TechNFun - Fun with technology
Electronic gadgets reviewed and modified
9th November 2008
Hack: soldering wires to bare cells
Wanna build a battery pack? Don't have a professional welder? Read this.
26th October 2008
Ooo. Nice.
I left the old files online here (with noindex metatags), partly for nostalgic reasons and partly so I can occasionally remind myself how much I have improved as a webmaster.
If you're wondering how come it took me 23 days to do this... well, it took me a while to figure out I don't have the creativity to create a layout from scratch, and it took me longer than that to download an assload (technical term) of free templates and choose one that suited TechNFun.
Ultimately I chose andreas09 by Andreas Viklund, but I had to modify it heavily in order to adapt it to the site, as it has several problems and deficiencies in stock form that needed to be eliminated. This took more time, as I knew nothing about CSS and had to learn as I went.
All the while I looked for an efficient way of implementing templates. Many and colorful were the curses I threw at Dreamweaver and KompoZer in the process.
And when I finally thought I'd done it, Windows snuffed it for no discernible reason. Bluescreen at boot in normal and safe mode, unrescuable. Unwilling to put up with more pathetic failures of Bill Gates' evil spawn, I decided to permanently switch to Linux.
This caused me immense frustration, because there's no easy way to run Dreamweaver under Linux, and KompoZer sucks; I spent a long time trying to coerce wine into running Dreamweaver, to no avail.
But it's good that that happened. Had it not I'd probably have gone through hoops to run a Windows virtual machine (easier said than done on my EeePC) and stuck with Dreamweaver, without researching the marvel that are server-side includes.
Which is the method I ultimately chose. Two tiny strings of text, and I can easily modify non-content parts of the site without having to put up with a dumb WYSIWYG editor that has different ideas than me as to what constitutes good HTML (yes, I'm one of the stubborn ones who keep writing their HTML by hand).
And now that this is finally out of the way, I can get back to writing some content.
3rd October 2008
It has become apparent to me that the current site layout, which is basically a hastily modified free template I found somewhere, is... rather underwhelming, shall we say. I've decided to try my hand at cascading style sheets and rebuild the site from scratch. Well, I've decided to try, anyway. Depending on how it goes, I might just end up using another template, though in this case I'll make sure to choose one that sucks less.
27th April 2008
Review: Weiguo Solutions Spotlight
A rechargeable LED flashlight for the car that's always ready to use.
21st April 2008
Review: More cheap LED flashlights
A small, very bright LED flashlight running on mildly exotic batteries and a medium power one running on common AAs. Any good? Click to find out!
20th February 2008
Firepower pill censorship attempt
Automotive snake oil manufacturer Firepower hasn't much liked fellow reviewer Daniel Rutter's exposition of their scam. They first threatened to sue him and sent him a "results" PDF file which they told him to publicise in order to avoid legal action.
Then, since he wasn't particularly convinced, they sent him a report.
After that, too, was thoroughly debunked, they apparently decided it wasn't so good that their PDF was linked from him, and told his blog's hosters to force him to remove the links.Acting like any censorship hater worth his salt would, he's made the file available anyway on his site, and he's asked for help with the Streisand effect.
I'm rising to the call, being a censorship hater myself. Here's the Firepower PDF. Download and spread at will. Anything you can do against censorship is good.
Good luck Dan!
25th January 2008
Review: Cheap LED flashlights
Can flashlights that cost about as much as a large ice cream be any good?
8th December 2006
Review: Acer MP330 mp3 player
Cheap. Large capacity. Featureful. Where's the catch?
22nd November 2006
Review: Walkera 5#4 "Mini Lama" coaxial RC helicopter
Pure, concentrated airborne fun.
10th November 2006
Hack: increasing voltage to your digicam for fun and profit
The digicam in this picture looks weird, but it works rather better than it did when it looked normal. Read on to find out why, and why you may want to do the same to yours.
10th November 2006
Tech'n'fun goes online!
25th February 2005
Review: rebranded GoDot M8470 mp3 player
A cheap MicroDrive mp3 player with a quirk or two but with lots of redeeming features.
Review is outdated; I meant to start this website months ago with this review as its first article, but events I couldn't control forced me to delay it.