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All posts tagged "diy"


Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Maximum PC Builds a Gaming HTPC

Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 09:26 AM

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fe..._pc_living_room

"I don't want to watch cable TV. I don't want to use a controller. I just want to watch 3D Blu-rays and frag people with a mouse and keyboard, all on a box that fits on my entertainment center. Is that too much to ask?"

With that goal in mind, Maximum PC built a HTPC that can game as well as play Blu-Ray discs, and comes up with quite a nice rig. While I love the Silverstone case, I would have used a cheaper motherboard and RAM to drive down the cost some more. I have to ask though, how does one frag using a mouse and keyboard while on the living room couch?


Thursday, June 23, 2011

Maximum PC's Guide to a $700 Gaming Rig

Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 07:00 AM

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fe...g_rig_under_700

"Our budget gaming rig is all about instant gratification: a way for you to fill your gaming hunger with a state of the art, speedy machine, capable of playing today’s games at 1080p resolutions, for less than $700. With our instructions, you will see how you can build it yourself in less than hour. On top of that, we’ll tell you how you can easily supersize your budget box with future upgrades."

I have been assembling my own PCs for a very long time, and I generally think that assembling them is not the hardest thing; it is deciding what components to purchase that makes many give up. In particular, video cards with their extremely fine segregation do not help (nVidia's pulled a trick from the past recently: the GTX 560 and GTX 560 Ti are different cards, but who is going to tell without knowing the GPU market well?). Maximum PC offers a good starting point, but depending on where you live, the "best" part for a budget gaming rig might be different. What are your own suggestions for a cheap gaming rig?


Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Build a Home Theater PC Inside an Ikea Besta Cabinet

Posted by Reid Kistler in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 04:00 PM

http://lifehacker.com/5619746/

"Many of us use computers to power our home theater experience, but the last thing anyone wants is a noisy PC tower uglying up the living room. Here's how [a] reader... converted Ikea's Besta media console into a well-hidden, well-ventilated HTPC."

This is one of those DIY projects that most people will look at and exclaim either a) "What a cool idea!" or b) "Why would anyone want to do that?!?" Having helped to convert an old console television into a stereo cabinet, I found this project intriguing, but ultimately I fall closer to category "b" above, if only because there are a number of nice looking HTPC cases that should make the task much simpler. Still, given a suitable donor computer and a (less expensive!) cabinet, I could easily understand the appeal of being able to show off such a project. Read the full story at Lifehacker.com - which includes a number of pictures of the project in various stages of completion - and then let us know what you think: Is this the type of weekend DIY task that you would be willing to undertake?


Monday, August 16, 2010

DIY Tilt-shift Project for the Miniature Experience

Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 01:00 PM

http://cow.mooh.org/projects/tiltshift/

"Have you ever wondered how tilt-shift miniature photography works and why it looks so strangely convincing? Have you ever wanted to have a tilt-shift lens but couldn't afford the hundreds of dollars needed to buy one? Have you ever wanted to take real tilt-shift photos? Then this short introduction to tilt-shift photography and DIY tilt-shift lens building is probably for you."

Do you fancy those selective focus photos that make cityscapes and landscapes look like some miniature diorama? Well, it's achieved by using the tilt function in a tilt-shift lens, and here's an article to help you bash your own DIY project if you want to see what this fad is all about. It is becoming a bit of a cliché now (you know it's a cliché when Canon starts including it as an effect filter in their point-and-shoots), so don't overdo it!


Wednesday, June 30, 2010

DigitalRev DIY "Stealth" Street Camera

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 09:00 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLUWtM0aP6I

"We challenge Kai to make a stealthy street camera from scratch. Kind of. With a minimal budget and fingers permanently coated with butter, he gets to work on making a camera perfect for candid street photography. But what will happen? Will it end up in a shade of Magenta? Or will he get electrocuted again? Find out in this video."

Some of the funniest DigitalRev videos are when Kai gets a "special task" to perform - because the guy tries his best, but his DIY skills are, well, somewhat lacking. Not that I could do any better mind you - I wouldn't attempt half of the stuff that he has. This video gave me a good laugh, but amazingly, he ends up with a camera that actually works - he'd just better hope that no one takes a very close look at it...watch the video and you'll see what I mean.


Friday, February 12, 2010

Quick and Dirty Light Tent

Posted by Chris Gohlke in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 03:00 AM

http://www.mostlycolor.ch/2010/02/c...inder-clip.html

"This light tent can also be scaled up and down. How else to take photos of your new light tent but inside of a larger light tent? Cheap railboard is great for larger versions. In the intrest of brevity, instructions for matryoshka light tents will not be covered in this post. Given the wide availability of paper and paper clips it's also quite handy to be able to construct a light tent as needed, especially when traveling, in a co-worker's cube or on the beach. It takes me about a minute to make one from scratch. The binder clips can be removed for lay-flat storage of the light tent."

This clearly fits in the good enough category. I don't have a ton of photographic needs for a dedicated light tent, but I'd probably pop one of these together next time I go to sell something on-line.


Thursday, April 16, 2009

DYI Multitouch Surface Table

Posted by Chris Gohlke in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 03:00 AM

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fe...MC-R3A917316679

"It all started while we were researching an article on future user interfaces. Touch interfaces are hardly futuristic at this point, but multi-touch hardware like the Microsoft Surface or the iPhone is just starting to become a big deal, and we decided to see what big things are going on in that field. What we found that surprised us the most wasn’t anything about the future of multitouch; it was about something that people are doing right now. There is, it turns out, a whole community of very smart folks out there on the internet perfecting the art of building DIY multi-touch surfaces. The process isn’t exactly simple, but the results we saw were stunning: multitouch surfaces with responsiveness rivaling Microsoft’s $12,000 offering, built in a garage on a shoestring budget. “Future UI article be damned,” we thought, “we’ve gotta build one of these for ourselves.”"

I've got a friend who claims he is building one of these. Looks like a cool idea. If it pans out I'll post the details.


Saturday, February 14, 2009

Building Your Own PC

Posted by Chris Gohlke in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 10:00 PM

http://preview.tinyurl.com/akk2p7

"That’s one of the most exciting aspects of our hobby. Automobile buffs can tune and customize their factory-built cars and trucks, but computer geeks like us get to build something new and unique almost entirely from whole cloth. And it’s so easy that you have to wonder why anyone would buy a preassembled PC in the first place. Thanks to the relatively open architecture that IBM stumbled into oh so many years ago (and has likely regretted ever since), we can rebuild and retune our creations again and again, boosting their performance and postponing their obsolescence. And if you’ve never experienced the joy and pride of building your own PC, click through to read our in-depth, hands-on guide."

Building PCs is something I used to enjoy doing, but have not done in years. If you've never built one before, I strongly recommend you do it at least once, you'll learn a lot and it really is not that difficult. Check out the full article to get an idea of what you would be getting yourself into.


Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Make Your Own Flash Diffuser Part 2 - Airline Barf Bag

Posted by Tim Williamson in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 01:00 PM

http://digital-photography-school.c...line-barf-bags/

"Call me crazy, but I happen to like airplane travel…no, I’m not a huge fan of screaming babies, recirculated air, or stale snack crackers. Nor do I like lengthy airport security lines, accusatory customs agents, or the way that my equipment cases get beaten, mauled, and abused by the TSA whenever I travel from city to city. Nope, what I happen to like so much about airplane travel is that — each and every time I fly — that I always manage to walk about from the flight with at least two portable/foldable flash diffusers tucked away in my pockets."

Suhit recently posted an article that explains how to make your own flash diffuser for built-in camera flashes using an empty film roll canister, but the article here explains an easy and cheap (if you don't count the price of the airplane ticket!) way of making a flash diffuser for external camera flashes with an unused airline barf bag. It's funny that I came across this article last week since I'm headed out to Washington DC this Wednesday and should be able to get my hands on a few of these "flash diffusers" while in transit. I'll be interested to try this out for myself since I normally just aim the flash at the ceiling and bounce the light onto the subject of the photo. This seems to work well, but I wonder if the barf bag would work even better.


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