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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

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.

About a two years ago, I moved into my first post-college apartment with my friend Eli. One of our first steps was to hit up IKEA to pick up furniture, given the fact that we were, A.) Cheap and B.) Cheap.

We took a bunch of measurements and headed off to the store with our tape measures and our credit cards in hand. Little did we know that we’d be struck with the spirit of Martha Stewart herself and end up devising the perfect interior decorating plan.

Eli and I, being of a similarly cheap nature, both owned identical IKEA couches, the Lillberg, if I remember correctly. We also figured out that the Norrebo bookshelf unit was approximately as wide as the windows on the two windows on either side of the corner of our apartment. And “two shelves high” was as high as the higher of the windows. We also discovered a corner TV unit (I believe it was from the “Lack” line but I can’t find it now) was just about the right height and of a matching color to both the Norrebo and the Lillberg units we already had. So we formulated a plan.

1. Build up a two shelve high bookcase unit against the wall with the taller window.
2. Put the corner TV unit (obviously) in the corner
3. Use the remaining third shelve of our Norrebo package to build a window seat against the other window.

But the true genius was realized when we discovered that the remaining cushions for our second (my) Lillberg couch were exactly the proper width and height to put on top of our new window seat.

The results were impressive. Even Eli’s (now-ex) interior designer girlfriend was very satisfied with the results.

Not bad, eh? All it took was a few extra random nuts and bolts scavenged from my toolbox and a little bit of extra time.

Update: There seems to be as much interest in the view from my old apartment as in the actual “hack”. The location is on Alki Ave SW in West Seattle, right at the east end of Alki Beach.

View Larger Map

The body of water you see is southern Puget Sound, and the mountains in the distance are the Olympic Range.

I have more pictures from my time on Alki up in my Flickr photostream.

About a year ago I picked up a pair of Shure E2C headphones. Well worth their somewhat expensive price, I use them all the time. They provide a ton of isolation, so they’re great on the bus and when flying.

But, in my experience, the actual headphone plug leaves a lot to be desired. Within about 8 months of regular use, I started getting the traditional crappy connection problems you get with cheaper headphones. After a few months of constantly trying to tweak the connector in order to get a good connection, I finally decided to replace the connector myself.

The final product was quite impressive. For more details, read on.

Step 1: Acquire supplies

Obviously you’ll need a pair of faulty headphones. And a new connector. I picked up a gold-plated 1/8″ connector from Radio Shack for about $3.99. I could have bought the standard chrome one for a buck or two cheaper, but in this situation, “bling” is worth a few extra bucks.

Step 2: Strip off old connector

First step is to remove the old crappy connector and strip it down to it’s bare wires.

Strip off the main cover for an inch or so, and then strip the individual wires. They will be incredibly tiny. This is where it pays to be really good at soldering. I won’t elaborate, but I’m not that good at soldering.

Step 3: Solder on the new connector

Now solder on the new connector. This is where reading becomes important.

According to Wikipedia, the three connections on a headphone jack are as follows:

1. The “Tip” (the end of the connector), which handles the left stereo channel. For me this was the blue wire, which I connected to the shortest terminal.
2. The “Ring” (the first segment of the connector), which handles the right stereo channel. This was the red wire, which I connected to the middle terminal.
3. The “Sleeve” (the second segment of the connector), which is the common ground. For my headphones, this was the conductor with no insulation on it. This was the wire with no insulation, and it connected to the ground terminal.

It may or may not take you some experimentation to figure out what wire is which channel in your headphones. Once you figure it out, solder or screw the connections down to each channel.

Step 4: Reinforce the connection

This step actually came later for me. At first I just soldered up the connections and used the plastic sleeve that came with the connector, but after a week or two my connection was flakier than the original. The tiny wires were moving around too much within the connector. So I re-soldered my connections and then encased the whole deal within a protective layer of cheap two-part epoxy.

Afterwards I waited for the epoxy to dry, and then shaved it down small enough to fit into the screw-on connector.

I’m very happy with the final results. After the epoxy modification, I’ve got a connector that is rock-solid and as good if not better sounding than the original jack. And I get tons of great compliments on how cool the “bling” connector is.

There you go. About $5 and less than an hour’s work to save a $100 pair of headphones. I hope you find this as helpful as me.

So I finally figured out how to write AppleScripts that hook directly into Quicksilver’s “text clipping” interface. For the longest time I’ve wanted to be able to set away messages from Quicksilver… and now I can:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text ThisClipping

    tell application "Adium"
        set my status message to ThisClipping
        set my status type to away
    end tell

end process text

end using terms from It may not look like much, but I’m a happy boy. Put that into an AppleScript using Script Editor and save it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. Restart Quicksilver, and you’ll be able to set any text you type in Quicksilver after the “.” command as your Adium away message.

The on process text terms has lots of other uses too. I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

Tilt/shift lenses let you change the focal plane of your camera by shifting your lens up/down/left/right or by tilting it in any direction. [1] In this manner you can do lots of interesting stuff to change the field of view and where the “focal point” is on an image. They’re used a lot in things like fashion and landscape photography to do things like selectively bring into focus a particular part of a photo. Check out the example fashion photo at the bottom of [2]. For landscape and in particular photos taken at a high angle of city scenes, they have the cool side-effect of allowing you to create pictures that look like macro photos of highly detailed models, since you can shrink the field of view to a narrow plane of the photo a lot like a macro lens does. But I just fake it using a gradient mask and a lens blur in photoshop. [1] http://www.dennisonbertram.com/hackmaster/2005/02/tilt-shift-pc-lens.htm [2] http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift

The whole tilt-shift miniature meme probably started with a post to Boing Boing with some awesome shots from a photographer who used a real tilt-shift lens to constrain his depth-of-field to make photos look like ultra-detailed models. And then, as memes go, it took on a life of its own and spawned more Boing Boing posts, Flickr groups, Photoshop “hacks”, and so-on.

Ah, the joys of the intarweb…

The IVR Cheat Sheet: This “QuickBase” from Intuit has instructions for how to cut through to a real person when you call a company and get an IVR system — Interactive (or Integrated) Voice Response. You know, the computer system that tries to solve your problem using stacked menu systems so they don’t have to pay a real person to talk to you? Even though you know what you want can’t be solved by the machine and you have to talk to a human? This site will tell you what you need to do to get the human on the phone.

The Intuit IVR Cheat Sheet.