After three years of constant abuse, my once pristine laptop keyboard now looks like this: My options were: Ignore it. Scrape off all the paint and replace with translucent stickers. Buy a new keyboard. Even if I were happy with the aesthetic of a hard-worn keyboard (I wasn't) the flaking paint just didn't feel nice under my fingers. I also figured that scraping the paint further risked damaging the keyboard. So new toy time! One of the problems of buying non-mainstream tech is that…
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Working from home without a monitor SUCKS. My wife decided that she didn't want to peer at her tiny laptop screen any more, so we decided to repurpose an old 37 inch TV. MEGAMONITOR! I bought the Pansonic TV back in 2012 and it served us pretty well over the last 8 years. But when we came to switch it on, it just displayed a blinking LED. The brilliant folks at ElectroMix helped confirmed the error code was to do with the decoder board. They had the replacement part in stock for only £30. …
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The other day I fished my old nook out of deep storage - only to discover that the battery wasn't holding charge. More seriously, the back had swollen out and looked like it was about to burst. Uh-oh! Inflating batteries are dangerous batteries. Taking apart the nook is incredibly simple, pop off the power button, use a Torx 5 screwdriver to undo the single screw, and then spludger your way around the edges. This is what I found in mine... VERY BAD! A replacement nook battery is less…
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