Technology

Change your iPod’s font color

Change your iPod’s font color

By adjusting a few resource settings with the iPodWizard tool, you can now change your iPod’s font colors: Open iPW, load your firmwire. Go to Layout, scroll down to Font Types. In that list, go down to item 24223, which is the titlebar string. Now look at the z2 tag. It should say 0xFF000000. We’re […]

The X-ray Eye (X-Ray of PCBs)

Bunnie writes – I love looking at PCBs (printed circuit boards) using x-rays. Great for failure analysis. One of the coolest things, I thought, was seeing a PCB tilt in real-time; you get a good sense of the actual spacial relationship between all the layers on a PCB. I took a series of stills today […]

Detecting and reducing power consumption in Linux

Detecting and reducing power consumption in Linux

For laptop users and data center administrators, power consumption is an important issue. Intel recently released a cool, top-like utility called PowerTOP, which can help you track down processes which are consuming the most power on your machine. When your CPU isn’t executing intructions, it enters an idle mode and consumes far less energy. Any […]

The secret life of pots

The secret life of pots

R.G writes – As electronics tinkerers, we all use potentiometers, or “pots” for short. We count on them to control all our musical gear, and quite often get frustrated by their limitations. As in all relationships, a little understanding goes a long way. Let’s take a look at how pots work so we can use […]