Dell Vostro 1500 Screen Wobble Repair Guide

Many laptops eventually develop a screen wobble problem over their lifespan-Some sooner than others! The Vostro 1500 served me well in that regard, but a little screen tightening eventually became due. Many laptops can be repaired in a similar way! Don't forget to use threadlocker or superglue to hold those screws in, or it'll get wiggly all over again.

Dell Vostro 1500 Wireless Card Installation Guide

The Dell Vostro 1500 has three, count them, three slots for mini PCI-E cards. It even has six antennas to match. You can install an additional wireless card, or replace your existing one, very easily! Check out my video to see how.

Dell Vostro 1500 Hard Drive Upgrade Guide

In this video, I go through the steps to upgrade or replace the hard drive in a Dell Vostro 1500 computer. Many Dells of a similar vintage have a similar process. Enjoy!

Dell Vostro 1500 RAM Upgrade Guide

Do you have a Dell Vostro 1500 (or similar) which needs its RAM upgraded? Look no further. In this video, I disassemble my Vostro 1500 to breathe some new life into it with a RAM upgrade.

Office 2010 and Living Without a Phone

Last week, I had a bike crash which crushed my phone. I've spent the last week without a cell phone. It really hasn't been so bad. 95% of my phone communications were text messages, and 90% of those were Twitter. I've got my computer with me all the time, so I don't miss out on that, and Google Voice has let me send and receive text messages, albeit at a different number. It also lets me get voicemails and, with the help of Gmail, make phone calls. Suddenly, not having a phone isn't so bad.

I also finally bought Office 2010 RTM. Not many changes from the beta, but some nice changes from Office 2007. I spend most of my time in Office applications on OneNote, and so that's going to be my focus. What can you expect with the new version?

• Finally upgraded to the new ribbon interface to match the rest of the office applications. Love the ribbon or not, it's my opinion (since adjusting to it in the Office 2007 beta) that it's a significantly better and more user-friendly interface. Haters who say it's not logical: Your menu-driven system had "page setup" under "file," not "formatting." How does that make any sense at all? Haters gonna hate.
• The ribbon is retracted by default, leaving a huge amount of space to do what you use OneNote for: taking notes.
• Integration with Windows Live SkyDrive: Microsoft gives every Live account 25GB of free, online data storage, to do with as you see fit. The new version of OneNote (and the other Office applications, though most in OneNote) features integration, allowing Notebooks to be shared across the internet, replacing some of the sharing features which were previously available. I've had limited experience with this feature, but even if you don't have anyone to share notebooks with, there's another advantage to syncing your notebooks with SkyDrive...
• Online Office Applications: BEAUTIFUL. Simply logging into your Live account on any computer allows you to edit any OneNote document you've uploaded to SkyDrive. You can also create new documents. The online version of OneNote is somewhat limited in features compared to the full version of OneNote, but the real beauty of the system is that once you have finished online, OneNote on your computer will automatically download the new notes, keeping you up-to-date everywhere.
• File Versioning: The new 2010 file format allows it to store previous versions of files, preventing accidental "oopses" when you mess up. Goes hand-in-hand with the new sharing features.

Complaints? Well. I still can't figure out a way to just take a photo from my webcam. You can scan, you can take videos, you can take sound, but there doesn't seem to be an option to just take a photo from a webcam. I've wanted this feature a few times now.

Also, I think Microsoft should have made the Courier and released a OneNote application as the "killer app" for the platform. I think the Courier was a more unique and interesting platform than the iPad will ever be. Oh well.

Combination Lock Cracking Lego Robot

F1rst p0st l0l

I'm working on building a 100% Lego rotary combination lock cracking robot. It cracks using a brute force technique. Since pure brute-force of a 40-number combination lock yields 64,000 combinations, (40^3) it skips every other number, reducing the possible combinations to 8,000 (20^3). It also uses a technique to speed cracking, by checking every third number in one go.

Of course, all these things are just theoretical, as I haven't had time to load the software yet. I've been preoccupied building the hardware in the lab, and writing the code at home.

I decided to start this project when I came across a lock which did not conform to the lock-cracking algorithm for Masterlocks. As such, I've avoided using "patterns" of combinations, and instead left the robot to pure brute-force, so that it would recover a combination from any lock, including ones which don't conform to standard lock rules.

Videos and more after the break.