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How to replace the battery in your Gyration Ultra GT

- Using a knife, cut open the edge of the battery casing as shown.
- Once a slight cut has been made take a small screwdriver and pop off the cover.
- This will expose the original battery pack as shown.
- Pop out the battery pack from the casing.
- This is the new battery pack you are going to use.
- First cut the wires from the old battery pack noting where the red and black wires were attached to. Also cut off the tiny white connector from the new battery pack and bare the wires as shown.
- Solder the wires to the casing making sure the red and black wires are in the correct position.
- The new battery will fit where the old one was in the outer cover (minus the top you took off and leave off). Just slide the cover back onto the mouse and charge the battery.
That's it!
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How to repair your SageTV HD100 extender
The SageTV HD100 extenders seem to be dropping like flies. Some people report a whistling/hissing sound while others don’t. In most cases when the extender dies you are left with a power LED that blinks once every 5 seconds or so. If you have an HD100 that exhibits this behavior then there is a good chance you can repair your extender yourself following this how-to.
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How to create a multi-zone WinAmp based whole house audio system
Hardware discussion and overview
First thing we need to look at is hardware. The Audio PC (APC) is a single computer that runs multiple instances of Winamp and is controlled via X-10 keypads.
The easiest place to start is the APC’s hardware. In order for all this to work, you’ll need a motherboard that has at least as many PCI slots as you want Zones +1. The idea is that there will be a single soundcard for each zone plus an additional card for synched play.
The APC doesn’t need to be a super powerful machine. All it needs to be able to do is run as many instances of Winamp as you require, plus Girder. I’m using an old Soyo K7VTA-Pro with an AMD Athlon 1.2GHz and 1 gig of RAM. This is probably over kill but it’s what I had lying around to use.
Video doesn’t matter because we’re not outputting to any monitor. If you have a motherboard with on board Video, you’re set. Otherwise any generic AGP card will do.
I ended up buying a 40Gig HD, the cheapest full ATX tower I could find and 5 Aopen AW850 soundcards to finish off the set. Again, this doesn’t need to be a powerhouse. All it will do is play music, nothing else.
To interact with the X-10 keypads you’ll need either a CM11A or CM12U module. I don’t believe there is a Girder plugin for the newer USB interface at the time of this writing. And for X-10 Keypads I’m going to use a single 8 key KeyPadLinc keypad for each zone.
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