5 Minute Cooler Speaker

5 Minute Cooler Speaker

     A few years back I bought a WOWee speaker/amp. It's contained a battery, amp, and small inducer speaker. I strapped it on a small cooler and it worked great. After a few years of use, the battery life started to fade and it never really put out enough volume. This year I decided to build a new speaker cooler with a bit more power and better battery life. My main goals were to keep it relatively cheap and non-invasive. I didn't want to modify the cooler in any way and wanted the components to be completely removable. This configuration is extremely easy to build and can be done in minutes...

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Harvesting a Stereo Bluetooth Adapter

Harvesting a Stereo Bluetooth Adapter

     A few months ago my Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth headphones died. They had a good run but the speakers started to go bad. The electronics inside, however, were completely fine. These headphones have a good battery life of about 5-6 hours and a decent range so I figured they would work great with an upcoming project I have in mind. I decided to strip them apart and see if I could make a small adapter instead of buying a new one...

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Makin' Bacon - Skin On vs. Skin Off

Makin' Bacon - Skin On vs. Skin Off

     After my first attempt at curing and smoking bacon at home, I came across some discussions that mentioned skipping the skinning process altogether. The main consensus was that it's just easier to take the skin off after smoking. There wasn't a definite answer on the whether or not the cure or flavor was affected so I decided to do a side-by-side cure/cook. I started with two whole bellies, about 18 lbs total. I cut both bellies in half, skinned two halves and left the other two untouched...

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$25 Sous Vide Controller

$25 Sous Vide Controller

     When I first read about cooking food sous vide I was very interested, but I didn't want to spend a few hundred dollars on a machine to experiment with. I did some searching and stumbled upon a few homemade sous vide machines using the STC-1000 temperature controller. It's cheap, available on Amazon, and came with just about everything you need for a primitive sous vide setup... 

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Litecoin Mining Rig - 4 R9 270x GPUs

Litecoin Mining Rig - 4 R9 270x GPUs

Cryptocurrency has been a really hot topic in the news for the past few months. Bitcoin and Litecoin are two of the main currencies currently in use. What's special about cryptocurrencies is that they're completely decentralized. There isn't a single entity or company in control like traditional fiat currencies of the world. Everyone has a copy of every transaction that has ever been sent, referred to as the blockchain. Instead of relying on a central server to store these records and carry out the transactions, cryptocurrencies rely on people to lend their computing power to the network. In return, the cryptocurrency network rewards contributors....

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