—Turning on SMS notifications where ever possible to save precious battery life & minimize data usage

(photo credit: Wikipedia)

SMS has been with us from the very beginning of the so-called “mobile revolution”, and yet many of us still don’t use it to its full potential. Maybe we’ve been conditioned to avoid the draconian limits and overage charges from the mobile overlords, but strangely these days carriers are the handing out unlimited messaging plans like it’s going out of style. What else could they do? They’ve been gouging us over for years, charging for a service that costs them next to nothing to deliver (don’t get me started on the international text plan racket) and in response people have shifted their methods of communication to more data-centric options like social media, apps like Kik, or the ever-awesome (and free) Google Voice. They’re losing profits and I say serves them right. Now they’ve changed their tactics to making data their cash cow; tiered data plans, or “unlimited” data for “just a little more”. And while it’s hard for us consumers to quell our ever-increasing data addiction, it’s easy for the frugal masses to find a cheaper route.

—Followup: Repurposing an old laptop LCD screen as a 2nd monitor for Trinity

Just wanted to pop in and post a quick update to my little repurposed laptop LCD screen project. Quite frankly I’ve become disillusioned with this whole “blogging thing” in general, and so I’ve changed the motivation behind it. But enough of that, here’s what’s going on:

—Update: Repurposing an old laptop LCD screen as a 2nd monitor for Trinity

Well it’s finally here. Took longer than I anticipated, but that’s mostly because of budget constraints. I finally got around to ordering it on 7/20/2012, and it arrived in about 2 weeks. Not at all unreasonable, considering it shipped all the way from Shenzhen China. In my original post,

—Enter: MintyBoost – The Portable, Battery-Powered, USB Charging Unit

Sometime last year I stumbled upon this great DIY project for the budding tinkerer. The MintyBoost: a portable AA battery-powered phone charger concealed within an unassuming Altoids tin.

—Return of the Mac!

Okay so we’re back in business. Trinity‘s roaring again. Fiddling with it after a long weekend, it turns out I was using the wrong HDMI port (doh). Once I switched to the HDMI port 1(?), below the VGA port, I was able to boot into Lion. That was a close one. The penalties of trying out the latest updates early on.  It was a serious headache reading through Toleda’s guide especially with so many recent updates and changes, but I learned quite a bit in the process. Here are Toleda’s Guides on the matter (& update). They taught me how high-definition sound is handled in OS X and how to do future edits on my own. This should come in handy when my new graphics card arrives (well first I have to choose one). HDMI audio works as before, as well as line-in (mic), line-out, headphones, and I’m told optical 7.1 surround sound, though I have nothing to test it with (yet).

—Waking Trinity from far far away: How I finally got Wake-on-LAN working with a Linksys E3000 & TomatoUSB!

Success! After a month of trial and error (and more error), I’ve finally found a way to reliably turn on Trinity over the internet. Wake-on-LAN—you know, that feature where your computer’s onboard ethernet adapter listens to the internet for a “magic packet“ of data telling it to wake up your computer. Why do I want to do this? I want to access Trinity on the go and on command via LogMeIn, without running her 24/7. That wouldn’t be very green now would it? I was really close after reading a guide on lifehacker, but somehow I couldn’t crack it. I could only achieve my goal from within my own wireless network at home, not very useful when I cross the pond. It seems after a period of about thirty minutes, dormant devices disappear from the router’s ARP cache, making it invisible to magic packet bursts sent from the outside of your home network (or so I’ve read). The solution? I needed better tools.

The stock Linksys firmware of my WRT54GS2 is ok, but it lacks several advanced features, mainly WOL. TomatoUSB is free*, open source firmware, written by third parties giving you greater control of your router’s settings and capabilities. I’ve heard good things about DD-WRT, it seems to reign in popularity, but TomatoUSB is a bit simpler to install so—yea, I went with TomatoUSB. The great thing about it is there’s a WOL feature built right into the interface. Simply log into the router, click the “WOL” heading, find your machine, and click on it to wake it up. Easy peasy. It seems the trick to doing this from outside your network is setting up remote access to your router. Doing so requires knowing your external IP address, the one given to you by your ISP [You can check it at whatsmyip.org]. The other problem with that is, sometimes they change it without telling you, and if you’re not at home to spot the address change you’ll be essentially locked out. No matter, that problem has been solved.

Want to know how to do this for yourself?

—Yup, we’re still here

Apologies for the hiatus. Did some traveling, cut the hobby budget. While away, my experiment to control Trinity from afar failed as I couldn’t get her to wake up using Wake-on-LAN (WOL). It’s proving to be a bit trickier than I thought and I think I may need a better router. Anyhoo, a few projects floating around in the ether: 

—Repurposing an old laptop LCD screen as a 2nd monitor for Trinity

I haven’t posted anything on it (yet), but following some work I did on Silvia, I took on the task of rehabilitating my girlfriend’s old Dell Inspiron 1150, which was a mess to say the least: missing keys, a broken headphone jack, dead speakers, and a decapitated display. I did my best to bring it back from the grave but sadly it’s still a mute (speakers still dead). It does run with a tad bit more pep, and sports a few new coats of paint. My biggest triumph was repairing the headphone jack. Out of that project I acquired an extra LCD screen because, as it turned out, all I needed was a new converter cable, hinges, and cosmetic plastic covers to fix the display. The ill fated replacement was also the wrong size at 15″, though somewhat compatible (eBay burn). That extra screen has been sitting in “the workshop” dreaming of a day it would once again have purpose. Welp, it seems that day has finally come.

—Trinity: The Build – A Temperature Control Scheme (& Schematic)

Cool vs. Noise — a delicate balance in my quest for the silence of the fans. I ask myself, “just how many fans are too many before I find myself having to crank up the volume on a riveting scene of Burn Notice?” Fans do the job, but they can be annoyingly loud for the purposes of home entertainment.

One of the problems I’m having with Trinity’s fan setup is airflow optimization. There really isn’t enough space to direct air in a straight path over the components I want to keep cool, mainly the CPU. From the power supply, to the mess of wiring, air is buffeting around the case’s many obstacles. I’ve tidied things up quite a bit with wire sheathing and cable ties, but it’s still pretty messy.

—Trinity: The Build – Built-in SD Card Reader & 3 Port USB Hub Mod for the CustoMac Mini 2011

Soon after successfully getting Trinity up and running I was already thinking of ways to improve her. One of the things bugging me were those two front facing USB ports.
Plugging-in my keyboard and wireless mouse left me with no open ports up front for say, a quick external hard drive transfer. I noticed that the motherboard had an extra internal USB header and thought adding more ports should be a snap. While I was at it, I could throw in an SD card reader for off-loading my camera or phone. There was one problem: How would I implement it? Most SD card readers on the market come in the form of USB dongles or 3.5″ bay devices designed to fit inside the case. I was already using the one 3.5″ bay I had for the hard drive and I really hate dongles. This needed to be built-in.