DIY Life

There truly is something for everyone in this world. I would never have thought to combine kitchen storage with geeky computer stuff, but this idea is well worth crossing the two. After thinking it over, it makes perfect sense to store your server in your extra bread bin.

The tutorial for this project is quite clever -- and clear enough for even the most challenged of DIYers. A bread bin is just about the perfect size for a server, and the material is easily cut to fit cords and the like. Once the server is safely tucked in its new home it can live there relatively dust free and out of harm's way.

My husband is a self-proclaimed computer geek. We don't just have a home computer; we have a downstairs server through which all of our incoming and outgoing email is processed. We have an upstairs computer which is the hub we can connect to remotely.

Add two laptops, a wireless router, a docking station, and infinitely many things that I cannot begin to tell you what they are used for, and you have our state-of-the-art wired household.

Did I say wired? You betcha. With technology comes wires, cables, and a mis-mash of mess -- everywhere! -- and that's where Creatrope's Card Cable Organizer comes in.

Salvaging electronic parts is a must for any DIY'er. You save big on shipping charges, and recycling is good for the environment. Hack-a-day dissected an old computer mouse and found some useful components.

What useful parts are inside an outdated PC mouse? There are a bunch of sensors and buttons, including rotary encoders that can be used to measure movement in robotics projects. My favorite find is the microchip that glues the sensors to a computer. Learn about all these parts in detail, in the how-to.

Hack-a-day doesn't delve into the proper techniques for removing parts, but there are a ton of tutorials that can help you get started. It's possible to remove many parts with a simple soldering iron and an absorbent copper braid, called solder wick. Many use a solder sucker to vacuum solder away from parts, or a special desoldering iron. Surface mount chips can also be removed, but they may require the gentle embrace of 400 degree air from a hot air rework station, or the crude gust of a heat gun.

I have a love / hate relationship with word processing programs. On the one hand, it completely excites me that they are so technologically advanced that I can use them for almost anything I need -- from creating business cards and labels to inserting photos to make flyers and even scrapbook pages.

The hate part comes in when I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do what I want to do. No little dog or paper clip on the sidelines offers me the help that I need.

eHow has a simple tutorial on how to create a stationery template in Microsoft Word. Did you know that MSWord comes with templates you can just fill in? Or, you can choose to create your own from scratch. eHow has easy, to-the-point instructions on how to do both.

What will I do with my new-found word processing skill? For starters, I think I'll make a personal stationery header for quick notes, thank-yous, and the like. Now that I know how to do it, the possibilities are endless.

When I spied the title "Guard your Laptop with Electric Rings of Death!," well, I had to check it out. And what did I find? Awesome pics of what looks like a bright electric force field circling a laptop! What is this? A DIY electric fence to keep unauthorized sticky fingers off your keyboard? Is it for real? Well, turns out this project is simultaneously very geeky and very cool.

Okay, so it's not a real force field. No, it will not zap your roommate for attempting to access your passwords file. However, creator TeslaDownUnder, says that, yes, the photos are for real and not Photoshopped. It's all done, he says, using a gadget involving rotating electrodes, which was then photographed in a dark room on a long exposure. Voila! Instant force field. Nope, it won't harm a fly. But it looks cool!

These old analog gauges were in a one-dollar junk box at the market. Before there were LCD screens in everything, before LEDs, data was shown on these.

In a sort of retro mash-up, we'll make a USB device that displays PC status info on these gauges. The gauges can show CPU and memory usage, processor voltage -- just about any numerical data typically displayed on small HD44780 based LCD character displays commonly used in PC case mods.

You'll find all the details and project files after the fold. Check out the podcast for an overview of the project.

Stumped by a difficult DIY task or a fix-it job gone wrong? Here's a possibility to consider: How to Mend it.com. This Brit site lets readers submit questions for other readers to answer. It's a lot like super-popular Yahoo Answers, but it's devoted entirely to fix-it topics. Car repair, home maintenance, renovations, large and small appliance jobs, computers, plumbing, lawn mowers, film projectors, boats, heating and cooling systems, toys, roofing, car alarms, and even musical instruments. Yep. They're all covered here.

Lots of questions seem to go unanswered. However, many others get one or even several replies. Worth a shot if you're having a problem and don't want to pay big bucks for a repair service. To test the site's mettle, I searched washing machine repair. This brought up over 15,000 questions on the topic. Problem is, (assuming you're searching for answers) you're going to have to hope that plugging in a more specific search term will take you to the questions best-suited to your situation. Obviously, you are not going to want to scroll through all those questions page by page.

Bottom line: if there's one fix-it this site could use, it's a more sophisticated search function. But give it a whirl anyway. It's free advice, people!

It seems to come up a lot that people aren't quite sure how to properly dispose of certain materials. While ideally, we're using less, some consumption is inevitable and the correct disposal of these things is environmentally crucial.

I've collected a list of things that don't belong in landfills, or regular municipal recycling programs and found the right place for them. I'm sure these answers vary from one community to another, so feel free to jump in with your own answers in the comments.

AOL Money has an interesting article: Top 5ive Things Never to Repair. Although you'll need to check the article itself to understand the reasoning behind it, if you're curious, the five items are:

• Computers
• Digital cameras
• MP3 players
• Microwaves
• Cell phones

Read more about it after the break!

The Mister is a cartoonist. Since The Mister got a Wacom Intuos tablet a couple of years back, he's been nearly inseparable from it: the digital coloring process he uses on his art is so much faster with a drawing tablet than it was with a mouse. However, there has been trouble in paradise in the last few months, and a distinct tang of Cartoonist Envy in the air, since he reported that another artist he knows acquired a Wacom Cintiq.

If you are familiar with the other Wacom tablets, you know that when you draw on them with the stylus, the results appear on your computer screen, but not on the pad. You learn to keep your eyes on the screen and trust your hand to do the drawing, which is not completely like drawing on paper. The Cintiq is a new model of drawing tablet that is also a screen, so you can look at your "paper" while you draw: much more natural! The thing is, the size most useful to artists costs upwards of $2000. What's a cartoonist to do?

A guy named Drew Northcott has developed his own system for hacking existing parts into a Cintiq-alike. You'll need a regular Wacom tablet, an LCD monitor, and some other supplies; it looks like the process involves putting the screen between your stylus and your tablet. Drew stresses that his pages are a record of his experiences, not a tutorial. Still, if you're electronically savvy, and know your way around a few hacks, you can probably follow along and work up something similar. It won't be cheap, but it'll be a heck of a lot cheaper than the real thing.

(The Mister, alas, will have to keep dreaming, as neither of us is quite techie enough to manage this one on our own.)

[via Drawn! -- who also linked to a video of the hack in action -- and Sample The Web.]

Mark Frauenfelder is well-known to web-heads as the editor of MAKE magazine and the founder of BoingBoing, which may be the world's most popular English-language blog (they say it is, anyway). His recent book, Rule The Web, is full of tips and tricks to help you do just that. Even if you think you're an old hand at this Internet game, you might still be able to learn something from his book.

Some of the tips in the book, like the general information about eBay, will seem like no-brainers to anyone who has any experience with the sites or processes in question. But there are also sidebar tips, labeled "Deeper," which usually include inside or obscure information that may be new even to quasi-experts.

Find out more about Rule the Web after the break!