I’m completely enamored by Tom Falconer’s gorgeous bubble photography, and he was nice enough to share his tips and tricks with us. Tom is a Tahoe resident, so he’s blessed by beautiful surroundings and cold temps that make shots like the one above possible. When I asked about shooting frozen bubbles, he said: “Frozen bubbles […]
When I was a teenager, we had a distinctly impolite name for a pull tab that had been removed from the can with the rivet ring still intact, said name being based on a persistent urban legend about the alleged redemption value of these relatively rare tabs. I can assure you, dear readers, that legend has nothing to do with the reason I am familiar with this handy trick for removing pull tabs with the ring intact every time. Turns out, a tab with an intact rivet ring is quite useful for mounting to wooden frames as a picture hanger. And I, you know, have to hang up lots of pictures. Seriously.
Clever idea from reddit user Crath. Unfortunately, I think most of us are likely to have many more cables than empty CD/DVD-ROM spindles lying around. Still, me likey. [via Recyclart]
A handy resource provided by George Graves over on the adafruit forums, based on an idea by Tod E. Kurt.
I especially like the use of staples as emergency jumpers.
I’m not a carpenter by training, but I have built a lot of simple furniture, and blogged about a lot of simple furniture, and one of the rules of thumb I’ve picked up from the pros is that threading screws into end grain is a big no-no. Wood is not an isotropic material, because of the grain, and is relatively weak in that direction. But sometimes putting screw in end-grain is the best/simplest way to do things, and until I saw this simple trick from woodgears.ca, the only way I knew to do it was to use a barrel nut or some other relatively unusual and expensive fastener designed for the purpose.
Awhile back, I wrote about co-opting the awesome glue used to mount rear-view mirrors for hobby projects. An interested reader e-mailed me a couple weeks later asking if I knew how to remove a rear-view mirror button from a windshield, which I didn’t. Several people have reported that trying to forcibly remove the metal button from the glass can actually break a divot of glass out of the windshield. I was therefore not optimistic, but we talked a little about the idea of using an organic solvent combined with sharp lateral pressure parallel to the glass. She experimented a bit, and, what do you know, eventually succeeded! Here’s her report:
