Duck's Tech Blog

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.
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Mar

2022

HP Chromebook 14 G5 Trackpad Failure

I have a fleet of about 200 HP Chromebook 14 G5’s that I manage at my job (among other models of machines) and I’ve been having this common fault with the trackpads where they will stop working or stutter around. I thought it was an interesting problem so I’ve decided to document it a bit more in detail here.

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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.

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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.

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Sep

2019

Firefly – Starry Night Stop Motion

This is a project I did with Year 6 students using stop motion for our schools Firefly Festival

Read on for some more technical details!

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Sep

2019

Firefly 2019

In August 2019 we ran an event at my Primary School called the Firefly Arts Festival.

It was a one night event where we show off artwork created by the kids as well as an art installation by each year level, most of the installations featured light.

For a quick summary of the night, watch this video!

For more details, read on…

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Sep

2018

Dymo LabelWriter Region Locked Labels

I recently bought a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo and was having trouble using non-genuine labels with it.
Turns out: There’s a US and an international version of the Dymo LabelWriters, and the labels aren’t compatible across the two!

Read on to see about my adventure….

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Oct

2017

Corsair Void Surround Review

Super fast review here, I got myself a pair of Corsair Void Surround headphones from work to try out and figured I’d post my findings here.

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Oct

2017

Synergy vs ShareMouse

After doing a mini review of Synergy in one of my earlier articles, I was contacted by Bartels Media who make a competing product called ShareMouse. They gave me a free copy so I figured I’d give it a good shot and compare the two.

Please note, even though I was given a free copy of their software (nothing extra), I’ll still be as honest as I can!

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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!

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