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Building A New Computer : Part 3 : BIOS, Drivers, and Software

Welcome to Part 3 of the series – Building a New Computer : In this section we are going to look at what happens when we turn on your brand new computer for the first time. If you haven’t yet read Part 1 : Picking Parts and Part 2 : Putting It All Together, check those out first. Now we get to the fun stuff: Turning it on. If everything in Part 2 was done correctly, it should turn on. But you won’t be greeted by a familiar scene just yet, because …

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Building a New Computer : Part 2 : Putting It All Together

Building a new computer feels like a daunting task: What if I mess it up? Install something incorrectly? Can’t make something work? Break everything? I know it seems scary if you haven’t done it before, but I promised it’s really just like a grown up set of Legos that becomes something useful. There are thousands of online sources for information about computer building, and in many circles, its like a techie right-of-passage. You get a certain amount of nerd-clout if you’ve built your own computer. So now that you’ve read …

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Building a New Computer : Part I : Picking Parts

I’ve been running my life on a 2013 Macbook Air for a while now. Blog posts, research, work, gaming, etc…. and its been alright, but there’s only so much you can do on a laptop when it comes to more demanding things like video editing and gaming. Even just opening 10 tabs on Chrome while doing research for a blog project tends to slow everything down, so I started the process of building my own monster desktop, and this post is now the result of that endeavor. So below I’m …

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Couch Console & Charging Table

A couple of months ago, my wife and I bought a new couch for our upstairs entertaining area. We wanted it to be big enough to fit everyone, and this thing can. 12 people at once so far. The only problem is it covers up ALL of the outlets around 2 of the walls and I used to use those outlets for all kinds of things. Lamps, phone chargers, the main router, a subwoofer… So we’ve created a problem for ourselves unintentionally. Then I went over to a buddy of …

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Raspberry Pi : Garage Door Opener

I had to buy a new garage door opener remote because my old remote’s button had disintegrated and no longer worked. I was curious if the board itself could still be activated and, sure enough, when I hit both pins on the board with a wire, the garage door opened. So now I wondered if we could make this board interact with a raspberry pi so that it could be activated over the network. Sure enough, you can! Here’s how. The basics steps are: Turn the Raspberry Pi into a …

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Wireless Outdoor Patio Speakers

One of our favorite things is to sit outside on the back porch on a nice cool night and read a book while the chickens cluck themselves to sleep and the garden pond trickles in the background. But sometimes you just want to listen to your favorite jams while hanging out with friends, so I set out to install speakers in the backyard. I found out that there are tons of ways to accomplish this, from trendy looking waterproof speakers to hidden rock speakers you put in the landscaping, but …

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Build a Website

So you have an idea you’d like to tell the world about? Well, its easy to do, and you’re going to need a website. I’m gonna walk you through setting one up. I’m going to attempt to break down the technical stuff and have links setup so that you just have to follow this guide and you’ll be up and running with your own website in about an hour. First off, whats it going to cost? You’ll need to buy two things: A domain name (ie. your site address) Web …