DIY Life

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!

This homemade metal detector is one of the easiest projects I've seen. All you need is an AM radio, tape, and a calculator. You don't have to take anything apart or follow any complicated directions, all you do is tune the radio, stick them together and let the reaction happen. As your device moves close to the metal object the radio waves from the calculator reflect off the metal and are heard as a loud beeping on the radio. The beep is intensified as you move closer to the metal object just as it would on a commercial metal detector.

Hack together one of these next time you're searching for a hidden treasure, or just give it a try for fun. The video results are impressive and it uses materials you have, takes little time, and is super simple.

They've been doing it since the 60's. People are trying to "find themselves." If they would have just asked me, I could have saved them a lot of time and trouble because I know one of the absolute fastest ways there is to find yourself.

All the seekers of self need to do is to make a Google search of their phone number. Just type your phone number into the little box this way: 555 555 1212 . In most cases, Google will then tell you exactly where you are, if you're at home that is.

What is even better is that with one additional click, most people can get a map right to their house, or to somebody else's house as far as that goes. I'm told that Google was even kind enough to provide an opt out link for this service. As of yet, I haven't found that link.

I just couldn't resist providing this handy information to you. It's the quickest way I know of to find yourself. While this process may leave the hippies and existentialists with some unanswered questions, it's still a darn good way to get a map to Aunt Tillie's house!

DIY Life is barely a week old, and yet, because some of our bloggers are geeks, we already have our very own Firefox search plug-in you can download and use to search articles on our site. Helpful, you bet! It is of course free to download, and allows you to search DIY Life from anywhere on the web you happen to be.

You can write your own search plug-ins for Firefox as well, which is definitely a rewarding yet sometimes challenging experience. For now, please enjoy the geekity-goodness of our very own search plug-in to find all the info you need here for your next project, home improvement endeavour, or household chore. If you don't yet have what we have found to be the only DIY-friendly browser, you can download it free online.