By quasi-popular demand: What do you do when you replace a fluorescent tube in your light fixture, but it still doesn’t work right?
Includes basic description of starters and the two main types of ballasts in fluorescent tube lights.
Watch below, and you can save money and impress your friends!
Well, at least you can save some money… 😉
New Version! See: A better Stylish Smartphone Faraday Box
With the release of WikiLeak’s “Year Zero” information on the CIA’s capabilities, you might be forgiven if you’re worried about your privacy.
Of course, those capabilities were always there, whether you knew about them or not.
Still, it’s a bit annoying to think that some bozo is remotely activating your smartphone’s mic to spy on your extremely dramatic dinnertime conversations.
You could buy some overly expensive “Faraday Bag” to stick your phone in when you’re not using it, but who wants an ugly black overpriced lunch bag?
Instead, just make your own Faraday Box. It’s stylish, it’s hip, and it only takes about 10 minutes to make!
Let’s say you’ve got ethernet cables running all over the floor because you don’t want to use WiFi.
Or maybe you want to install another phone jack, but you want to route the cable nicely along the baseboards.
Of course, routing cables inside the walls is always the prettier option, but it’s also not easy to do in a finished house.
Well, I have a new friend, and she’s a hot glue gun. As her name implies, she’s rather attractive – and very handy when it comes to routing those cables in no time flat!
Superglue is awesome.
Originally discovered in 1942 by American scientists who were trying to come up with good transparent gun sights during WWII, superglue is the “sticks to everything” goto adhesive for all your gluey quick-fix needs.
And frankly, until you’ve superglued two fingers together, you really haven’t lived…
Anyway, there’s probably a lot about superglue that you’ve never heard before. So, read on, and then you can go impress your friends with your amazing knowledge of cyanoacrylate adhesives!
Many of you have installed Windows 10 on your puters only to discover that every time you boot up, you get a screen that reads: Choose an operating system
Windows 10 will of course be at the top of the list, usually followed by either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. If you pick Windows 10, it fires up and everything works normally.
Obviously, there is still something wrong: Why is Windows 10 asking if you want to boot your old version of Windows? After all, you upgraded, right?
Fear not! There’s a very easy trick to remove this boot menu – and it works for all flavors and versions of Windows all the way back to Vista at least…
Most people these days use WiFi. I’m not one of them, because the idea of being bathed 24/7 in multi-gigahertz radio waves just isn’t that appealing.
If you’re like me, then that means you’re using the ethernet jack on your puter. And if your puter is a laptop, you may run into a terribly annoying situation where your ethernet just stops working one day.
In a laptop, you can’t replace the ethernet jack and internals without replacing the entire motherboard…
Fortunately, there’s a quick and cheap way to get your ethernet back up and running – without breaking the bank!
Let’s say you’ve got an aging laptop. It doesn’t exactly run like new any more. Maybe the battery is a bit weak even on a full charge, or perhaps the fan makes a lot of noise even after you cleaned it out.
Traditionally, you’d have to pay a pretty penny for new laptop parts.
You’d also have a hard time finding instructions or guides on how to remove and replace any parts in your lappy.
Well, nowadays, things are a bit different.
You can get all kinds of laptop parts on the cheap, and all the how-to guides you’ll need are already out there just waiting for you on YouTube!
You buy a new 400″ TV. You hook it up, and pop in a DVD or Blu-ray disc.
You expect to enjoy a glorious movie-watching experience, but instead, your movies look like TV shows or soap operas.
What gives?
As it turns out, the problem is your fancy new TV. Get ready for this: it’s too realistic, and your brain doesn’t like that.
Read on to find out how to fix it!
You know the drill: You turn on your puter, and it doesn’t boot, beep, or do anything else. What it does do is power itself off again after a second or two.
Or… Your puter works fine, but it spontaneously enjoys turning itself off.
Whatever could be the matter?
Naturally, the first thing you’ll think of (because you’re a genius) is that something is broken – and you’ll probably guess that it’s the power supply.
Not so fast! There’s one thing you need to check first before you invest time and money replacing a bad power supply…
One day, you turn on your laptop. Maybe no
thing happens, or maybe you get some error message about fan speed, or maybe you just get a “system halted” message. Then again, perhaps your computer works just fine, but it’s starting to sound like a vacuum cleaner because the fans are running at full blast!
At this point, you may be inclined to freak out. But don’t go there just yet…
If this sounds familiar, it’s because you probably read my earlier post, How to Clean the Inside of a Desktop Computer. This edition is specifically for laptops.
Usually, cleaning the fan and heat sink inside your laptop is a lot easier than you might think.
With a few dollars and a bit of bravery, you can “dust” inside your laptop (without taking it apart, hopefully) even if you don’t know anything about how computers work.
If you can dust your house, you can dust your lappy!
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