Sunday, November 23, 2008
Fix
Make A Custom Leather Case For Your Small Electronics
10:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Sure you could probably pick up a pleather case for nearly any electronic device you own, courtesy of eBay and healthy international trade routes, but it would lack the charm of a hand crafted leather case. There is an excellent tutorial over at the DIY blog Instructables on how to make a molded leather case. The tutorial details how to make the case for an iPod, but the molding technique is valid for anything you’d like to mold a case for. The required tools are minimal and inexpensive, for their sample they bought leather scraps off eBay and made their mold out of dense chipboard and tape. For another interesting DIY case idea, check out how to make a laptop case out of floppies. Leather iPod Touch Case Using Water! [Instructables] More »
Organise
Trim Your Budget By Reclaiming The Special Treats
9:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | What happens when something that was once a special treat, slowly becomes an expected part of your daily routine? Trent, over at frugality blog The Simple Dollar, noticed that things he had previously done as a treat of sorts had become necessary components of his day much to the determent of his wallet. Describing how his enjoyment of the a local coffee shop had changed: More »
Design
Spice Up Your Pics With Some Photoshop Lighting Tutorials
8:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | Over at design blog Web Design Ledger, they’ve rounded up over two dozen tutorials to teach you how to add impressive lighting effects to your photos. Whether you want to inject some sparkles, motion trails, sun flares, fire, star bursts or luminescence into your image, there is a tutorial for you. Completely new to Photoshop? Learn the basics of Photoshop in a week. No room in the budget for Photoshop? Check out GIMP, a robust freeware alternative. 28 Powerful Photoshop Lighting Effects More »
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What A Lovely Name Helps You Select A Name By Traits
6:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | What a Lovely Name is a tag-based search engine for baby names. Rather than take the traditional approach of searching for a name and then reading what traits are associated with that name, with What a Lovely Name you select a handful of traits you value and the gender of the child and the site suggests names. The name suggestions are refreshingly multicultural; in testing various trait combinations I wasn’t stuck with a laundry list of Anglo-Saxon names. Interestingly when I chose the two traits I find most endearing in my own daughter, elegance and strength, her name appeared in the list of suggestions. The tags aren’t limited to just personality traits, although it’s certainly the strongest draw of the site, you can also use cultural tags to see names by country and region or celebrity tags to see what names are popular amongst athletes, actors, musicians and so on. For another fascinating look into baby naming conventions, check out the NameVoyager to see the popularity of names over time and The Baby Name Map to see the most currently popular names in your region. What a Lovely Name [via TechCrunch] More »
Fix
DIY Hot Sauce
5:00AM Lifehacker US Edition | If you find the hot sauce spread at your local food emporium a bit lacking, it’s time to do it yourself and create a batch of palate-scalding sauce that’s just right. Over in the Dining and Wine section of the New York Times, there is a straight forward method for making your own hot sauce. If you have chili peppers, vinegar, a blender and a stove to boil the mixture on, you’re in business. Even if you have no intention of cooking up a batch of hot sauce right now the comments from home-brewing hot sauce aficionados are a wealth of information about hot sauce brewing and a fascinating read. Photo by jslander. D.I.Y. Hot Sauce [New York Times] More »
Work
Top 10 Things You Can Do With A DVD
2:00AM Kevin Purdy | The proliferation of thumb drives and external hard drives has made optical media like DVDs seem a little less handy—but there are still plenty of ways to put DVDs to good use. These shiny, multi-gigabyte discs can run entire operating systems, put movies on your computer and vice-versa, host a robust copy of Wikipedia, and do so much more, if you know how to work them. Check out some of our favourite hacks and tips for getting the most out of DVDs, whether released by Hollywood or purchased at OfficeMax. Photo by MiNe (sfmine79). More »
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