How-To Guides

How To Guides

Oct

2023

Thermaltake Riing Fan Rewiring and Pinout

I needed a 120mm fan for my 3D Printer that I was messing around with and found some Thermaltake Riing Plus fans I had lying around, but I needed to control them via a standard fan header rather than using the special 9 pin plug they have. Here’s a quick run down to change the pins around to use it as a standard PC fan, as well as how to wire up the LEDs to work with WLED (on an ESP8266/ESP32), Marlin on an Ender 3 (SKR Mini E3 V1.2) or to a 5V Motherboard RGB header.
Continue reading →

Sep

2020

Rubber Band Cars STEM Project

About the project

This is a project I worked on with a group of students at both the schools I work at. The original goal was to have the students at both schools build the cars then meet up and talk about their cars and have races to see whose car can go the furthest. Sadly COVID-19 resulted in us being unable to meet up, but we still built them and had in school races anyway!

The basic principle is the Rubber Band cars are planned on paper, designed in TinkerCAD on the computer and then 3D Printed and assembled by the students.

A little bit of background on me: I’m the Technology Officer in two primary schools and I’ve been doing this job for 11 years now. My background is in IT and I’m a tech enthusiast – I’ve done a bit of everything! I’m not actually a qualified teacher, so I do my planning alongside the teacher who I’m working with to make sure that it ticks all the boxes.

Continue reading →

Dec

2019

Where to get games for PC

There’s a boatload of different ways you can buy/rent PC games these days. This guide is a quick rundown of the different places you can get games from and how to score yourself a good deal too!

I cover Games Launchers, Stores and subscription services. Please feel free to leave a comment if you think I’ve missed something!

Also: Everything should be up to date as of December 1st 2019 and any pricing listed is in Australian Dollars.

Continue reading →

Sep

2017

My Favourite Mac Apps 2017

UPDATE: May 2020 – Not a lot has changed. Wunderlist is gone now and I’ve moved over to using Microsoft Todo. Here’s a few more alternatives too. I stopped using Control Plane as it was bugging out too much on me, I ended up just making shell scripts that do what I want to to when I swap from home to work.

NetNewsWire stagnated, then was reborn. I wasn’t a huge fan of the changes, so I swapped to using Reeder.

Everything else is still good!

A while ago I wrote an article about my favourite apps, I figure it’s time I did it again!

Continue reading →

Aug

2017

Managing Storage on your Mac

When your computer starts to run out of space, it will come up with error messages saying “Your Startup Disk is almost full”. Once it completely runs out of space, you won’t be able to save any documents and it will start to behave weirdly (programs crashing etc).

Continue reading →

Aug

2017

General Touch Bar Tips

The Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro lets you do a whole bunch of functions within apps that support it. I’ve put together a few tips for ways you can utilise this and extend what you can do with it!

Continue reading →

Aug

2017

IFTTT Triggers with a MacBook Touch Bar

IFTTT lets you create applets that let you control things like web services with custom triggers (eg. Create a To Do Item if you receive an email). I’ve been using it to control the lighting in my house based on triggers I’ve put on my Touch Bar.

This guide goes through setting up IFTTT with my Xiaomi Yee Lights and then adding triggers for them on my MacBook’s Touch Bar.

Continue reading →

Aug

2017

Mac Tips for Beginners

Here’s a quick collection of tips I put together on common questions I get with new Mac Users!

Continue reading →

Jul

2017

AirPods Power In TouchBar

Here’s a fun little project I did to put the AirPods battery level on my MacBook’s Touch Bar. Heads up: This is a not a guide for beginners!

First part is a quick how to, then I’ll go into detail about how each part works.

Bonus points: I had to work out how to get a lot of bluetooth information via the command line, so there’s some nice shell scripts for it too!

Continue reading →

Jul

2017

Using Family Sharing with iCloud

iCloud is designed to run with one account per person, this includes both adults and children!
If you’re sharing an account with multiple people, you will run into problems like:
* Text messages being sent to all devices on the same Apple ID
* Facetime calls ringing on all devices
* Purchased apps appearing on all devices, whether you want them or not.
* Children having an account with your credit card on it spending your money.

To fix this issue, Apple have introduced Family Sharing. This will let each family member have their own account, while still allowing you to buy an app once and share it across all family members. It also includes features for finding lost phones, allowing you to use GPS to track where people are, shared photo albums and calendars and allowing accounts for children under 13 years old.

Continue reading →