DIY Charging Station

Last night, I finally got tired of having things charging in every room of the house (except the bathroom). I decided to do something about it and paid a visit to the local Home Depot this afternoon. This convenient kitchen DIY charging station is the result.

The shelf has room enough for both my 13" MacBook, my 10" Toshiba netbook, and a couple of smaller devices such as my iPod Touch and my phone. The two hanging baskets below the shelf, which are the key feature to me, accommodate the AC adapters for both laptops, the iPod charger, the phone's AC adapter, a camera battery charger, and a charger for AA/AAA batteries with space to spare. If necessary, a couple more baskets could easily be added. A couple mini hair clips help with cord management.

The shelf unit is Closet Maid item 8279, $15.76, all hardware included. The two baskets are Closet Maid item 3937 at $3.67 each. The hair clips were locally appropriated at no cost to me. Total (with tax of course) was $24.48. Labor, about a half hour. Degree of difficulty, a caveman could do it.

Daily Video #9 - All I Wanted Was the Hard Drive

Don't ever think you'll open up an iBook to pull out the hard drive and then put it back together. What an adventure! Thank goodness for the interwebs. I'd have never figured this out on my own. I thought it was just going to be "pop off the enclosure, pull out the HD, put it back together". Oh, no! This monkey is not going to be reassembled, at least not by this guy.

You'll find it on eBay being sold for parts. However, I did get a nice little USB external hard drive as originally planned. It was a learning experience.

DIY Whiteboard with Wii Remote

This is really cool! You can use a Wii remote and a DIY infrared pen to turn just about any surface you can project on into a pretty good interactive whiteboard. This video from Johnny Lee (Carnegie Mellon Univ) will show you how. Johnny even shows how to turn any laptop with an LCD screen into a tablet PC.