As I was biking home one day, a couple blocks from my house I noticed a flat screen TV on the curve in front of a house. I biked faster, picked up my car and inspected the TV. It looked in good conditions so I said to myself “If I can pick it up by myself I will take it with me”. I was able to lift it by myself and put it in my back seat. Plugged it in, and powered it on, I noticed a quick flash, sound turned on but black screen. Doing some googling I noticed it is a pretty common problem with these model of TV’s.
How To’s
How to’s on how to fix things!
How to: Fix Moto G4 Play Poor GPS Connection
This is an awesome phone, it does everything I want it to and battery lasts more than a day :). Unfortunately I started having GPS problems and after googling soon realized it was a common problem with the phone :/ . Thanks to the XDA thread I was able to do the fix below which improved my GPS signal 🙂 . The GPS readings were taken from the front of my house for consistency.
How to: Replace and/or Upgrade a Flowtron Starter Bulb
Being in Wisconsin, mosquitos a merciless, they will suck all your blood. I bought a Flowtron mosquito repellent lamp off Amazon BK-15D 1/2 acre coverage, unfortunately we used it twice and it stopped working. Bought new bulbs and soon realized that it was the starter. I looked all over the internet and realized that the company was the only one who sold those types of starters anymore. They also weren’t returning my calls to get a new starter bulb or light bulb to see what the problem was.
Doing a bit of research I realized that I could upgrade the starter to use newer fluorescent starters, it would save money and hassle in the future, and hopefully last much longer.
How To: Automatically remove Tunnelblick route after disconnect
Tunnelblick has been working great except for one problem. On macOS 10.11.6 I need to manually delete the route after I change gateways (home vs school vs coffee shop)
How to: Create a Magic Mirror 2 with Pi Zero W!
I’ve seen a lot of magic mirror projects and finally decided to make my own 🙂 I don’t spend much time looking in the mirror so I decided to make it instead an entry way mirror. As I leave the house, I can see my calendar, what the weather should be like, and motivational quotes. I relied heavily on the post below, just followed step by step, added missing steps, and took out some of the wordiness of the post. Will post pictures once I finish!
How To: Fix “Sync Failed” when using doubleTwist
This is a minor but unexpected error I kept getting trying to sync playlists to my device using doubleTwist and my smartphone – Moto 4G Play.
Problem: Sync Failed error when using doubleTwist
- I kept getting this error and wasn’t sure why….
Solution: Don’t forget to enable File Transfer on your android device!
- Charge Only is the default choice!
How to: Sync iTunes with Android phone – doubleTwist
Unlike most people, I still have a local library of music on my computer, and I don’t like streaming music over 3G/LTE because it uses precious data! Therefore I wanted to find a way to create playlists on my computer and put them on my phone. Unfortunately It wasn’t as straight forward as I hoped, manually copying and pasting music between devices was cumbersome and not idea. Until I found doubleTwist!
So here is my workflow :
- Install doubleTwist Sync on your Windows computer!
- Create a smart playlist in iTunes that aggregates all songs with 5 stars
- Inside doubleTwist ONLY sync this playlist to your phone.
Now whenever you want to add new songs to your Android device, go to itunes, 5 star any new songs you want to add, sync with doubleTwist!
How To: Ninja your Google Searches
Google is great, but with a few tips it can be awesome!! These are the tips I found most helpful to memorize.
Noob Ninja
- Ignore Spelling (google will correct you)
- Only unique, descriptive keywords
- Use quotes for exact match
- “Pirates are awesome!”
- Case insensitive
- Cats == cats
- Ignore Special Characters
- Wont be in the search: @#%^*()=[]\
- Omit common words
- a, the i
- Put them in quotes if they are important: “a”, “the”, “i”
How to: Install Arduino IDE Ubuntu
I tried installing Arduino IDE from the repo’s through apt-get but realialized that the Arduino Yun was not listed. So I google some more and eventually installed the newest IDE and arduino Yun was finally listed.
Steps:
- Download Arduino IDE (file ending in .tar.xz)
- Extract the folder containing the files
- IMPORTANT: Move the folder containing the Arduino IDE files into the directory you want it to reside
- The installer will rely on this being the location of the Arduino IDE
- In a terminal, cd into the directory containing the Arduino IDE
- Run the command $ sudo ./install
Note: When you run ./install, sometimes desktop shortcut will be created but you wont be the owner (It will show up with an X and a lock) in that case run $sudo chown <username> ~/Desktop/Arduino-IDE.desktop
How To: Disassemble Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard and make it wired
I could not find any tutorials on how to disassemble this keyboard so I thought I’d take pics along the way to disassembling mine. I also decided to make it wired (still with the dongle!!) because I realized that if you lose the dongle, there is no way to replace it and you need to spend another $70 on a new keyboard !!! So I decided to hide it in the body of the keyboard, and that way I will never risk losing it!