The F-Stop Blues

How To Rip A DVD To Your Hard Drive

2008-01-16T23:30:00.001-05:00

Now that hard drive disk space is cheap (I mean really cheap) ripping a DVD to your computer hard drive for backup purposes or to create a streaming movie library is well within your reach. In this post I'll show you which program I use to backup a DVD to my hard drive and how you can use the resulting video file.

A side note on legality: In this day and age of digital copyright, it is difficult to say whether it is legal or not to make a backup copy of a commercial Hollywood DVD on your computer. If you try and distribute or share your backup copy then you are definitely breaking the law. If you keep the physical DVD and only use the backup copy on your computer for personal uses then you are probably okay. Either way, proceed at your own risk.

There are numerous programs available (free and not free) that will take a DVD and make a digital copy of it (the ripping part) to your hard drive. All of these programs basically do the same thing. They take the video and audio files from the DVD disc and copy them to your hard drive. Most commercial DVD's use the VOB format to store the audio and video. VOB files are basically just MPEG2 streams that have multiplexed audio and video. All this means is that when you rip a DVD to your hard drive you will end up with a folder titled VIDEO_TS that will contain multiple VOB files that contain the video and audio from the DVD. (It also includes the menu and other things as well) You can use the same programs on your computer (Windows Media Player, DVD software such as WinDVD, etc) to watch the movie. You can also use DVD burning software to create a duplicate backup disc.

The program I still like to use to rip a DVD to the hard drive is DVD Shrink. The latest version is 3.2. This program isn't currently being developed but it can easily be found on the web doing a Google search. As I said earlier, there are a lot of programs out there that you can use. The end result will be the VOB files for a DVD movie that can be burned to a DVD if you break or lose the original and you can also use these files to playback the movie directly on your PC or media extenders.

Once you install DVD Shrink and start it up, you get to the main screen.

First go to the preferences tab and make sure the Target DVD option is set to the DVD-9 8.5GB file size. This tells the program that you are allowing this much space on your hard drive for your ripped DVD. (It is also used if you want to burn the ripped video files to a DVD)

Next put in the DVD you want to rip and you'll get a pop up screen asking you to select the DVD drive you want to use.

Once you select the DVD drive then DVD Shrink will analyze the DVD. You will see the DVD in the preview window. This usually takes about 2 minutes to complete.

Now you are back to the main program screen. You can see that all of the audio, video, and extras on the DVD takes up a total of 7.169GB of disk space. Here you have two options: you can do a complete one for one backup which would use 7.169GB of disk space on your hard drive, or you can omit certain items like subtitles to reduce the file size. (You can also compress the video so it is encoded at a lower bit rate, giving you a smaller file size but lower quality video.)

Since we want to get rid of some of the extra things we don't need (like subtitles in French) we will click on the ReAuthor button. Then click on the DVD Browser button. Here you can choose what portions of the movie like the menu, the main movie video file, and the extras to include. Just double click on each video section you want and it will be added on the left hand side.

In my case, I just want the movie without any extras or menus.

Now we will click on the Compression settings tab. Here we will unselect some of the subtitles in different languages that I don't need. We'll also set the video compression settings to None since we want an exact copy of the original movie without any loss of quality.

Now you can see that just the movie with one audio track and one English subtitle will take up about 6Gb of hard drive space.

Select the Backup! button and a new dialog screen comes up with some different options. Under the Target Device tab, make sure that the Hard Disk Folder option is selected. Next, choose the folder where you want the DVD ripped to on your hard drive. By default, the Create VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subfolders is checked; leave this checked so these folders are created. (It allows the computer to play your video files) You can leave all of the other tab options set to their defaults.

Once you select OK, the program will start to rip the DVD to your hard drive. You will see the progress screen as your DVD is being ripped. A standard movie will take about 30 minutes on a decent computer.

When the program is done ripping the DVD, a pop up screen will appear.

Now you have a ripped copy of your DVD on your computer hard drive. I will have some follow on posts on some things you can do with VOB files like setting up DVD movie streaming in your house.

Review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance for Xbox360

2008-01-15T17:56:00.001-05:00

I just finished playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the Xbox 360 and it was one of the best games I have played in a long time. So here is my 'official' review.

The background story for the game is that Dr Doom has assembled some of the most notorious villains in the world in a plot to take over the world. Nicky Fury of SHIELD calls upon the superhero's of the world to stop Dr Doom. This is where you come in. You get to assemble your own four person team to battle Doom and the bad guys. The story takes off from here taking you through many different worlds leading up to a final battle with Doom. The game does a great job of interweaving many subplots (often revolving around different marvel characters) into the main story line.

Characters. Since this is a Marvel game, you can only play Marvel superhero's like Captain America, Fantastic Four, Blade, Spiderman, etc. It' actually a pretty good cast of characters. You can also download extra characters through Xbox Live like the Incredible Hulk. You start with a certain number of characters you can play and along the way you can unlock different characters.

Teams. You select four different characters and that forms your team. You can change your characters along the way at different points if you want to. But the game allows for your team to have a reputation and you can build points and special abilities along the way if you stay with the same characters. If you choose a pre determined team like the Fantastic Four then there are even some special moves you can do.

My Team. For my team, I chose Human Torch, Iron Man, Wolverine, and Colossus. The beginning levels are a good time to use different characters and get a feel for what you like. But you should choose wisely. For example, the Torch and Iron Man can both fly which is a very useful ability. Colossus is very strong and can lift things that other characters can't. My favorite character was the Torch because he could launch projectiles such as fire balls and also had some special skills to clear an area easily.

Game Play. The basic game play is you have a light attack, heavy attack, and then special skills. Your basic attacks are the A and B button and the Y button is for jumping. The X button is used to throw your opponent. Your special skills like a pulse ray or super smash are accessed by the right trigger and any of the four main buttons. You have access to up to four special moves at any one time. The caveat is that you have a power meter that you need to replenish in order to use your moves. You can switch between characters using the left pad at anytime which is a great feature. The rest of the characters follow you along and you have a few basic commands to make them attack, defend, or just left the computer control them.

Overall the game is a lot of fun to play. It doesn't feel like a button mashing game because of the special moves you have and the ability to switch characters instantly. I also really enjoyed the storyline as well. I think it helps to know who the superhero's are and their background stories but I don't think you would play this game if you didn't know your superhero's.

I loved this game and I don't think it got the respect that it deserved in terms of other games out at the same time. You get to play as some of the greatest superhero's with a great story line and there are a ton of bad guys and bosses to battle. Definitely check this game out - you won't be disappointed.

Check Out My Media Center Hacks in Oreilly's Big Book of Windows Hacks

2008-01-14T14:41:00.000-05:00

I finally got my copy of OReilly's Big Book of Windows Hacks and I'm pretty excited because I contributed some of the Media Center hacks included in the book. This is a great book that has a ton of useful hacks for both Windows XP and Vista covering everything from email to Media Center. Here are the hacks I contributed:

Hack #139: Remove Commercials from Recorded TV Shows

Hack #140: Make Your Own TV Mashup

Hack #141: Burn Recorded TV Shows Directly from Windows Media Center to DVD

Hack #142: Rip DVDs into Media Center

Some pretty good hacks, if I may say so myself; of course, I might be biased because I wrote them. It's a good book to pick up and I don't get any commissions so this is an unbiased review.

Microsoft Xbox 360 Support Rocks

2007-12-30T10:24:00.001-05:00

Well, it finally happened to me. After having my beloved Xbox 360 for a little more than a year, I got the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Fortunately Microsoft has extended the standard 90 day warranty to three years to deal with this issue. I sent my console out last week and got back a brand new unit. It was really easy to setup: you go online, fill out a form, and they send you a box via UPS. You ship it out (at their cost) and they send you back your fixed console in four to six weeks. I was pretty impressed with how quickly they sent me a new console. I also wasn't expecting a new console but I guess the Red Ring of Death issue is really causing them some pain. Warranty service in less than a week - that's pretty damn good! Now I know they didn't handle this issue in the best way in the beginning, trying to downplay the returned units and all, but I think now they have a solid policy and I am very happy with their service. So let's get back to some gaming!

Great Video of Guy Kawasaki on Evangelism

2007-12-30T10:07:00.001-05:00

Guy Kawasaki is a great speaker (and author) and I came across this speech he gave about evangelism at Gnomedex. Guy gives the top ten things you need to know about starting a company and spreading the word, or evangelizing your company. I think the best advice he gives is that you should start a company for meaning, not for money. If you start a company just to make money then you probably won't make it. If there is meaning, then the money will follow. Maybe you want to make search better. Maybe you want to make an integrated email/calendar/scheduler app that doesn't always crash. Life is about meaning, not money :)

RadioShack Needs To Bring It Back Old School

2007-10-29T22:28:00.000-05:00

You can clearly see from the above stock chart that Radio Shack has not enjoyed immense success in a long time. (I'm not going to count the 99 to 01 years where everyone's stock went up) But what happened? How did RadioShack fail to jump onto the whole do-it-yourself/PC moddding/hardware-hacking-O'Reilly Make band wagon?

Back in the day, in my neck of the woods, meaning outside of California, RadioShack was the only place to go to get your hardware fix on. You needed a 10K resistor? They got it. You need some soldering wire? They got it. A PS/2 keyboard converter for your old motherboard? They got it. RadioShack helped me finish many of my DIY projects with their unique product focus on the hobbyist.

RadioShack failed to see the long tail. They lost their focus on their core products for their core customer - the hobbyist. Yes, there was definitely a downturn of consumer DIY activity pre-web but the long tail predicted it was still there and would come back strong.

For the last few years going into RadioShack was a disheartening experience. Every visit to a local store was like watching the corner bakery decline into a graffiti ridden crumbled existence. For a while I thought they were going to turn into a solely cell phone distributor. You can read about the troubled years of RadioShack on the always accurate Wikipedia.

Today I went into a local RadioShack looking for a wired USB mouse. (You would be surprised at how many stores don't carry these in stock, cough, cough, Best Buy) And they had one. The store had a new layout since I had been in last. There was a huge wall with all sorts of components for over clocking your PC. The electric component draw was well laid out between resistors and LED's. And then I noticed the flyer that pointed me to this link: Do Stuff. RadioShack shows you how one of their customers made a stationary digital camera stand to take pictures of a deer in the woods without disturbing the deer.

Hopefully this is an upswing for RadioShack. Hopefully RadioShack is getting back to its roots, getting back to its core customers that fled to the Best Buys and Circuit City's - the hobbyists. I would love to see RadioShack embrace the DIY community and provide rich content for the community - blogs, special newsletters - gasp - maybe even local clubs. They could really do some interesting things with social networking but with real people in real places.

So I'm pulling for you RadioShack and I'm hoping you're coming back to your roots.

It's like they always say, 'There's no school like the old school.'

Best Career Advice Comes From Cartoonist

2007-10-15T22:13:00.000-05:00

I was reading part of Marc Anderson's treatise on managing your career and saw the quote he had from Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams about the 25% career formula that I found very interesting:

"If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."

Can you guess which of the above is the key to success for writing Dilbert? This is some of the best career advice I have ever seen. Not everyone can be the next Tiger Woods but everyone has at least a few things that are pretty good at; maybe not the best, but pretty good. And that just might be the key to your success.

If you follow the link to Scott's post you should take a few minutes to read the comments. People just started listing out what things they were good at (in the top 25%) and I thought that was very cool.

So what's in your top 25%?

Blink Author Malcolm Gladwell TED Talk

2007-10-15T21:57:00.001-05:00

I came across this TED 2004 talk with Blink and Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell discussing 'What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce' and wanted to share it with everyone else. I'm a big fan of Malcolm's and loved his books so I was interested to see him speak. His less than twenty minute talk focuses on how spaghetti sauce made a comeback in the late eighties and focuses on what makes people happy. Just another one of his brilliant examples and he is a very engaging and intelligent speaker.

Browser Considerations When Desiging for the Web

2007-10-08T22:39:00.000-05:00

I don't know what's worse when designing for the web, the fact that there is now 38+ different web browsers out there or that Internet Explorer still seems to need the most work arounds. You always need to be aware of what browser (including the version) that your target audience is primarily going to use when designing for the web.

According to W3 Counter Internet Explorer 6 still has the lion's share of the market:

According to my blog stats Internet Explorer 6 is the minority:

It's interesting to see that Firefox v 1.X is the second biggest web browser used by F-Stop Blues readers. You should always do some user interface research before designing for the web, especially if you are changing or tweaking a current design.

(original link: Smashing Magazine article)

Grade Your Website For Better Search Engine Optomization

2007-10-08T22:19:00.000-05:00

With Website Grader you can enter your website or blog url and it will report back 'scores' on how well your url performs on all sorts of different SEO (search engine optimization) metrics.

My blog here at www.fstop-blues.com scored 78% if I remember correctly. Two useful things that it told me was that 1) my meta tags were all default (I think because I switched to the new Blogger beta template a while ago and didn't notice) and 2) I don't have a 301 redirect from fstop-blues.com to www.fstop-blues.com and that could be affecting my inbound link ranking. (Read more about how to make a 301 redirect file at isitebuild)

A very useful tool to use and best of all it's free!

(original link: Guy from How to Change the World)

Ruby,Ruby,Ruby

2007-09-26T19:08:00.001-05:00

Most of my programming experience is with embedded hardware so I don't often get excited about the latest and greatest Web 2.0 thingy but I'm really getting into Ruby on Rails. (Yes, I have been living under a rock) I did get into Java for awhile , doing some specific engineering applications but I quickly burned out when I tried to port to the Web. Keeping up with the framework and standards - the Web got sloppy in my opinion.

And then comes along Ruby on Rails. It's so simple, so easy - it's like the first time I wrote a Perl program. I'm just getting into Ruby on Rails so we'll see what I make of it but so far I'm digging it. If you know of any good Ruby on Rails resource sites then leave me a shout out in the comments.

Test Image Posting

2007-09-24T16:56:00.001-05:00

Test Post

2007-09-16T17:36:00.001-05:00

Testing out new Windows Live Writer Beta 3

Chasing Cool

2007-05-07T21:46:00.000-05:00

I was sent a free copy of Chasing Cool the other day and I'm about half way through it and I have to say I'm hooked. It reminds me of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell which talks about trends in business that make a product/service popular, or put another way, making your product cool.

The authors of Chasing Cool (former CEO of Barneys and a former DJ turned marketing specialist) give sound business advice on how to be cool instead of just trying to be cool. They weave in a lot of choice quotes from leaders in the fashion and music industry (the authors backgrounds) who know a lot about being cool. The book really lays out the foundations you should learn in any business class about timing your product for the right market and for the right time.

The book also spends a lot of time on what it means to be cool that you should already know - if you have to ask, then you're probably not cool.

Honest Review of Toshiba A2 HD DVD Player

2007-05-02T22:24:00.000-05:00

I started reading Tom Richmond's blog over at Tom's MAD Blog a couple of weeks ago and I have really enjoyed his posts. Tom is a very talented artist who does caricature drawings; he does a lot of work for MAD Magazine. Tom gives you the inside view of being a freelance artist and a lot of history on MAD all with a little bit of sarcasm and wit. (I recently picked up The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to improve my drawing skills from stick figure to, well, more human. I should ask Tom if he has heard of this book and what he thinks about it.)

Anyway, Tom recently posted a review of the second generation A2 Toshiba HD DVD player on his blog that I thought was a very honest review. It also sounds like he has a nice home theater setup so I think he's also got some good metrics to go by. All in all, it seems like he likes it and even has nice things to say about the image quality:

Of course, all that is just an aside when in comes to the really important thing… picture quality. As far as picture quality goes, it’s difficult to describe the difference between an HD DVD picture and even an upconverted regular DVD other than to say it’s incredible. The bigger your screen, the more you’ll notice the difference. The picture on a 42 inch plasma screen at 720p resolution is obviously tighter and clearer with an HD DVD, but get into the 50 inch range and it’s like night and day.

I used to work in the consumer electronic field and could tell you some interesting stories about this player - let's just say that it's more of a computer than high def DVD player. But it's at a decent price now of less than 400 bucks and has good image quality so I think it's a good deal for your home theater setup.

Mean and Green Racing Coming to Your Street Soon

2007-04-29T21:28:00.000-05:00

As a hybrid driver myself (I have a Toyota Prius) I love to see new alternative fuel vehicles being designed. The combustion engine is so 1980 - the next generation of car gearheads and monkey wrenchers are going to be about hybrid/electric/fuel cell cars.

The Wrightspeed X1 is a great prototype of what an all electric car can do: look good, help the planet, and burn rubber.

The X1 prototype is just the beginning. It meets its design specs of 0-60 in 3 seconds, 170 mpg equivalent; and at 1536 lbs, is only 36 lbs over the design target of 1500. It really does raise the performance driving experience to a new level, even for racing drivers. No clutch, no shifting, precise and immediate control of torque in drive and braking, perfect traction control…first gear takes you to 112mph…

New X Box 360 Elite with HDMI Just a Pretty Paint Job

2007-04-29T21:19:00.000-05:00

The reviews are starting to come in about the new X Box 36o Elite with the HDMI connection. Engadget posts about their test between HDMI 1080p and Component 1080p:

But to tell you how subtle it was, we didn't even notice it until we literally started flipping back and forth as fast as we could. Fast motion, spinning, action, all the rest -- it looks almost identical on both consoles.

The truth is you are going to have to know what you are looking for and have an advanced setup to see the differences. Going back and forth between HDMI and component on your 42 plasma (probably not calibrate properly) ain't going to get you there. Since most people aren't going to notice the difference then it's probably not worth going.

(Before you leave a comment and tell me that you can absolutely see the difference and that I don't know what I'm talking about, make sure to tell me that you can tell the difference in a CD recording at 128kbps and 192kbps with your iPod headphones and I'll be sure to send you a T-Shirt that says 'I Got Jacked at The F-Stop Blues' or some other clever saying to indicate you are delusional)

HDTV Consumers Are Not Idiots and Maybe Your TV Shows Suck

2007-04-29T20:53:00.000-05:00

Yahoo picked up a story from Audioholics citing a survey in which 12 million people that had HDTV's weren't even watching HDTV programs. Then it went on to say that 25% of those people didn't even realize that they weren't watching HDTV television.

This reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Homer responds to Kent the anchorman with "People can make up all sorts of uses for statistics. 40% of all people know that."

I have seen so many stories in the last year by the mainstream media about how 'confusing' HDTV technology is and how half the people who have an HDTV don't even know they aren't watching true high-definition programming. (See how I threw my own statistic in there off the cuff? Pretty good, no?)

First of all, the average Joe Sixpack buying a HDTV is not an idiot. Sure, he might not know exactly what he's buying or the difference between 720p and 1080p, but he knows that the picture on that new HDTV is a lot clearer and brigther than his 25 in Zenith at home.

Second, I think there are a lot of people buying HDTV's for DVD movie watching and not necessarily for TV shows. Oh, I could give you a percentage on this, but 56% of you would know that the population size of my survey would invalidate my results in any real scientific journal. Let's face it - TV shows suck. The one's that are any good you can download through iTunes or Xbox Live or buy it on DVD. How many HD channels do you get in your area? In my area I can probably get 10 or so, if I'm lucky. There is not a lot of HD programming in most areas right now.

A 60 inch HDTV today looks a lot better than a 60 in projection TV only a few years ago. (Yeah, do you remember those? You could only view the screen at a 133 degree angle and while everything was big on the screen the image quality was lacking)

Third, if someone did buy an HDTV without having any clue of how to get HDTV programming onto it, his friends would make fun of him and he would call the cable company the next day to hook it up. Any idiot can do that as 94% of us know.

Fix for Editing Recorded TV Shows in Vista Media Center

2007-03-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

While it's true you can edit your recorded TV shows in Movie Maker with Windows Vista you might run into an 'unspecified error' stating that Movie Maker can't open your DVR-MS file. This means Movie Maker is probably having compatibility issues with the different video decoders installed on your system. If you go to Tools and then Options, you can click on the Compatibility tab and deselect the different video filters and that should solve your problem.

Nvidia TV Tuner Card DOES Work in Vista Media Center

2007-03-18T21:47:00.000-05:00

I just upgraded to Windows Vista from Windows Media Center Edition 2005 this weekend and I'm happy to report that my evga single PCI TV tuner card with Nvidia NVTV does in fact work in Vista.

Even though the Vista Upgrade Advisor said it would not work and some of the forums said it would not work I got mine to work. I had to run through the TV setup a few times using manual settings but I did get it to work.

Halo 3 Game Tester - Do You Have What It Takes?

2007-03-05T22:13:00.000-05:00

File this under 'dream jobs' but Bungie (the guys behind Halo) are looking for some game testers in the Puget Sound area to play Halo 3 and help them make it the best game ever:

So, you want to play Halo 3? Do you want to be a part of the most anticipated game of 2007? Here is your chance; Bungie Studios is looking for a few good testers in the Puget Sound area to help test Halo 3. Testing plays a vital role in product quality and Bungie Studios is looking for intelligent, driven & energetic testers to help ensure Halo 3 is of the highest quality. Read the job description and qualifications below to see if you're qualified to sport the uniform of the Master Chief.

Check out their website for more info on the position but hopefully these positions are up to date and we'll all be working for Bungie playing Halo 3!

Take the poll below and let's see how hardcore Halo you really are:

Working on High Quality Flash Video

2007-02-25T23:07:00.000-05:00

As you can see from my last two posts I am experimenting with using higher quality flash video on my site by hosting it myself. I'm still trying to get it to work properly but if you are looking to do the same thing on your site I will give you the 2 minute tutorial to get it done. (This is the site I found that pretty much details it all out for you)

1. To encode your video to flash from Windows Movie Maker, save it as a avi and then use the free Riva flash encoder. This tool has a really easy to use interface to convert your video file to a flash file. It also comes with a flash viewer so you can see what you have converted. The only downside is that it only supports certain video formats.

2. Now that you have a flash file, you need to put it up on your website. But for people to be able to view it, you need to have a flash player on your website. FlowPlayer is a free and open source flash player that you can put on your website. It has a lot of features like being able to add your own skin and looks great.

The only thing about using FlowPlayer is that it can be a challenge to figure out how to actually embed your flash files so they can be played on your site. I'm still working on this for my site and will let you know what I find out.

Vista's Ready Boost No Match for RAM

2007-02-19T23:00:00.000-05:00

I've been watching Ready Boost in Vista for a while now and I've read different things about how much of an improvement this feature is supposed to have but the crew at Tom's Hardware put it all to rest with a very nice test comparing Ready Boost vs Memory RAM:

Although an additional USB 2.0 Flash memory device clearly helps to increase application responsiveness at launch time (we've experienced time savings in this area of up to 50%), upgrading an average computer from 512 MB to at least 1 GB of RAM makes a huge difference. Microsoft may argue that adding a Flash memory stick already has a tremendous impact on subjective performance, reducing application launch times considerably. And that's all true; the performance impact is considerable, but Windows Vista still remains slow in the end.

I wasn't surprised to see that having more system memory would give the biggest improvement but I was surprised to see how in certain configurations the USB flash memory with Ready Boost could make up to a 50% improvement. I think when I upgrade to Vista I will use a USB flash drive with Ready Boost just in case it gives me better performance.

Green Your Computer and Get a Free Netflix Subscription

2007-02-19T22:52:00.000-05:00

Over at Coding Horror Jeff calculates out how much its costing him to keep his server running 24/7:

Here's the kilowatt-hour calculation for my server, which draws ~160 watts:

160 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 1401.6 kilowatt-hours

The other thing you'll need to know is how much you're paying for power in your area. Power here in California is rather expensive and calculated using a byzantine rate structure. According to this recent Mercury News article, the household average for our area is 14.28 cents per kilowatt-hour.

1401.6 kilowatt-hours * 14.28 cents / 100 = $200.15

So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.

So you can see that his server is costing him 17 bucks a month or the cost of a Netflix subscription. I use to turn my computer off at night until I switched it over to Media Center and now run it 24/7 to record shows and as my main 'server'. But I think I'm going to have to start turning it off again at night when I'm not using it and get bette rat the power management for it too. But I sure am glad I have a new Core Duo in there to keep the wattage down!

I would be interested in hearing how many watts your computer is consuming - especially those gamers out there ...

(via Lifehacker)

Convert Your Gas Lawn Mower to Solar

2007-02-19T22:46:00.000-05:00

This was a cool project where an old gas lawn mower was converted to an electric mower and charged off of a solar panel! Basically you pull off the gas engine and put on an electric motor with a battery and then use a solar panel to keep the battery charged. The total cost of the project was around 700 dollars and seeing how you can buy an electric lawn mower for around 300 dollars this is definitely more of a concept project than a practical project. But you could modify this project to add a battery to your existing electric mower and with a solar panel never have to plug it in again!

(via Zedomax)