hacks

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By popular request, I thought I’d write this one up. It’s a quickie.

Finished Product
Finished Product

A month or two ago, I was lucky enough to spot a pair of very cool vintage theater seats with a big “FREE!” sign on them sitting on them down the street from my apartment. After my eyes lit up with the possibilities, I convinced an anonymous neighbor to help me haul them to the elevator.

Then I asked my awesome father for some carpentry assistance, since I can’t fit a table saw in my apartment.

He totally came through for me with a great “floorboard” made from some gorgeous teak/holly flooring (commonly found in sailboats) edged in oak. Mounting it to the seats was pretty straightforward – just some 10-24 stainless bolts backed by fender washers and nylock nuts. I added some standoffs made from nail-on nylon “magic mover” pads to make them easy to move around.

The result is awesome. They work great as a couple of extra seats for guests that stay out of the way when I’m not using them. And I love the quizzical look friends get on their faces when they try to figure out how I managed to steal them from the movie theater.

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Yes, I’m back from hiding with another empty promise to blog more often. :)

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.

Cable Organizer
Cable Organizer

So I did. Details below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Seriously, the last screwdriver bit set you will ever need. I’ve been looking for one of these for a long time. Besides all your standard philips, hex, Torx, and square head bits (in every imaginable size from tiny to huge) it also includes a whole ton of “security” bits, including those for secure hex, secure Torx, those crazy one-way philips-head screws you see in public bathrooms, and a few others I’ve never even seen before.

The last bit set you will ever need
The last bit set you will ever need

With this kit, I can take apart just about any piece of electronic hardware (or public bathroom urinal) I’m likely to encounter. And it was only $16 at Fry’s. Definitely a must-have.

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This week I finally received my Arduino Starter Pack from Adafruit. The Arduino is an awesome, Open Source, easy to use platform for getting started in embedded programming. It uses the ATMega168 AVR processor, and there are a bunch of great Open Source toolkits for programming and working with the platform. Very fun.

One of the great things about the AdaFruit starter pack is that it comes with the ProtoShield, an easy daughter-board for prototyping. The ProtoShield also comes with two extra LEDs and a spare button you can wire up to use in your projects. They’re great to use as built-in status LEDs or mode buttons.

But there is no documentation anywhere on how to use them. Poking around at the board and looking at the schematic, I eventually figured out that there were just a couple spare holes on the board that you can use to access them. But they don’t lead to any of the onboard headers, so they’re hard to use.

Fortunately I had a left over three-position header from the kit, so I wired it up with jumpers on the underside of the board.

The Ugly Underside
The Ugly Underside

Its ugly, but it works. Now I can just run jumpers to my breadboard to take advantage of them.

Using the new header
Using the new header

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

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Woot Wine Hacks

Woot Wine ships their wine packages with these frozen “ketchup packets” full of water in them to keep the wines cool during shipment. They always suggest reusing them, but I never figured out why.

Whiskey Hacks
Whiskey Hacks

Tonight I figured out that they make an excellent reusable “ice cube” for whiskeys and scotches. Unlike normal cubes, they don’t water down your drink when they melt.

A friend of mine spent a good amount of money for a similar (but more elegant) solution for her father, involving cubes of granite that one would freeze and then put in their glasses of expensive scotch.

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