Gearfuse

What’s a programmer to do. Buy a hard-to-find LED strip? Most likely. He’ll then probably spend weeks hacking it so he can interface it with an Arduino. Afterwards, the LEDs will fade in and fade out for weeks to come, as our hero desperately tries to make sense of all this. After meeting with a friend, our hero and his companion work together to release a library for said LED strip. The day ends and they both breathe a sigh of relief. They hack to live, they live to hack. Hit the link to see it in action.

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Even if you turn your computer and electronics off, they still suck power from your outlets. This is known as vampire energy and it can really add to your electric bill if you’re like us and own a lot of consumer electronics. For $100-130, this power strip from Monster lets you tap a button to switch it into sleep mode. A test was done with 200W worth of equipment. After hitting sleep, the outlets only drew a combined total of 6 watts. Impressive. The GreenPower Center might be on the expensive side for a power strip, but it could save you some serious bucks, essentially paying for itself.

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