It is tempting to buy your kids new toys, and given that we were all kids at some point in time, we all know the joy that comes from opening a brand new toy. However toys can be wasteful since many of us outgrow them, plus there are also the materials involved in making them that needs to be considered.
In recent times there has been proposals for the “right to repair”. Basically the idea is that customers shouldn’t be penalized if they choose to take their devices to a third-party repair service which is often cheaper than going through official channels. Now it looks like a new set of rules proposed by the Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office has made it easier.
Taking a phone to an official repair center can be expensive, which is why many people turn to third-party services which aren’t official but usually offer much cheaper rates. However if you think that you’re more than capable of repairing your own phone, then you might be interested to learn that Motorola and iFixit have teamed up to offer an official DIY repair kit.
To put it simply, camera lenses are essentially pieces of glass that help to focus light that allows a camera to capture an image. This is a concept that stuck with photographer Mathieu Stern who got the idea to try and make a working camera lens out of a piece of ice. According to Stern, “If glass can focus light, then ice should do it too.”
Input devices like keyboard, mice, and gamepads are great for playing games with, but they tend to be rather “general” in terms of use. This is by no means a bad thing, but when it comes to certain games, there is no doubt more niche controllers could do a better job. For example arcade fighting games might benefit from a fight stick setup, and driving games a steering wheel controller.
In case you didn’t know, there is actually a very enthusiastic mechanical keyboard community, where users swap ideas on how to mod their mechanical keyboards to create some pretty unique designs. Recently YouTuber JK Brickworks uploaded a video showing off a modified mechanical keyboard that is made out of LEGO bricks.
One of the “courageous” things Apple did when they introduced the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus was remove the headphone jack. However it did inconvenience quite a lot of users who might not have been so ready to cut the cord, but it seems that it did not stop YouTuber Strange Parts from trying to rectify the problem himself.
Thanks to inventions like Raspberry Pi, it has become considerably easier for DIY tinkerers to come up with their own computing solutions and gadgets. Granted sometimes it doesn’t have the same polished look or feel as a finished product put out by a bigger company, but the freedom and fun that comes with creating something of your own is hard to beat.
Prisons aren’t meant to be fun or relaxing so as you can imagine, a lot of the little luxuries in life we take for granted aren’t quite as readily available in most prisons, such as computers. However inside a medium-security prison at Ohio, it seems that the inmates were somehow resourceful enough where they managed to assemble two working computers in secret.
In the past we have gotten hints at what kind of features Apple’s iPhones could get based on leaked photos of components that are sometimes posted by companies that deal with spare parts. Sometimes these companies would even sell you said components, which means that in theory you could piece together your own iPhone which is what Scotty Allen at Strange Parts did (via 9to5Mac).
If you’ve ever played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you know exactly how important and central the ocarina is to Link, and how it more or less controls a lot of aspects in the game. Now wouldn’t it be awesome if you had your own ocarina that you could control stuff with? That’s pretty much what YouTuber and Zelda fan Allen Pan did.