We finally decided to get rid of the old carpets in our basement and replace them with laminate floor. The carpets had a subfloor, which was a sponge that basically fell apart as we tore it out. This, and the carpet, was a major source of dust at our place.

For the new floor we decided to go with a simple subfloor, which comes in 2 by 2 foot pieces and can be locked together. The bottom part of the subfloor is plastic with a pattern that creates an air cushion between the concrete and the wood. It’s also made in Canada.

The slowest part of this project is to do the final edges. In my case I had to cut the wood to a pattern of our wall, which is made out of stone. There also needs to be about a 1 cm gap between the walls and the wood. Similarly, we laid inter-locking pieces of laminate on top of the subfloor and finished with a baseboard all the way around the room.

The breakdown:
$6 per 2′ x 2′ subfloor
$0.8 per 1′ x 1′ laminate
$5 per 8′ baseboard

For a 10′ x 11′ room it cost us $350 and about a day of work.

Not too long ago I purchased a used LCD tv from eBay. The price was good at $100 for a 27″, but the backlight died within a week of use! After some research I found out that practically no one carried a replacement inverter for this model. The only alternative that I found was done on a 17″ LCD monitor using LED lights. This is where I started.

My tv is a 27″ widescreen, so I figure I need a lot of LEDs. I started with 24 and quickly tripled that. I had to drill a little hole for each LED to put in place. I protected all the contacts with heat shrink wrap and hot glue, which I also used for fixing the LEDs to the tv. Each light takes about 3.5V DC, so I strung six in serial to power it with 24V DC. These batches were put in parallel. The first attempt produced bright lines on the screen, because the LEDs are spot lights (very narrow light beam).

Next logical step was to put little pieces of reflective tape on each LED. At this point you really have to learn to be patient! Unfortunately, I did not like the result. Considering how the tv is constructed, it has 3 films that the light has to go through before hitting the actual screen (pixel matrix glass plate). This clearly wasn’t enough for the LEDs to become diffused. Here is a picture:

My second idea involved a flashlight type of approach. I wanted to use a regular light bulb and to create a cone shape in order to spread the light onto the screen. Initially I wanted to use wood for the prototype, but then I decided to make it even easier by using styrofoam. Styrofoam did not offer the rigidity, but it definitely left the tv very light! The idea is simple: make the cone shape out of styrofoam and then cover the inside with tinfoal to make it reflective.

I had to go through a number of bulbs to get the right tint too. Finally, I found a good energy saving (13 watt) light bulb that produced a good tone of white. Regular bulbs at 60 watts+ get way too hot for this model. To finish things up I used a 5VDC relay, so the bulb would work only when the tv works. Here are few shots:

For more pictures visit my Picasa Page.

I recently launched a new web service for landlords worldwide. It goes something like this…

What if you had to make 8 receipts for your tenant right now? We automatically generate and pre-fill all the receipts for you. For free. All you have to do is print and sign!

While the idea is pretty simple it looks like it’s one of its kind on the net. The service has been getting a good amount of use, so I am looking to invest more time in building it up.

–> Rent Receipt

I currently have 2 turtles. As an owner I constantly look for ways to improve their aquarium life. This time around I decided to make a house for the turtles, which allows them to go out of the water or hide in the shadows from the bright light bulb.

Previous experience told me not to use wood to build the house. The problem with wood is that it changes properties while being underwater and there is no good way to keep everything together. For example, glue might be poisonous and nails can rust. These problems set me on a path of making a house as one solid piece and there is no better material for this than the good old concrete!

You can see the design of the house from the picture. Basically, I dug up some large pieces of styrofoam I had laying around and cut them into shapes. The shapes I glued together with hot glue. The trick is to make the outside of the house with styrofoam such that you can fill it in with concrete. I also had to add extra reinforcements, because styrofoam alone cannot hold the weight of the concrete.

Finally, I filled in the concrete in two parts. I filled in everything before the roof of the house, then I glued the styrofoam shape for the roof to the pillars and filled in the rest.

Total cost:
$5 concrete
$10 glue gun and glue
$1 for styrofoam

Total time:
2 hours to make styrofoam shape
30 minutes to pour cement
3 days to set cement