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In the summer of 2023, we went on an amazing trip through Portugal. We’d already visited Lisbon on a short city trip a few years earlier, and that experience was so good we knew we had to return. This time, we decided to take a full three weeks and see the sights. We were planning […] The post Our favorite places to eat and drinks during our Portugal vacation appeared first on Style over Substance.
Back in 2021, we bought a PlayStation 5 (PS5) as our main living room console. Making the most out of this console meant we also had to buy a new TV, as our old TV was not 4K-compatible and did not support HDMI2.1, the new A/V standard required to support all of the PS5’s capabilities. […] The post Using the EZCOO / AVStar HAE118 HDMI2.1 Audio Extractor for PS5/Xbox audio appeared first on Style over Substance.
For the past few years, I have been running Home Assistant to make my apartment a smart home. It’s become such a hobby of mine that I’ve even started coding add-ons for it. While there are other popular automation platforms, Home Assistant’s versatility blows the rest out of the water. It connects to everything I […] The post My Home Assistant setup (2023 edition) appeared first on Style over Substance.
The CANARY corrugated cardboard cutter is definitely in my top 10 list of most useful purchases ever. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, we all started shopping online a lot more. The number of cardboard boxes in our house basically quadrupled overnight and cutting them down to size for recycling became like a second job. It turns […] The post CANARY Corrugated Cardboard Cutter appeared first on Style over Substance.
This is a placeholder post! I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site and have loved their recommendations for years. So much, so that I even started a Pinterest board filled with my own recommendations. But after a few years of running into the limitations of the form, I feel such a project […] The post Guy’s Cool Tools appeared first on Style over Substance.
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Plants of all kinds are quite infamous for their inability to move, and this can be especially problematic for houseplants that rely on consistently sunny locations within a room in order to get enough light. Driven by wanting their plant to have the best possible growing conditions in their north-facing room, GitHub user MarinaXP has […] The post This plant always gets enough sunlight thanks to its robotic legs appeared first on Arduino Blog.
We’re heading to Automate 2025, the largest robotics and automation event in the Americas, happening May 12-15 at Huntington Place in Detroit – and we’re bringing a lineup of fresh innovations, live demos, and exciting new launches. You’ll find us in Booth #6632, right next to our partners at Weintek. This year is extra special […] The post Join Arduino at Automate 2025 to explore the future of automation appeared first on Arduino Blog.
The gang gets to work defending their Mac login items. Who has the most minimal startup? Who's got the craziest apps? This episode has more new apps mentioned in any episode of Comfort Zone ever! Watch or listen now. Other Things Discussed Chris's hyper key video
Introduction Finding the Display Tuning Potentiometers The Result Hardcopy Preview Mode Introduction Less than a week after finishing my TDS 684B analog memory blog post, a TDS 684C landed on my lab bench with a very dim CRT. If you follow the lives the 3-digit TDS oscilloscope series, you probably know that this is normally a bit of death sentence of the CRT: after years of use, the cathode ray loses its strength and there’s nothing you can do about it other than replace the CRT with an LCD screen. I was totally ready to go that route, and if I ever need to do it, here are 3 possible LCD upgrade options that I list for later reference: The most common one is to buy a $350 Newscope-T1 LCD display kit by SimmConn Labs. A cheaper hobbyist alternative is to hack something together with a VGA to LVDS interface board and some generic LCD panel, as described in this build report. He uses a VGA LCD Controller Board KYV-N2 V2 with a 7” A070SN02 LCD panel. As I write this, the cost is $75, but I assume this used to be a lot cheaper before tariffs were in place. If you really want to go hard-core, you could make your own interface board with an FPGA that snoops the RAMDAC digital signals and converts them to LVDS, just like the Newscope-T1. There is a whole thread about this the EEVblog forum. But this blog post is not about installing an LCD panel! Before going that route, you should try to increase the brightness of the CRT by turning a potentiometer on the display board. It sounds like an obvious thing to try, but didn’t a lot of reference to online. And in my case, it just worked. Finding the Display Tuning Potentiometers In the Display Assembly Adjustment section of chapter 5 of the TDS 500D, TDS 600C, TDS 700D and TDS 714L Service Manual, page 5-23, you’ll find the instructions on how to change rotation, brightness and contrast. It says to remove the cabinet and then turn some potentiometer, but I just couldn’t find them! They’re supposed to be next to the fan. Somewhere around there: Well, I couldn’t see any. It’s only the next day, when I was ready to take the whole thing apart that I noticed these dust covered holes: A few minutes and a vaccum cleaning operation later reveals 5 glorious potentiometers: From left to right: horizontal position rotation vertical position brightness contrast Rotate the last 2 at will and if you’re lucky, your dim CRT will look brand new again. It did for me! The Result The weird colors in the picture above is a photography artifact that’s caused by Tektronix NuColor display technology: it uses a monochrome CRT with an R/G/B shutter in front of it. You can read more about it in this Hackaday article. In real life, the image looks perfectly fine! Hardcopy Preview Mode If dialing up the brightness doesn’t work and you don’t want to spend money on an LCD upgrade, there is the option of switching the display to Hardcopy mode, like this: [Display] -> [Settings <Color>] -> [Palette] -> [Hardcopy preview] Instead of a black, you will now get a white background. It made the scope usable before I made the brightness adjustment.
