Unfortunately, it only hung on my wall for about a week before my cat decided to try to tug on the power cable hard enough to actually rip it off the wall. The motherboard popped off its mount, severing the LCD cable, and rendering the picture frame dead. I couldn’t bear to give up on it, so it sat in my closet for a few years until I finally decided I needed to resurrect it.

This weekend I put the final touches on the new frame. Using an old ex-Amazon laptop I purchased at a special employee-only sale, I’ve brought it back to life.

Read on for more details.

The old picture frame, before I mounted it in the wooden frame:

First I stripped the laptop of all its extra components. The DVD drive went, along with the modem, keyboard, trackpad, and other various bits and pieces. I kept the battery mounted since I figure it’ll serve as a nice built-in UPS.

By pure luck the LCD panel for the Compaq laptop was exactly the same size as the old LCD from my Thinkpad, so mounting the LCD was a simple matter of fitting the new panel in place. Then I mounted the motherboard backwards against the back of the frame using copious amounts of foam double-stick tape. Nothing too elegant this time.

For software, I opted this time to use FlickrFrame, a super-simple framebuffer-based picture frame app that can suck down images from my Flickr account. It’s really easy to set up and it has a web-based UI for configuration and monitoring.

I’m very happy with the end results, and it’s nice to finally finish off this very long-lived project.

It’s heavily based on Tarski, with a few local tweaks. Tarski worked out great as a base, and I highly recommend it.

This one is a pretty simple and “obvious” hack. Last week Cool Tools posted a link to a simple and very ingenous device for holding those extra cords behind your desk, the Keep-a-Cable cord organizer.

While I could have just bought a pack for $5 and be done with it (and I encourage you to do so if you’re so inclined rather than rather blatantly ripping off their idea like I did), I’m just not that kind of guy. I can’t look at a flat 5-cent piece of stamped plastic and not want to make my own.

So I did. Details below the fold.

I used a lid from a plastic Sterilite storage box I had repurposed for something else. In reality you could probably make it out of a discarded milk jug or any similar source of flat plastic, but I liked the thicker plastic of the lid.

Using a ruler and a circular lid from a spice jar, I sketched out a series of half-circles with a rectangular mounting strip about an inch wide. Then I cut it out.

Then (rather crudely if you look at the pictures) I used a drill to hack out some wire-sized holes in the semi-circles and cut through to make a slot.

I used some inch-side double-stick tape to stick it to the underside of my desk. The final result turned out quite well. I hung a couple of MacBook power supply cables (yes I’ve had up to 3 Apple laptops on my desk at a time) and some Cat-6 Ethernet cables back there, and I still have a couple of spots left over. You can’t see the strip from the front side of the desk, and it hides the cables nicely.

See, told you it was easy.

Update: As suggested by some commenters, I ended up securing it to the underside of my desk with three small half-inch screws. The tape really wasn’t holding up as well as I’d hoped.

May 16th was my last day at Amazon. After about a week of a half of vacation I’m starting all over today at blist.com, a small, early-stage startup in Pioneer Square, Seattle. My tentative job title is “Technical Project Manager”, but my actual work will encompass so much more. I’m looking forward to working with such a young, ambitious company and getting the chance to leverage my skills and experience in ways that will hopefully help make them very successful.

In my tenure at Amazon, I had the opportunity to work with so many awesome people that I can’t count how many people I need to thank. I still love Amazon and all it’s hard working employees, but this opportunity at blist was too good to pass up. They’re small, scrappy, and have a grand vision of the future, probably much like Amazon did when it was starting out. It’s a big jump, but it should be a great ride, and I look forward to being able to accomplish some great things.

Photo borrowed from TheMahers Seattle Lunch2.0 photoset on flickr

For details on construction, read on.

Basically, a snoot is a tube or channel you fit onto the end of your speedlight (flash) to create a very directed beam. They’re handy for creating a tight, focused beam of light for flash photography, getting you effects similar to this one (borrowed from PositivePaul’s CC-licensed photostream):

Mine is really the simplest of snoots - a cardboard sleeve that friction-fits onto the end of my flash. The only improvement I made to mine is the inclusion of a “grid” of corrugated cardboard you can slip in or out to change the charecteristics of the snoot:

The results are that you get a tight, extremely focused beam with the grid in place:

And a larger beam with it removed:

Simple and really easy to build out of some cardboard and gaffer’s tape.

The results were quite good, and the whole process was much smoother than the last batch. I had very willing helpers for the boil (my parents) and for bottling (my girlfriend) which helped a lot. I also switched to a “pump-style” racking cane, which eliminated the painful siphoning process I struggled through last time.

I’m very happy with the beer itself, and my friends seem to love it as well. It came out a bit maltier than I was hoping for, I think primarily because the primary fermentation went a few days faster than I was planning. It did have a bit of hidden hoppyness to it, but I think next time I’ll pick a lighter malt than the chocolate malt I used and throw in an extra couple ounces of hops for good measure.

Read below for more instructions.

They’re really simple. Basically I just started with some foam rubber pre-slit pipe insulation from Home Depot:

And then I stitched up some ballistic Cordura covers with velcro from some leftover material I had:

Super simple, and I think the results are better than the ones for sale.

I have a few posts queued up about projects I’ve been working on lately, and I’ll be posting them soon. I promise.

This is mine. Click through to Flickr to see the details of all the stuff I crammed into it. It started as a standard IKEA shelving unit that I decided to convert into storage, but when I discovered that they had discontinued the cabinet (and more importantly the doors) I bought the last set of doors they had and painted them flat black.

The final results (if you don’t look too close) are quite nice and fit in well with the rest of my apartment (and effectively hide my toys).

In a future post I’ll detail my “workshop” (slash office) as well.