Organic Design wiki - Organic Design blog [en]

Airflow

Saul — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 23:19:10 GMT

Airflow

File:Riot-account-recovery-2.jpg

Nad — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 01:02:47 GMT

Riot-account-recovery-2.jpg

File:Riot-account-recovery-1.jpg

Nad — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 01:02:33 GMT

Riot-account-recovery-1.jpg

Matrix

Nad — Sun, 31 May 2020 20:03:16 GMT

Matrix

Prosody

Nad — Fri, 08 May 2020 08:29:12 GMT

Prosody

Big Blue Button

Nad — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 01:00:32 GMT

Big Blue Button

Gitea

Nad — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 14:51:10 GMT

Gitea

Jitsi

Nad — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 01:09:27 GMT

Jitsi

Fixing Beth's microphone

Nad — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 21:41:37 GMT

After fixing my laptop microphone last month, I finally got around to fixing Beth's one today. We very coincidentally both had exactly the same issue with our microphones both failing shortly after we started using them. I thought of a few things I could do better or more easily after doing my one.

First, rather than solder the new microphone onto the circuit board connections, it's much easier to simply cut the wires that lead off to the existing failed microphone and connect those to the new one. That way the kill switch automatically works without any extra effort as well.

Another thing I found after fixing mine was that drilling the hole in the case was unnecessary - when I was talking to my parents to test the new microphone, I demonstrated my new "mute" button by putting my finger over the hole, but they said they could still hear me perfectly! So I didn't both even drilling a hole for Beth's, and sure enough it's fine without - it is very slightly muffled compared to mine, but perfectly fine for every day use.

Finally I remembered we had some bonding stuff that's similar to silicone, but much firmer, so I decided to dab bits of that around the microphone to bond it to the case, rather than making a complicated housing for it. I took some close up pictures of the wire connections to the microphone contacts too, because even with my glasses I couldn't see if the joints were good enough - the whole microphone is just 5mm in diameter so it's very difficult to solder such small wires with a fat soldering iron and no magnifying glass!

Fixing my laptop microphone

Nad — Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:02:20 GMT

Last year I got a Purism Librem 13 laptop which is made for Linux and is very privacy focused hardware. But about a month after I got it, the microphone stopped working. It wasn't a problem with the built in kill switch that allows you to completely disable the camera and microphone at hardware level, because it still activated and deactivated the camera properly. I took it in to some laptop specialists we know in Caxias who are very reliable, and they said that the problem was most likely that the wire had come off the microphone since all the connections on the main board were fine. This is a big problem because, the microphone is next to the camera above the screen and is very inaccessible, so I left it because I didn't want to send it all the way back to the US which would take months and probably also involve a huge tax when it returned into Brazil!

But then we got another Purism for Beth, and after about a month of use exactly the same thing happened!!! We asked the Purism engineers if they could explain better how to access the microphone so that maybe our laptop guys could have a go at fixing them. But then later an idea occurred to me - why not just replace the microphone with another one that's in a much more convenient location?

So first I located the connectors which Purism show clearly on their site here. It looked a little different on my model as can be seen in the first photo below, but it seemed like it would be doable as there was a convenient space right next to the connector where I could fit a new microphone that would be to the left of the keyboard which would do just fine. Next I pulled apart some old unused earphones that had a microphone on them, and removed the microphone and some of the wire.

Then I removed the current microphone and kill switch from the connector and soldered on my replacement microphone via a short piece of the earphone wire, and then tested that it worked. It did work! So the next step was to make it into a permanent feature of the laptop! To do this I drilled a small hole in my chosen location to the left of the keyboard, and then I made a small housing for the new microphone out of a rubber grommet from a roofing nail. I then superfixed the housing to the inside of the case so that the microphone would be positioned right over the hole when inserted into the housing.

And that's all there was to it, it works really well!

I should really have connected the kill switch up to the new microphone, but I decided to quit while I was ahead because my eye sight's too bad and my soldering iron's too big! Later I'll take both our laptops in to our guys in Caxias to fix Beth's and get both kill switches working. As a final finishing touch I countersunk the hole a little to tidy it up a bit and dabbed a black permanent marker on it to make it a bit more subtle :-)

Mastodon

Nad — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 14:44:31 GMT

Mastodon

LimeSurvey

Nad — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 17:58:31 GMT

LimeSurvey

Scuttlebutt

Nad — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 21:29:10 GMT

Scuttlebutt

Nextcloud

Nad — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:06:45 GMT

Nextcloud

File:MyAtom.jpg

Nad — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 21:07:20 GMT

MyAtom.jpg

LAMP

Cyrusty — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 09:55:23 GMT

LAMP

GNU social

Nad — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 19:27:06 GMT

GNU social

Tox

Nad — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 19:42:44 GMT

Tox

Mumble

Nad — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 21:01:21 GMT

Mumble

Red Matrix

Nad — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 17:11:09 GMT

Red Matrix

Bitmessage

Nad — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:06:42 GMT

Bitmessage

GNewSense

Nad — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:36:18 GMT

GNewSense

MariaDB

Nad — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:59:51 GMT

MariaDB

Byzantium

Nad — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 15:06:55 GMT

Byzantium

Fossil

Nad — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:59:26 GMT

Fossil

Distributed TiddlyWiki

Infomaniac — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 03:15:49 GMT

Distributed TiddlyWiki

Concrete

Nad — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:30:50 GMT

Concrete

SOGo

Nad — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 06:29:31 GMT

SOGo

Ext JS

Nad — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:34:12 GMT

Ext JS

CorMVC

Nad — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:30:08 GMT

CorMVC

Friendica

Nad — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 06:53:15 GMT

Friendica

Cappuccino

Nad — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 02:21:57 GMT

Cappuccino

ØMQ

Nad — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 02:11:00 GMT

ØMQ

SproutCore

Nad — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 01:55:39 GMT

SproutCore

WaveMaker

Nad — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 06:31:46 GMT

WaveMaker

KDE Plasma Desktop

Nad — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 03:04:25 GMT

KDE Plasma Desktop

Project-open

Infomaniac — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:56:33 GMT

Project-open

OpenACS

Infomaniac — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 22:34:37 GMT

OpenACS

Tonika

Infomaniac — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 16:13:14 GMT

Tonika

Open source construction set

Infomaniac — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 23:59:17 GMT

Open source construction set

SourceForge

Robin Patterson — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:31:59 GMT

SourceForge

Bitcoin

Nad — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:31:42 GMT

Bitcoin

Nginx

Nad — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:23:05 GMT

Nginx

OpenLeaks

Infomaniac — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:40:54 GMT

OpenLeaks

Diaspora

Nad — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 10:12:03 GMT

Diaspora

FBI Alleged To Have Backdoored OpenBSD's IPSEC Stack

Infomaniac — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:25:09 GMT

FBI Alleged To Have Backdoored OpenBSD's IPSEC Stack

Drupal

Nad — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:13:44 GMT

Drupal

Joomla!

Nad — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:05:57 GMT

Joomla!

Wordpress

Nad — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:57:13 GMT

Wordpress

JQuery

Nad — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:41:17 GMT

JQuery

Category:MediaWiki

Rob — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:36:26 GMT

MediaWiki

Apache Server

Sven — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:16:22 GMT

Apache Server