Ideas - inspirations experiments & notes

Some information about my ongoing project to recreate a piece of classic 1950s modern design from Charles and Ray Eames - the gravity-powered "Musical Tower" glockenspiel.

Google has been hassling site owners for months now about making their sites responsive and mobile-friendly. The two things aren't the same but the big G doesn't care, so I finally caved in to their nagging and jumped on the site to change the CSS. This site always had a very simple stylesheet and a really basic structure, which lends itself to responsive [...]

Just a walkthrough of my homemade Time Capsule based on some old hard drives and low-cost hardware. Spent a bit of time last week hacking a Seagate GoFlex Net into an old rackmount server case which I cut down and converted to use SATA drives. Result is a nice super low-power network accessible storage array in a small space-saving casing.

How to replace misbehaving or jumpy rotary encoders on the Yamaha SU700 digital sampler, with links to the components I tested. Fire up your soldering iron!

iPhones have a few common problems that come up again and again. Cracked screens, splitting cases and dodgy headphone connections often occur but the most common problem seems to be the hardware buttons; either the sleep/power button or the home button just stop responding, or become inconsistent. This can be caused by one of two issues: the contacts [...]

Firstly a clarification: there is no way short of looting you will get your hands on a Cintiq pen display for less than three figures. They are extremely expensive bits of kit and for good reason. However, the pace of global technology development and the subsequent rampant obsolescence of all things technological means that you can get a Wacom pen-enabled [...]

Just spent an hour working out how to output a list of contacts from a web application in the correct format so that it can be imported into the address book in Apple OS X. It's basically a simple text file with the values separated by tabs and each distinct entry separated by a new line. The clever bit is that by using the first line (which might [...]

How to replace the broken LCD screen on a Lumix FS62 digital camera