Ingenious DIY Idea: How to Declutter a Desk or Workspace It happens to the best of us: we get seduced by some sleek ultramodern furniture design and forget to factor in what it will look like when we add cables, cords and other peripherals that have become essential in this age of electronic and digital technology. This idea solves the problem from the other direction: rather than boasting an initially simple design, it relies on your actions after-the-fact to transform a messy desk into a brilliantly clean workspace. Van Mardian may have been the first to publicize this simple DIY desk organizing idea, but many people have since (and likely before) come to the same conclusion: a simple piece of composite pegboard mounted underneath a work surface makes it easy to use wire, zip ties or whatever other fasteners you may have handy and attach all your necessary-but-ugly essentials so they are not seen from above.
Homemade Document Imager Recently I had the need to digitize a few banker boxes worth of old documents. I usually would use a Canon Lide scanner to scan a few pages but this project required the capture of a few thousand pages of paper and would take forever with a normal document scanner. After looking around on the internet to see what other people have done to solve this type of problem I decided to build my own document imager. I converted an old overhead projector into a copy stand by taking off the projector head and adapted the arm and bracket to have a 1/4 inch camera thread mount. Then I spray painted a plywood board matte black for the imager table surface. Two old desk lamps were mounted next to the table for illumination. I have been extremely happy with the results and it takes a fraction of the time a normal scanner would take to capture a few hundred pages at a time. Document Imager Camera Bracket Here is a sample page that captured using this homemade document imager and was cropped in Photoshop.
9 Tactics for Rapid Learning (That Most People Have Never Heard Of) &... - StumbleUpon Whenever the subject of why some people learn faster comes up, I get a whole host of common answers: Some people are just naturally smart. (Often implying you can’t improve)Everyone is “smart” in their own way. (Nonsense, research indicates different “intelligences” often correlate)IQ is all in the genes. (Except IQ changes with age and IQ tests can be studied for, like any other test) There may be some truth to these claims. Considering the upcoming launch of my rapid learning program, I wanted to share my favorite tactics to learn faster, retain information better or just enjoy the process of learning more: #1 – Pegging (or How Mental Magicians can Perfectly Recall Hundreds of Numbers) One of my favorite learning tactics, that is rarely mentioned, is pegging. The systems I’ve seen typically work with a special cheat sheet. From there, you can translate any series of numbers into a series of letters. Here’s a quick way to separate the rapid learners from the average learners.
Black Labels, Bright Lights: 5 DIY Wine Bottle Lamp Projects Admire the label art, open the bottle, drink the wine, put a stopper in, then consume the rest later … and then what? While a true collector might still keep the empty glass around, most of us then dispose of the leftover container and move on. Here are some illuminating reasons to think twice before recycling them right away. (Instructions for the above DIY outdoor wine bottle wooden-wall torch at Design Sponge). More than decor, candles can add nice mood lighting to a space – particularly when filtered through dark greens and browns of a glass wine bottle. Lamps are an obvious choice for useful and display purposes, and by preserving the full bottle intact they can also let the labels remain (or add your own drawing or image) if you prefer to have a bit more decor than a simple colored glass object. These sound a bit complex, right?
DIY Book Scanning | A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization. How To Rip DVDs with VLC - How-To Geek - StumbleUpon Yesterday we took a look at the new feature in VLC 1.0 which allows you to record DVDs to your computer. There is also an overlooked feature in VLC that allows you to rip your DVDs as well. Here we will take a look at how to rip DVD movies with VLC for Windows. Note: This feature should work with VLC versions 0.9.6 and up. Ripping a DVD with VLC Load up the DVD you want to rip and start up VLC. The Open Media window will appear and you want to click on the Disc tab. Next the Convert screen opens where you will want to select a location for the ripped file. While you are browsing to the location to put the ripped file make sure to give it a name and a supported extension. When everything is set up the Convert screen will look something like this where we have the source drive and destination file with appropriate extension. While the DVD is being ripped you will see a progress count in the main UI. You may notice a slowdown of your system as the process takes up a lot of resources.
My Flour/Sugar Drawers (Note: If you missed the KitchenAid winner results, you can find them here.) When Marlboro Man and I kicked his parents out of their house on the ranch so we could live there instead, I didn’t want to do a thing to the house. It was 30 years old, lived in, exceedingly comfortable, and I loved everything about it. And okay, we didn’t kick Marlboro Man’s parents to the curb. I asked my mother-in-law to help me figure out the design of the new kitchen because she’s good at that type of thing and she’d lived in the house for thirty years and knew all about the air and the light there. I’m happy with the way it turned out. One of my favorite things about my kitchen are these glass-front drawers: They’re in my baking center. I think I dreamed them up one night in my sleep…I’m not sure. The flour (or sugar) go right inside the drawer, so I can see exactly how low my supply is getting. But the flour/sugar is safe inside, because there’s a sliding cover on each of the drawers.
Using a WebCam for WhiteBoarding in GoToMeeting Have you ever wanted an easy way to communicate a simple visual idea on-the-fly from a GoToMeeting Session? GoToMeeting is awesome for communicating ideas, and with HDFaces it is awesome for getting that face-to-face feel. What I’m talking about is a quick drawing or whiteboard. So, here is what i did. I wanted to be able to use the medium I’m used to using, namely whiteboards or drawing a diagram on a pad and have that translate to a web meeting. There a quite a few tablet and drawing slate options but I wanted that direct feel of a sheet of paper or whiteboard. Here is the basic idea, use GoToMeeting HDFaces and shift focus to a webcam that is pointed downward from an overhead mount. I tool a Lagra work lamp from Ikea: and used the base and arm of the lamp. I used an HP HD-3110 webcam. My costs for this project were: 2 lamps, $4.99, $9.99, 1 webcam $19.99, plus a few cable ties. 1. 2. iGlasses 3.