Posts tagged DIY

DIY Passport Photos for $0.19

May 22nd

Posted by Kenny in On The Go / Travel

1 comment


If time flies when you’re having fun, I must be having a heck of a time.

It’s been 10 years already, and now it’s time to renew my passport.

In the past you would go to a photo booth or a local pharmacy photo center and get a passport photo made up for 10 bucks or so for the duplicate photos you need to submit with your US Passport Application at the USPS post office or through the mail.

But these days, you don’t have to cough up that much money to get the photos done with all the digital magic we have available at our fingertips.

Here’s how I got my required duplicate passport photos created and printed for a mere $0.19.  You can too!

First, I got out my digital camera and computer and went to work (well, it wasn’t really much work at all actually).

While in the past I used manual online passport photo generators to create the photo image, this time, I relied on a fully automated face-detection enabled website to properly crop the headshots for me.

IDphoto4You.com does it all.  Just upload a decent headshot with enough background to play with and it automatically crops the photo and creates a single 4×6 photo file for you to download and bring to the photo store.  They even have options so that you can have it sent online to get printed quickly for you as well.

I opted not to print out the photo at home on my photo printer and instead wanted a “real” photo that came out of a photo processing machine at Walgreens.  $0.19 and the single 4×6 has the required two copies of the photo on one photo sheet.

It won’t be long till I get my passport back I hope – or at least track. . .


QUESTION: HOW MANY COUNTRIES HAVE YOU TRAVELED TO IN TOTAL?

,

How To Get WiFi-N Signal Strength From WiFI-G or WiFI-B Routers

Aug 24th

Posted by Kenny in Computers

No comments


Personally, I have wifi-B routers in the house.  To extend the coverage, I’ve daisy-chained two of them to increase the footprint of reception.  It’s really easy to use a 2nd wireless router to basically act as an extension cord.  All you have to do is turn of DHCP and make it into a wireless switch (switches are different than routers, but that’s a different blog post right there).

But I still have areas of the house and backyard deck where the signal strength is a bit weak.  So I’ve been monitoring prices for the latest WiFi-N routers of course.  The other option is to buy an “extender” or larger antennas – but the price is about the same with option A or option B.   Since what I have set-up basically works for 90% of my needs, I’m in no rush to spend full retail for the upgrade.

I recently heard of a hack that turbo boosts your signal.  Here’s an amazingly simple router hack that lets you boost your Wi-Fi signal strength (in truth, it works for 802.11N / G / B / etc) for about $0.25.

The secret is in the parabola. . . check out this video tutorial to see how to create the wifi signal extender in less than 10 minutes:

If you don’t want to risk 10 minutes of your time to make an actual antenna dish, here’s a video that shows all the steps in detail. It’s not that involved in making the wifi extender parabolic reflector from the printable template. Remember all you need is the printed template, aluminum foil, scissors and a glue stick.

Ok, now do you like what you see?

Here’s the link for the printable wifi-extender template:

QUESTION: HOW MANY WIFI DEVICES DO YOU HAVE IN YOUR HOUSE?

, , , ,