My first thought is a distributed surveillance system where you wire up a webcam at every remote location you want to monitor. This could be your elderly mother's house, your camp way up north or maybe even your office because you suspect someone's stealing your favorite multi-colored sticky notes. Whatever the reason, all you need to do is install your webcams with either their own Internet IP, or plugged into an Internet-connected PC running Active Webcam. For my global distributed network test, I visited Opentopia and selected three random webcams from several Universities around the United Sta

Since I only have a single IDE CD-ROM and single hard disk to show you today (as well as only a single physical IDE connector on my motherboard), I've opted to make the hard disk as Master and the CD-Drive as sl

The way this setup works includes a web server with Subsonic installed. Technically, you don't need to set up a web server - when you install Subsonic , it will use port 80 and serve up its own webpage. If you already have a web server, you can configure Subsonic to use its own subfolder within the public html fol

For the CD-ROM, the diagram indicates that 2 is Slave setting. What does this mean? Well, looking at the back of the device, we have 3 pairs of pins. So, to make it a slave device, I place a jumper over the central (second) p

I suggest electrical tape or the amazing, adhering substance known as duct-tape, to fasten the material in place. Pretty much any adhesive will do. However, you will probably want to avoid using extremely powerful rare earth magnets as fasten

Most DVD drives need to be installed from the front, so that means taking the front panel off carefully and avoid pulling the wires for the power switch. It's also better to connect any cables now before it's slotted in, as things can get quite tight back th

This has been a dream of mine for years, but I've always avoided the project because of the costs I assumed were involved. However, writing for MakeUseOf often forces me to think a bit outside the box. How would I accomplish a home security system inexpensively or f

The hard disk is similar, but this time I chose " Master with Slave Present ". Then I connect the cable up, bearing in mind that the hard drive as the master should be connected to the centre of the cable, with the slave CD-ROM drive being added at the

You can even add a special Guest account for people that visit your home and have a laptop or mobile device that can connect to your home Wi-Fi network. What's especially cool about Subsonic is that it's available for multiple platforms, and there are even Subsonic apps for Android, iPhone and Windows Mob

However, for those completely sick of constantly cleaning the dust out of their PC, you might want to check out water cooling , which is an entirely silent and efficient means of keeping your computer running c

Every two-to-three years I decide to upgrade my PC. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision as I plan my builds to run for around that length of time, choosing components such as RAM , CPU and graphics card so that the computer will be able to run the best gaming CPUs|https://Pcbuildinsight.com/ games and applications (although not necessarily at maximum performan

However if you’re looking for sales, don’t expect to get exactly what you’re looking for (unless you happen to be extremely lucky). Rather, play a long game. Stay patient, purchase when the item you’re watching is at the right price and don’t rush into your upgr

Now, two of these cameras were obviously monitoring very quiet locations. However, the third webcam on the lower left was a college workshop where students kept walking in and out of the room. So I quickly configured the motion settings as described above, and then waited for one of the three cameras to trigger my alert. Sure enough, within about five minutes, I received my email al

A few months back I showed you how to install a second SATA drive , appropriate if your computer was bought sometime in the last 5 years or so. We also taught you all about partitions and formatting drives, and to completely replace your old drive with a new one - but I skipped over the subject of physically installing IDE hard drives as I considered them to be too old to warrant a tutor

This is probably the hardest step of all. Before securing the motherboard to the case, I made sure to write down a quick diagram of the jumper pins for the case switches and LEDs as they're difficult to see once the motherboard is in place. These can be found on the bottom left, if you were looking down into the machine, and they look like t

That's it from me. I hope you enjoyed this little visual build-log. If you'd like to try the same thing yourself, keep an eye on FreeCycle , or head down to the city dump and find old some old PCs to play with. Just tearing them apart fully, mixing a few components, and trying to make them work again is a fantastic learning experience. Comments are welcome, but I might not be able to answer any specific hardware related questions for your particular bu