how to make a quick and easy 5v and 12v power supply.

A good power supply is a must if you do hobby electronics. However a low end variable voltage power supply (like the one pictured to the left) can cost  more than $100. most of the time, electronics need 3.3v, 5v or 12v. so in this tutorial, ill show you how to make a bad ass 12v and 5v power supply.

12v line: 198 watts, 12v@16.5amp
5v line: 5 watts, 5v@1amp

Know the specs: Graphic cards.

If you are into playing video games, rendering 3d animation, or editing large video files, a high end graphics card is a must. Graphic cards are responsible to draw what you see on your screen at around 60 times a second. Due to their power, a lot of programs are using the GPU (graphics processing unit) in collaboration with the CPU to crunch numbers.

Know the Specs: RAM

Cool, so you need to buy 8 gigs of ram. well, obviously 8 gigs is better than 4 gigs, but what about if one type of ram has 10-10-10-30 timings and the other has 9-9-9-27? what do all the numbers mean? well... they are rarely explained and unless you try to hard to find them, no one seems to tell you.

Know the Specs: CPU

Do you know all there is about the cpu?

a good network monitoring solution, and how this mess happened.

ok... so as you know, i do a lot of tech based stuff. i set up servers for the net admin at my school, i configure a lot of computers, and most of the time it all goes swell and dandy. but sometimes stuff breaks, and when it breaks... it's usually is something big. for example, a server going down that controls your DNS / Wins server... or a switch going bad and 1/2 of a building looses all connectivity.

how to prevent all this? enter Nagios!

The Hard Drive Speaker

ok, so what happens when a nerd has a dead hard drive and too much free time in school? simple -- he makes a speaker out of it!

Expect a break in posts.

on Friday, me and my friend decided to ride our bikes down to McDonalds... we stopped at a crosswalk, but the light was not changing fast enough, so he rode across to the median. there was heavy traffic in the other two lains, so he decided to ride back, but a van parked in the tun lain, blocking his view of traffic (and the traffics view of him)
he puched off to come back over to where i was without checking for oncoming traffic, and rode right out in front of a van. the van had no time to break, and hit him going full speed (about 45 mph). he was not wearing a helmet.

that's that a skull does to a windshield in a 45 MPH collision.