Sunday, March 29, 2009

Carry Lotion In A Contact Case

9:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Most moisturisers don’t come in convenient little containers, and if they do, you’ll likely pay a premium for the privilege. Use a contact lense case instead. Judy wrote into the Parent Hacks blog because she didn’t like carrying bulky container of moisturiser, but the cold winter weather made her son’s face really dry. Her solution? I found an unused contact lens case and realised it was perfect for carrying the lotion. It won’t leak, and if you want, the two sides are labelled so you could put two different items in it (i.e. lotion and Vaseline). They’re easy to clean, and if you’re a contact wearer, you’ll have a ton kicking around the house. At first consideration it would seem a contact case wouldn’t be large enough to hold an appreciable amount of anything, but upon further inspection of the multitude of contact cases scattered around my house my opinion changed. The majority of cases were deep enough to easily hold more moisturiser than most people could reasonably use before being back home and able to fill it up again. Practical way to reuse a contact case and save space or repurposing gone too far?Photo by L. Marie. Carry a small amount of lotion in a contact lens case [via ] More »

Use A Mirror Stencil To Create Intriguing Glass At Home

8:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | You can easily add patterns or shapes to windows and mirrors using a simple DIY stencil and some cheap paint. Design blog Design*Sponge posts a series of projects centered around using easy, home-brewed stencils to add visual interest to your home. The process they use for mirrors and glass windows is pretty neat: you apply a sheet of contact paper to the glass, smooth it out and draw the pattern you want onto the contact paper and then trace the pattern lightly with an exacto knife. Peel the inside of the pattern out and you’ve got a stencil adhered right onto the glass you can colour in with some basic latex or acrylic paint. You can even go for an etched look without damaging the glass by using clear acrylic glaze instead of coloured paint. For more detailed instructions, check out the full tutorial at the link below.

Primitive File Size Chart Quickly Locates Your Drive-Hogging Files

7:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you’re looking to quickly get a snapshot of which folders and files are eating up your disk space, Primitive File Size Chart can help. We’ve covered other tools that help you see where your disk space is going, but it’s tough to beat the portable application Primitive File Size Chart for speed. You point it at a disk or directory, tell it how many files and folders you want listed, and it takes care of the rest. Results were returned within seconds even when scanning a packed 1TB disk. Primitive File Size Chart doesn’t have any fancy bells or whistles but it will give you the path, file name, and size of your largest files making short work out of assessing what is filling up your disks. Primitive File Size Chart is freeware, Windows only. Primitive File Size Chart [Freeware Home] More »

Make A Pet-Safe Carpet Deodoriser

6:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | It isn’t hard to find carpet powders at most grocery and home improvement stores, but finding one without a lengthy list of chemicals inside is another story. Keep Fido and Whiskers happy with a DIY mixture. Having a pet increases the odors in your home, especially on the carpets and upholstery they spend all day lounging on. While strongly scented carpet powders can most certainly help you get the smells outs, most store bought powers have all sorts of compounds in them you may not want your pets sniffing up. Fortunately over at the home design blog Re-Nest, they’ve shared a simple and pet-friendly alternative to store bought powders: Baking soda is an ever-popular deodoriser and it’s pet-safe. Crush up a handful of dry lavender and mix with a cup of baking soda, and sprinkle that over your carpet. If you’d like to use essential oils, mix a few drops of your favorite(s) in with baking soda (not enough to make it wet), and then break up any clumps and sprinkle that over your carpet. Let it sit for a bit, vacuum it up, and you’ve got fresher and fido-friendly carpets. If you have your own pet-friendly cleaning tips, share them in the comments below. Photo by ElBosco. Make Your Own All-Natural Carpet Refresher [Re-Nest] More »

XWindows Dock Provides An OS X-Style Dock In Windows

5:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If the application dock on your friend’s Mac fills you with envy, you might want to check out XWindows Dock, a full-featured OSX dock clone. XWindows Dock certainly isn’t the first dock bar for Windows we’ve featured—RocketDock and ObjectDock are two popular options covered in the past. Although much newer to the scene than the aforementioned options, XWindowsDock has an eye-pleasing array of features. The visual appearance is easily customisable with settings covering opacity and blue, spacing, icon size, and many more aspects. If you’re not interested in tweaking settings, the default is more than serviceable, and the application is skin-able to take advantage of other peoples’ design chops. You can minimise applications to the dock, save folders to it, and even preview images and video on it. One small oversight is the lack of support for dragging applications to the dock to create shortcuts. Application shortcuts are added by searching from the dock for the executable. Not a deal breaker for most people, but if you’re a frequent dock re-arranger you may miss the convenience. Also as you can see in the screenshot above, some of the default icons for applications come out a bit fuzzy—grabbing icons from the icon sets we shared last week would be a definite improvement.For more features and screenshots, check out the site below. XWindows Dock is freeware, Windows only. XWindows Dock [Download Squad] More »

Use A Rock To Crush Garlic

1:00AM Jason Fitzpatrick | Why use a complicated tool that’s a hassle to clean when a simple one will do? Forget garlic presses, use a rock! Fresh garlic is a staple ingredient for many recipes, but cloves have a tough and dry skin on them. Garlic presses get the job done, but are a pain to clean and can leave a lot of the garlic behind. Janet, a reader at the tips and tricks blog TipNut, shared the following tip for easy crushed garlic: Find a rock that is smooth and is about the size of your palm. Look for one that is comfortable and not too heavy in the hand. When you first pick the rock, run it through the dishwasher a few times and it’s ready to use. If you don’t have a dishwasher just wash it in hot soapy water with a bit of bleach. To crush garlic, hold the rock and smash it on a clove of garlic. Pull out the skin and there you have it, crushed garlic ready to cook with. Cleaning the rock is a dream, just throw it in the dishwasher utensils basket and it’s perfect to use for years and years. I keep my rock in the utensils drawer in the space between the tray and the back of the drawer, I call it my kitchen rock. You can also give the rock a good scrubbing and then boil it, a technique many an aquarist has used to prep river rocks for their fish tanks without using chemicals. An alternative method that relies on the same principle is to place the clove of garlic on your cutting board and lay a broad cutting knife atop it, crushing the garlic with a strike of your palm. I saw many a cook use flat of the blade technique during my past life as a caterer, but would consider a smooth stone a much safer method. If you have a kitchen tip of your own, rocks involved or otherwise, sound off in the comments below. Photo by a.pitch. Crush Garlic with a Rock [TipNut] More »