Adjust your LCD display’s contrast and brightness correctly

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I have three monitors hooked up to my Dell XPS M1710 and I swear they all look a little different.  On a Mac I would just go to Colorsync and adjust away but its not quite that easy and uniform on a PC. If you have to adjust colors and contrast on a PC I recommend ScreenCheck which basically allows you to adjust your screen with a constant display that lets you know when your LCD display has too much contrast dialed in or if your brightness is turned down too low.  Yeah its a little low tech, but sometimes low tech is all you have to work with when you are dealing with someone elses PC.

Check it out

November 27, 2007 | Filed Under Hacks | 1 Comment 

Prank: Hack your HP’s display’s text

This HP Printer Display hack is not so much of a useful one as a pranky hack.  With a little stretch of the imagination you can use the screen of your HP printer to remind yourself of little to-dos when you visit your printer.  Most likely however it will just cause confusion and havoc around the office when the friendly HP printer displays the message “Insert Coin” or “Feed me paper!”. 

Although anyone can do this hack with a command prompt and a few lines of code IronGeek created a slick little program that even a novice can handle.  All you do is load it and click the printer you intend to hack, insert some text, and press the send display button.  Next thing you know the accounting dept’s HP is telling them all how much they suck (or are awesome).  The secretarys will all flock to the printer to see what it will say today.  All good clean fun.

Check it out

November 7, 2007 | Filed Under Hacks | 2 Comments 

Easily Sync your bookmarks to anything even your mobile device

There are many ways of transferring your bookmarks from Computer to Computer but one of my favorites is very simple. All I do is go to the Bookmark Manager in Firefox and export my bookmarks.  Then I email myself the bookmark file with Gmail. Once you receive your email you click on the view attachment button in Gmail. This opens up the html document where-ever you are even on your mobile device.

Click on the view button in your Gmail

It will open up and look like this (Exploded Hierarchical view)

June 18, 2007 | Filed Under Cell Phones, Google, Hacks | 4 Comments 

Modded Mac SE/30 with Mac Mini internals

Someone in Japan jammed a Mac Mini in the Case of a vintage Mac SE/30.  Of course not much from the original SE/30 survived not even the original CRT which was replaced with another CRT capable of taking a RGB VGA input.  Overall the integration looks pretty good for a case mod.  But some might ask why, when even a stock 1986 Mac Plus can beat 2007 AMD Dual Core in testing.

Check it out (Japanese and English)

More Pictures Below…

June 12, 2007 | Filed Under Hacks, Mac | 1 Comment 

Split Screen Firefox Extension, Two or More Browser Screens in One

Lots of screen real estate is great, but sometimes the applications that use that screen may not take full advantage of the hardware you run on.  Take for instance Firefox, running Firefox in maximized mode on a 1920 X 1200 screen is a huge waste. A screen that big could show up to four web pages, but you would have to manually set each window up.  So along comes Split Browser, its an extension for Firefox that can literally split your Firefox into two or more sections for side by side reading.  This is great for Google fans who want to run their Google Calendar and Gmail right next to each other without a goofy greasemonkey script.  Maybe you are writing a review on a website and you want to write in one section and browse in the other.  The possibilities are endless.  Whether you have an second monitor or just have one Split Browser is a must have extension for Firefox.

Here are some ways to “Split” your browser from the publisher’s website.

* Choose the “Split Browser to” menu in the context menu.
* Choose the “Load in Split Browser” menu in the context menu on link.
* Click popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area.
* Drop links, bookmarks, etc. to popup-button on top/bottom/left/right edges of the content area while dragging.

Check it out

June 11, 2007 | Filed Under Firefox, Hacks | 3 Comments 

Convert regular audio cassettes to Mp3s

ElectricPI has a nice article on converting regular cassette tapes to mp3.  Why you would want the notoriously staticy music from a regular audio cassette to a mp3 file format when in most cases you could find the equivelent digital copy of the same audio elsewhere?  Well I suppose not all audio yet resides in the digital realm yet.  So if you want to reminince about your favorite 80s hair band while listening to your iPod or PC get to reading ElectricPIs tutorial.

Check it out

June 7, 2007 | Filed Under Apple, Hacks, Life Tip, Mac | 2 Comments 

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