hacks

You are currently browsing articles tagged hacks.

IKEA Hacks: Corner Wall Unit

August 28, 2007 by Chris Metcalf | 8 comments

I’m mostly posting this for the benefit of the folks on the IKEA Hacker blog because they’ll probably get a good kick out of it. I’ve long since moved out of that apartment, but I think the concept is still solid and that somebody else will probably benefit from it.

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.

The Apartment

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.

Tags: , , , ,

How-To: Repairing Faulty Headphones

August 7, 2007 by Chris Metcalf | 95 comments

Welcome Lifehackers! Looks like another one of my posts has been lucky enough to be featured on Lifehacker! Very cool. I hope you enjoy my how-to.

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.

Final Product

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , ,

Quicksilver/Adium Away Message Hack

July 25, 2006 by chris | 16 comments

Update: My script no longer works with newer versions of Adium, but brnrdbrk was kind enough to update it for 1.3.

Quicksilver/Adium Hack

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

WTF is Tilt/Shift Photography

March 8, 2006 by chris | 6 comments

So after posting a few tiltshift fakes to my Flickr account, the most frequent response has been “Yeah, they look cool, but what the hell is ’tilt-shift’ photography??”. Well let me quote myself from an email I sent to my mother as a response to just that question:

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…

Tags: , , , ,

Find-A-Human

November 8, 2005 by chris | 1 comment

An awesome time-saving database forwarded to me by a friend:

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.

Tags: , , , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »