Category: Articles

Most people don’t think twice of popping a frozen bag of chips in their shopping trolley while at the shop and some get a pack from the takeaway on their way home.  If you have the patience, there’s a cheaper method.  All you need is an electric fryer, with fresh oil and a bag of potatoes.  No need to take up all that space in the freezer either.

For anyone who tried cutting potatoes into chips and popping them in the fryer as they would with frozen chips, the end result was usually dark soggy chips which tasted both burnt and greasy.  However, after reading a few different approaches on how to do this and doing this myself for several months now, there is more to just dumping the cutlets in the fryer! Continue reading How to make tasty crispy home-made chips

For those who landed here looking for CDFreaks, they renamed to MyCE in 2008.  So while the CD Freaks name is history, everything it contains still exists – Here’s the MyCE homepage and discussion forum. Continue reading CD Freaks is history 🙁 Why not Computer Drive Freaks?

After getting some rather interesting questions on dehumidifiers from my original blog entry, I figured I would try answering some here as well as some other dehumidifier related questions I saw around the web. Please note than I am not an expert on these, so if in doubt, please ask a confident professional, such as at a DIY centre. Continue reading Dehumidifier Frequently Asked Questions

After reading various DIY guides and articles on how to balance a radiator based heating system, I came across an interesting, but in-depth guide on how to do this without the cost of using thermometers, let alone hiring a plumber.  In my guide here, I aim to summarise the process, which is a little different to the original in-depth guide, but worked well for me despite me not being a plumber. Continue reading Balancing radiators without thermometers

While carrying out product reviews of media players or even just trying out a software media player, it’s useful to find out whether the audio and video are in sync.  Sure, there are a lot of audio video synchronisation videos out there, but when the audio and video are out of sync, it’s useful to find out just how frames or milliseconds they are off by. Continue reading Audio Video Sync, Alignment & Latency Test

In this article, I’ll show a solution of how to invert the brightness of an object in GIMP without inverting the colour.

When the Invert option is used in GIMP, it will invert both the brightness and colour, which is generally a problem if all we want to do is let’s say invert the brightness of writing or of a dark/bright object in an image.  I have encountered this problem on several occasions and all I got with searching the internet was similar questions with answers saying to use another image editing tool, use the colorize tool after inverting, etc. or just answered questions.  So hopefully this article will help some out. Continue reading How to invert brightness-only (not colours) in GIMP

Before I start, I’m not selling or advertising anything here.  There isn’t an affiliate link or banner on my website. 😉

Despite all the rain here in Ireland, it does get warm from time to time, often to the point where it is difficult to sleep at night.  However, what is more surprising is that I see people using air coolers that can actually make their environment even worse, not realising how these operate!  So in this basic guide, I’ll go through the types of appliances and where they work best and why air coolers are not really useful in the Irish climate. Continue reading Air conditioner, air cooler, dehumidifier or fan – What works?