If you’ve ever thought about getting some LED garden lights, check out this simple and inexpensive tutorial on how to make your own.
Using a couple of homemade infrared pens, a Wiimote, and some software he wrote, Johnny Chung Lee of Carnegie Mellon University has come up with, what must be, the coolest Nintendo Wii hack ever. Since the Wii tracks IR lights, Lee found that practically any surface—a projector screen, a tabletop, an LCD screen—could be turned into a multi-touch screen reminiscent of the iPod Touch or Microsoft Surface.
For those do-it-yourself types out there, the software can be downloaded here.
Check out this clever how-to video that explains how to make your own glowing tomato. The instructions over at diylife are worth the read.
How To Slice an Unpeeled Banana, because “the gift of a banana, pre-sliced from the inside, cements a friendship”.
I began to pre-slice bananas and give them to people I knew. Even when you know how it is done, peeling open a banana to reveal those perfect slices transforms the mundane banana-peeling experience. The service provided by pre-slicing a banana is a small (and unnecessary) one, but pre-slicing magnifies the effect of the gift. The recipient not only gets a banana, they get the unexpected.
Now I’m off to buy some bananas.
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Last summer, Ray Keim of Haunted Dimensions released an extremely cool paper model of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion in New Orleans Square. My brother and I started working on it as a summer project, but since he was only here for one afternoon, we didn’t get very far. Lately he’s been back visiting and it got me back working on it again. Today, it’s finally finished and it looks great!
Here’s a useful tip for Firefox users. Typing in dict followed by a word you want to lookup in the address bar will send you to the definition page for that word.
For people that love keyboard shortcuts:
Alt-d (focuses cursor on the address bar)
type: “dict + word”
Takes you to dictionary.com with the definition you wanted.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could setup custom quick searches on other sites? Well you can; here’s how! Find a search box on the site you’d like to add a quick search for, (currently it’s on the top right side of the main page sidebar at this site), right click on the search bar, and click on “Add a Keyword for this Search” you should see something like this:
Then, enter a title for the search and a keyword you’ll use to execute it, like this:
Once you click the ok button (it might say “Add” in other OS versions), your quick search is setup and ready to search jeffmilner.com. Now, as an example type jm backmasking into your firefox address bar and Firefox will bring you to the search results for backmasking related posts on this site.
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The Make Blog has a link to the nice step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade the value of your router by 10 times! I’ll have to try this when I get back from my sister’s place.
Some of the features available after the upgrade include boosting your wireless signal and throttling your bandwidth by program.
Update: I just hopped downstairs and found that the particular model of Linksys router that I have isn’t on the list of supported routers. Too bad, I would have liked to try this.
Let me know if you’ve tried this and how it went for you.
There are very few things in this world that I would go so far as to say that I hate. Having said that, I HATE Yellow Jackets. I haven’t been stung for a long time (I was stung by a wasp within the first couple weeks of moving to Lethbridge over 3 years ago) but my hatred for this pest runs deep.
Here is a brilliant, cheap, and non-toxic way to deal with wasps and their cousin the yellow-jacket from the AOJ Outdoors Tip Site: Grandpa Kipp’s Sure-Fire Yellow Jacket Trap.
How It Works:
The yellow jackets love fish and will begin to cut off small pieces to take back to the nest. In their “excitement” of buzzing around the bait a few will occasionally hit the water. The soap in the water breaks the surface tension of the waterproof coating on the yellow jacket and it instantly sinks in the water and drowns in a few seconds. Some yellow jackets will successfully haul a piece of meat back to the nest and tell all the other gatherers in the nest where this great food source is. Soon all the wasps from the nest will be working on this fish and over a period of time, all will eventually make mistakes and either fall off the fish and into the water or bump other wasps flying around and knock themselves in the drink, then its curtains for them too. It only takes a day or two to wipe out nearly every yellow jacket in your area.
I’m going camping for the long weekend, and I’ll keep this little contraption in mind should any wasps try and disturb our Victoria Day celebrations.
It’s not too fancy and it doesn’t really do anything important, but yesterday I created my first plugin for Word Press. It’s a small php file that puts random Douglas Adams quotes on the background of Word Press admin pages. If you’d like to install it follow these simple instructions:
- Download dna.php.txt and rename to
dna.php. - Upload it to your plugins directory. (/wp-content/plugins)
- Next activate it from your plugins menu. You’ll probably want to disable the Hello Dolly plugin if it’s activated since both use the same screen space (Disclaimer: This script was based on hello.php)
This is an image of the script in action:
Good luck.
I found this helpful site full of tips on how to clean anything. At first I was skeptical, but after reading a few, I’ve discovered there are some really good tips there. For example the site explains how to clean:
- Adhesive Tags off Plasticware
- Grease in the oven
- Smoke smell from a microwave
- Light Fixtures in Kitchen
That’s just a few of the many entries in the interior category!
Afroman’s guide to recharging alkaline batteries includes not only how to save money on old batteries, but also how to build the charger to do it. His metaphors are a little rough around the edges, but I’ve long held a theory that it’s not as unsafe to recharge the “non-rechargables” as they claim. Afroman busts the myth wide open.
wikiHow is the how-to manual that anyone can write or edit. If you feel so inclined, they have a page of requested “how-to”s.
Wiki’s are a great step toward a society where all information is free. I love it.
Here are some great tips on writing great, productive, emails. When I worked at City Hall I learned of the myriad of emails that some people have to go through (I thought my email was full). I’m sure that if more people would practice the tips from this list their emails would have been read more often and timely, and had a greater chance of actually being acted upon. It would have made things easier for everyone. Many of these tips are also applicable to voice-mail.
- First: Understand why you’re writing
- Get what you need: Providing information, requesting information, or requesting action
- Write a great subject line
- Brevity is the soul of…getting a response
- What’s the action here?
- More good ideas—including make it easy to quote
This is probably pretty boring to %99.9 of the people that read this, but for the other 0.1% here is something I learned about while playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (download) this afternoon.
You can change the colour of the text in your nick name by adding a ^ and then a number in front of the text you want to change. Each number from 0 to 9 is a different color.
- ^0 = Black
- ^1 = Red
- ^2 = Green
- ^3 = Yellow
- ^4 = Blue
- ^5 = Light Blue
- ^6 = Violet
- ^7 = White
- ^8 = Orange
- ^9 = Grey
Here is a site that lets you preview nick colors.
I also learned recently that as a medic you can stick the other team with your needle and poison them. When someone is poisoned, their screen turns up side down and their health slowly goes down. They also make a choking sound—it’s my favorite thing to do in the game.
Update: I found out later the poison thing is actually a mod and not available on all servers.
I stumbled upon an interesting site that explains how to start a fire using a pop can and some chocolate. I’ll have to try this sometime.