Guides, DIY, and How-to’s
Welcome to the guides section of our blog. This catagory is reserved for a lot of the technical things of what we love doing throughout our day to day existence. Some of these deal with some DIY projects we’ve done while others is just our own experience with certain pieces of hardware. Feel free to browse around as there may be something of interest to you.
Accuracy and update CRC.
As a kind note: Many of these guides are based around the personal experiences of those who run s-config.com and may not reflect the correct way of doing something. If you have any problems with what you are reading you can drop a comment in the article or contact us for any modifications or corrections.
Before I talk about the On-Screen display issue there are a lot of people that visit my site that come from the Kodi website and that is totally cool! I love to see all of the people getting a little more life out of a console which was technically only supposed to last 1-2 years before the Ouya 2 was theoretically supposed to come out (and NO Razor, I'm not calling the Cortex the Ouya 2. Not happening.)
A long time ago, Hack a Day did a breakdown on the rechargeable battery that you could buy for the Xbox 360 controller. There really wasn't a whole lot inside as a lot of your circuit for charging is actually in the charge cable. The only thing that was in the Xbox rechargeable battery is 2 Ni-Mh batteries rated at around 2100mAh, a thermal sensor, and a circuit board which has a little EEprom chip that simply informed the Xbox what kind of battery was installed into it.
In the spirit of the original hack posted by them. We will focus on working with replacing the battery cels in the Ni-Mh charger versus mutilating our Xbox controller. Now, for those reading this and want a super simple solution check out this blog about using just one battery and a diode. For those looking for that total conversion charger and all. Keep reading!
This entry was started because for some reason throughout all of the years of repairing printers there hasn't really been a good article about thermal printer repair. Usually when you look-up problems with these types of printers you ether get sucked into trap sites that are trying to get your contact info. Forums that have a lot of dead links. Or some company that is only out to sell you a new thermal printer instead of fixing or even using the one that you already got. We're old-school Luddites and still believe the internet is a place for information. We will not sell you anything. If you find any of this information useful to you then awesome.
Uninstall Cyanogen (sometimes referred to as CM11) and restore our Ouya back to factory default using the full firmware load in the ClockWorkMod Recovery menu. There can be many reasons why you would want to restore the factory firmware onto your Ouya ranging from the company actually getting off their ass and updating new software updates which make the Ouya usable once again such as an Android OS update. Simply restore stock because of the many bugs and glitches in Cyanogen that you simply cannot tolerate anymore. I have published a blog on how to install Cyanogen it is only fitting that I also publish a blog about how to remove Cyanogen as well.
Why Cyanogen Mod (sometimes referred to as CM11) you ask? The future of Ouya and the news of the most recent acquisition of the company to Razer has made a lot of Ouya owners such as myself feel rather uneasy with the console business as a whole. Couple this with an aging OS to the point where some favorite applications such as Kodi no longer work under android 4.1 due to programming issues. Razer is now stating that they will keep the Ouya servers up for another year. But then what?
I guess they pull the plug and tell console owners such as myself to buy the next latest/greatest razer box. I will probably laugh and buy an Nvidia shield if I ever get an Android box again. But that's not the point of this blog entry.
When I first started this blog I created a posting about how I could build a better controller for Stepmania by using a device called an I-Pac. In the MAME community the I-Pac does what modern day mechanical keyboards do by assigning each key its own interrupt onto a micro-controller giving you the absolute fastest response between your joystick and your PC. The only way you could go any faster then this device is by bypassing the USB bus all together and wiring your controller via GPIO onto something like a Raspberry Pi.
The Ouya while it does have a Wireless-N chip the quality of reception has a lot to be desired for it's wireless antenna. Consisting of a tiny block on the motherboard which behaves like a 3dbi antenna that one would expect on a Cel-Phone; The overall reception of wireless traffic coming into your Ouya especially at a distance is problematic. Initially, I did this mod in an attempt to alleviate Bluetooth lag on my Ouya joysticks as the chip-set that Ouya used carries both the Internet and Bluetooth traffic over the same wireless antenna. While it didn't help with the Joystick reception. It did help considerably with wireless traffic.
For PNG Optimization: PNG (or Portable Network Graphics) was a replacement to GIF and is one of the most widely used lossless graphic formats on the net. Whenever you are setting up a website that has a heavy amount of images going for it; You often have to rely on other formats then JPEG or .jpg because although the .jpg is good for most cases such as photos it is often a self-destructive file to have as every time you re-compress the quality of the .jpg gets worse and worse. Also known as lossy compression where the image is compromised to better suit the compression of the file.
Transmission is a torrent P2P file sharing software which is open source and can be run on practically every type of platform environment on the face of the earth. Since torrents can take a long time to download depending on how many seeders there are (people with complete copies of said file) versus peers or leechers (people who are attempting to receive files) it makes sense to keep a device on that only takes a few watts of power versus a giant PC which just eats power throughout the night.
