you got for free (or less than $200) when you signed a two year contract with one of the "Big Three" American network providers. These providers subsidize an expensive phone for you, and in return you are obligated to pay their (costly) monthly talk and data fees. An unlocked phone is one that is not tied to any carrier and thus can be activated for a much cheaper monthly fee , or pay-per-minute prices. Note that this is different from "jailbreaking" (iPhone) or "rooting" (Android). That process is used to...

Valve released their "Big Picture" Steam interface from beta several weeks ago and I am very impressed. Frankly, it puts to shame the dashboards on both the xbox360 and PS3 that have had years of development. I started playing PC games when my dad bought our first Mac with a CD-ROM and I checked out Myst from the library. Despite using the original Xbox for a few years, I've always preferred the versatility of a PC. That  being said I now spend hours a day in front of computer screen at work and plopping down on the couch in front of my 42" HDTV sounds a lot more relaxing than taking on the zombie horde with my mouse and keyboard. Although Gabe Newell & Valve are now in the process of developing their own Steam Box console, I didn't want to wait that long. So with a little Googling and the help of the websites listed at the bottom, I came up with a way to run Steam Big Picture as a shell under its own user account. This post gives instructions on how to ...