Sunday, August 31st, 2008
at 10:43pm
All-things-IKEA weblog IKEA Hacker details how to make an attractive headphone stand for your desk—complete with cable-wrapping posts for cord management—using roughly $15 worth of returned parts from IKEA. The outcome, which you can check out at IKEA Hacker or in the many larger pics at the original forum post, is really impressive. The headphone stand seems like a perfect addition to any desk, particularly if you do any sort of editing or you just like zoning out with headphones when you’re working.
(Via Lifehacker.)
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
at 1:39pm
Add mood lighting to this weekend’s evening backyard soiree with some Mason jars, LED lights, and coin cell batteries. The Evil Mad Scientists DIY site describes how to make your own temporary outdoor lighting with cheap supplies and easy assembly. Tape the LED cell to the battery to light it up, then mount that inside the jar top and set it out. This setup is temporary (and will burn out eventually if you don’t disassemble) but it looks like an easy way for even beginner do-it-yourselfers to light up a dark pathway without investing in a pricey outdoor system.
(Via Lifehacker.)
Monday, August 18th, 2008
at 9:24am
News is just out of a new way to jailbreak your iPhone, and this time the tool is specifically designed to work ‘quickly and easily, without requiring a full restore.’ Quickpwn has been released as a beta, intended to complement the main PwnageTool. It works with iPhones and iPod’s running 2.0.1 firmware, and operates very quickly without needing iTunes to rebuild/restore your device afterwards. This beta version is basically feature-complete, but lacks a ‘funky UI’ (they’re adding that soon) and is currently windows only (other OS’s are ‘coming soon’). It’s available here. Keep your eyes open for a complete version (though remember that even though it’s development software, it’s apparently ‘impossible for this to permanently damage your device’). [iPhone-Dev.org]
(Via Gizmodo.)
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
at 6:52pm
All platforms with Adobe AIR: When you follow enough chatty people on Twitter, some days the noise can overwhelm the signal—that’s when you want TweetDeck, a full-featured desktop Twitter client that groups, filters, and searches incoming tweets for you. TweetDeck’s killer feature is its ability to separate the people you follow on Twitter into groups—like ‘Don’t Miss,’ ‘Co-workers,’ and ‘Chatty types.’ That way while tweets by the prolific folks fly by in one pane, infrequent tweets from people you don’t want to miss stay bookmarked on top in another. You can add or remove modules from TweetDeck’s multi-paned interface to show you all tweets, tweets from groups you configure, replies to your tweets, direct messages, search results for a keyword, and more.
The second most useful feature TweetDeck offers is its excellent replies capability. Unlike the Twitter web site, TweetDeck doesn’t only show you replies that start with @yourusername—it shows you any tweet that contains @yourusername anywhere in the body. Similarly, it can show you a constantly updating search for a particular term, like a search for ‘Lifehacker.’ The more modules you add to TweetDeck, the wider it gets. Here’s a screenshot. (Click on the image to pop up a full-size version.)
Of course, you can resize TweetDeck to whatever width you want—a single column, if you’d like.
TweetDeck can also display all the tweets from the last 48 hours, often more than the Twitter web interface can (when the ‘Older’ button’s disabled, anyway). TweetDeck also has TwitScoop built in, which shows you the most popular keywords appearing on Twitter at the moment, a Twitter status indicator for when the service is down (which is often), and a URL shortener available right below the new tweet entry box. TweetDeck is a free download for all platforms running Adobe AIR.
(Via Lifehacker.)
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
at 11:16am
Here’s something to put a smile on your face on a non-descript Wednesday morning: Thanko’s new Code-Padlock USB protector. Does it use some funky encryption, or a digital keypad interface? No: it uses a physical code-padlocked lid that stops you from plugging in a thumbdrive if you can’t work out the three-digit code. Brilliant, except that a thief will just steal the whole thing and work out the code at their leisure. So it must be aimed at stopping ‘casual eyes’ accessing files you’d rather keep to yourself. Ah… ones with lots of pink pixels—it all becomes clear. You can of course lock up other USB devices, but you’d have to be working in a really mean office environment to need to do that. Yours for about $9. [Akhabaranews]
(Via Gizmodo.)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
at 11:47pm
10 Things to Consider Before Starting a 2nd Blog: ”
Most bloggers at some point face the decision of launching a new blog or just focusing on their existing blog(s). Whether you currently have one blog or ten blogs, adding another is something that should be given careful consideration. Typically, bloggers choose to branch out for one of the following reasons:
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