With just a couple yards of cloth, a staple gun, a wrench, and a screwdriver, you can give your bland office chairs a fast makeover. The decor nerds over at Design*Sponge have a quick tutorial on how to make a typical computer desk chair into something pretty snazzy. They say: With no need for new foam or batting (we upholstered right over the old stuff), this turned out to be a super simple, super cheap way to dramatically improve our office decor.
Plus, the stripy chair looks great. Image via Design*Sponge.
Office Chair Upgrade [via Design*Sponge] More »
Beer batteries create energy from bacteria that feed on waste water. The technical term for them is “microbial fuel cells” (MFCs), and they earned the nickname beer batteries because beer company Fosters has funded the development of MFCs in Australia that run on waste water produced by the beer-making process. The best part about beer batteries, though, is that you can make them at home, based on instructions developed by a high school student named Abbie Groff. She won an international science fair prize for her work. Image by Abbie Groff.
Groff’s MFC tutorialLet’s say you’re looking for an expert opinion to flesh out some research you’re doing, but don’t have time to track down a university professor or go to the library. Or maybe you’re just one of those people who likes to have the answer to everything, and you want to prove you’re right by citing an authoritative source. Sure, you can try to Google up an expert opinion on how the launch of Sputnik led to a culture of censorship in the U.S., but you’re likely to get mired in a pile of search result goo. That’s where Google Book can help. With its extensive catalog of academic books and journals, Google Book is the very best place to find fast, authoritative answers to your question about Sputnik, complete with a short quote and trustworthy citation. More »
If you’re sick of opening a new terminal window for every application, GNU Screen is here to save the day. It’s a simple little program that comes pre-installed in Linux, BSD, and Mac OS X, and it allows you to page through multiple console applications from the same terminal window. Imagine reading your mail, editing text, and running a sorting application—all from the same terminal on your desktop! To get started, just type “screen” at the command line prompt. You’ll get a welcome screen, and then you’ll hit return. It looks like you’ve been taken back to the prompt, but now you’re in GNU Screen. Start an application, like a text editor. Then hit ctrl-a, followed by letter c. This creates a new window (you’ll see a new command prompt). Start your next application, then hit ctrl-a, followed by p. Now you’ve paged back to your previous window, with the text editor. Presto, two terminals in one! But wait, there’s more. More »
US-centric: The best way to use powerful real estate information-sharing program Redfin is to forget what the directions tell you to do. More »
Apparently the tradition of great engineers not having college degrees goes back 2,500 years. Harvard classics researcher Mark Schiefsky has shown that many great technical innovations of antiquity, such as the balance and steelyard, were created by craftspeople with no theoretical training in mathematics. A steelyard is a balance with unequal arms, whose operation is based on ancient mathematician Archimedes’ law of the lever. Schiefsky poo-poos the idea that you need a fancy law to make a steelyard, and in fact has proven that steelyards were in use long before Archimedes explained it. More »
With fears of an avian flu pandemic on the rise, a group at Georgia Tech has made it easy for researchers in the field to identify and analyze the virus using nothing more than a laptop and a small suitcase-sized biosensor (demonstrated by scientist Jie Xu at left). Usually it takes several hours in a wet lab to identify strains of avian flu, but the new biosensor works in minutes. Now researchers can rapidly determine whether a sick bird is carrying the dangerous H5N1 strain of the virus that has occasionally jumped to humans. More »
