[click photo for gallery]

I found this freaking cool package yesterday called tleds which blinks the keyboard LED's when there's ethernet traffic. It blinks the Num lock for traffic down, and the Scroll lock for traffic up. Anyhow, I like this thing a whole lot... but I thought... what about the resources! This package is taking a whole like .03% of my CPU at least! So I needed a hardware solution...

It costs a whole $.25: All you need is a pair of wires (a twisted pair from a cat 5 cable works nicely), and a piece of 1 row pin header (click for an example of what that is). And some shrink tube if you're feeling professional. Oh and soldering skill... and a soldering iron +1.

I took pictures so you could see how you do it, but basically, wire the led on your ethernet card to the pins, and plug the pins into the Turbo LED plug. And some pointers: The ethernet card will have one LED that tells you that it's plugged in at all, and the other one blinks when there's some data going through... You'd want to use the one that blinks, because its far more interesting than just a solid light. Polarity isn't a big deal, if it doesn't work when plugged in one way, just turn the plug around and it should work. Oh yes... and a disclaimer:

Disclaimer: This information is provided with NO WARRANTY. The author takes no responsibility for the actions of other persons who may attempt to execute the described actions. So if you misinterpret Turbo LED for 220v power line and ethernet card for mom, and hurt your mom, or hurt anything else including your self, or feel sad because you broke your ethernet card, or burn yourself soldering, or whatever else that you might want to blame me for, It is not my fault.

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