The perfect case for an eBook Reader

Having received my new Kindle Fire a few days ago, I was astonished to find that a cover/case for it costs upwards of 30$, and even a simple sleeve starts at $25. Instead of throwing my hard-earned dollars at Amazon, I created this contraption, which is both cheap and unique.



The process of creating this is rather simple, and not very time consuming. Here are the steps!

1. Get a book that is the right size and thickness for a 7” reader. You can probably find one by browsing your neighborhood store or the nearest Barnes and Noble store. I felt the most suitable was Beowulf: http://amazon.com/o/asin/1593083831 It’s somewhat ironic to use buy a B&N book from Amazon, not to mention using it to store a Kindle, but perhaps it’s the best one BECAUSE it’s so ironic! The book can used or new for less than 5$.

2. Stick the pages together. This is done with simple paper glue. You should separate the front cover from the rest so it doesn’t stick – just stick some plastic bag between them, or some other plastic sheet.


3. Mix half a tea-spoon of paper glue (like Elmers) with water in a 1:1 ratio. The purpose is to have the glue very thin so it soaks into the paper.

4. Using a brush or a sponge, coat the side of the book with glue generously. We want the glue to soak into the paper, so they all stick together to form a hard edge.

5. Put some weight on the book so the pages don’t deform, and leave to dry for half an hour or so, or until it seems dry and hard.

6. Repeat with another layer of glue, or even two layers, if you have the time.

7. Remove the plastic, and place your ebook on the book’s first page. Mark out around it with a pen.

8. Using a metal ruler and a snap knife, cut through the pages. Be careful not to cut too deep (you don’t want to go through the back cover!). The tricky part is the corners, because when you cut from top to bottom, the angle of the knife prevents it from penetrating through more than a few layers at the bottom corner. To make it better, rotate the book occasionally and “fix” the bad corners.

9. Do this in steps, pulling out a few pages to reveal the pages below them, until you reach the bottom cover. Again, be gentle with the pressure to avoid cutting through the bottom cover. Also, be careful with the knife, as snap-knives tend to snap if you put too much pressure on them. This should still take no more than 10 minutes.

10. Check that the reader fits nicely inside the book. If it does, use the same technique as described in steps 2-5, but from the inside of the hole in the book. This is not absolutely required, but would serve to make the whole thing more stable.

11. Optional: cut out a piece of rubber or felt, and glue it inside the book. This would help the reader stay in place and not move around insid the book box.

12. Optional: get a latch, and stick it to both covers, so you can lock the book closed when not in use.

Congratulations! The same technique would be useful to hide a flask of Whiskey in a book (preferably an Ernest Hemmingway book) or a pistol in a copy of "War and Peace"!

Backup outlook using Volume Shadow Copy

Shadow Copy (a.k.a Volume Snapshot Service or VSS for short), is a Windows feature that can access files even when they are locked. It has many great uses, and this time I want to talk about backing up outlook. When outlook is running, it locks the PST files it uses, making them impossible to backup. One workaround is to close outlook before the backup, but that has several disadvantages, and may be hard to automate. Many backup utilities use shadow copy to help, but what if you don’t want to spend money? As usual, I’m here to help.

To use Shadow Copy, you would need a little utility called VSHADOW. I wish I could offer it as a direct download from here, but unfortunately, you’ll have to download the Windows SDK for that. It’s quite a hefty download – an ISO image that is over 1 GB long and takes FOREVER to install. Once you’re done with that, go to c:\program files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Bin\vsstools and find VSHADOW.EXE there. It would be a 226K file – run it once to make sure it displays the right version – 3.0:

Copy this file to somewhere safe, and you may now uninstall the SDK to save on some disk space (approx 1.3 GB to be exact). If you had some virtual machine to do this install on, even better.

To actually make a backup, you need to perform 4 steps:

1. Use Vshadow to create a “snapshot” – this captures a drive the way it is at a certain point of time.

2. Mount the snapshot as another drive

3. Copy the files from the newly mounted drive to somewhere else (the backup destination).

4. Erase the snapshot.

Erasing the snapshot at the end is not really critical – you can leave it there for eternity, but since it’s frozen in time, there isn’t much point in making another backup from it in the future. You can mount multiple snapshots, but you’ll run out of drive-letters pretty fast.

To be more technical, here’s what you do:

1. Open a CMD prompt, which must have Administrative privileges.

2. Go to where you saved VSHADOW.EXE, and run the following command. If the files you want to backup are on a drive other than C, substitute it’s letter with c:

Vshadow –nw –p c:

3. On the output of this command, note the line that says SNAPSHOT ID:

If you get an error message like “Access denied”, that means you are not an administrator, or that you have ran your CMD not as an administrator.

4. Run the following command to map the drive letter, using the proper snapshot ID. You can use any letter you want, if J is already in use:

vshadow.exe -el={57b7248c-e086-46fc-848d-f449fb4c0ae3},j:

5. Now, use your favorite file copy method to copy any files you want from that temporary drive to anywhere else. I use ROBOCOPY and copy to my external USB drive, but you can do anything you want, really.

6. Once done with the file copy, use this command to un-mount the temporary drive and delete the snapshot. This does NOT do anything to the original files – just gets rid of the shadow copy and frees up the drive letter and system resources. Note that we are using the same snapshot ID as before:

vshadow.exe -ds={57b7248c-e086-46fc-848d-f449fb4c0ae3}

7. That’s it! Now you are ready to do this again tomorrow.

As you may or may not know, I don’t like to do so many things manually, so I wrote a VBScript to do the same as above, automatically. I use the WScript.Shell object and its RUN method to execute the various commands, and VBScript’s INSTR to find the snapshot ID. Other than that, the script is pretty straightforward:

'Create the Objects set oWshell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") 'Create the snapshot oWshell.run "%COMSPEC% /C c:\vshadow -nw -p d: >c:\vshadow.txt", 0, TRUE 'Read the output and find the Snapshot ID set oFile = oFSO.openTextFile("c:\vshadow.txt", 1, TRUE) sOutput=oFile.readall oFile.close sSnapshotID=mid(sOutput,instr(sOutput,"SNAPSHOT ID")+14,38) 'Mount the Drive wshell.run "%COMSPEC% /C c:\vshadow -el=" & sSnapshotID & ",j:", 0, TRUE 'Copy the files. Note that I'm using double-quotes because the path has a space in it wshell.run "%COMSPEC% /C c:\Robocopy ""j:\My Documents"" ""x:\My Documents"" *.pst", 0, TRUE 'Destroy the snapshot wshell.run "%COMSPEC% /C c:\vshadow -ds=" & sSnapshotID, 0, TRUE

You may adjust the script for different drive letters and folders. That’s it! Now, just use the Windows Task Scheduler to run this daily, and you’re done!

Pick it up

A few months ago, I discussed a technique to fix LCD monitors, but since then I received a lot of questions with regards to how to actually OPEN the LCD’s plastic casing. Unfortunately, the front and back plastic shells are usually attached using snap-locking plastic notches, and these can be very hard to open. Here are two techniques that you can use to open such cases.

The basic technique is to simple use force – the plastic notches will come undone if you apply enough force to them, although some of them might break. Before going there, remove any screws that are in place, and inspect the back well to make sure there are no screws hiding under a warrenty sticker, or under the monitor’s leg. Then, place the screen on a table with the screen itself pointing upward, and the “top” of the screen facing you.

With your fingertips (of both hands), grab the plastic panel of the top part and try to slide your fingers underneath it, while pulling towards you. There will be resistance, often significant one, but with enough force, the frame will open. The hard part is to find the right balance so as to not break the LCD panel, so you might want to practice on a screen that you care less about. If you are not an experienced guitarist, expect some finger pain after this process.

Once the top comes open, slide your fingers a bit more inwards, and then slide them sideways towards the corners, still applying force, to open the notches that are in the corner, and then keep sliding along the sides towards the bottom of the screen. A typical screen has about 10-15 clasps along the frame, and they will snap open one by one. The snaps that are along the bottom part of the frame should be the easiest to open, as you should have most of the frame loose by now, and can apply a lot of leverage easily. Note that the monitor’s button panel is usually part of the front-frame, and wired to the main body, so be careful not to rip these wires or panel off when you open the panel. Most monitors’ internal body is separate from the plastic frame, and once you pop it open, the main body will come out easily, but be careful still – in some cases, the main body is connected with screws to the front or back frame, and you need to be careful not to break those.

If applying force, as described in paragraph 3 does not work, or you are very concerned about keeping the monitor in pristine condition, another technique is to pry the snaps open with a wedge. The problem is that the frame is usually soft plastic, so if you apply a screwdriver to it, it will cause very ugly damage. The right way to do it is use a plastic wedge. I recommend using a thick guitar pick – get a bunch of them – at least 3, and don’t get the expensive kind. This procedure might destroy them.

Take one pick, and push it between the front and back frame as much as you can, about 1 inch to the left or right of the middle of the frame (the middle point itself would probably have a snap, so you can push anything in there). The pick will separate the frames a bit, so now you can push another one next to it. Now, slide the 2nd pick sideways towards the corner, and the pressure will pop-open the snaps without causing any damage. You might have to experiment with several picks until you find ideal ones – some might be too soft to force the screen open, and others might be too thick to easily insert between the panels.

Shredit Card

Credit cards come and go, but when they go, it’s usually our job to make sure they do. Most people just cut the card in half and drop it in the trash. If you do so too, that could be a costly mistake. The magnetic stripe on the credit card can be quite easily read even if the card is cut, not to mention the card’s number, expiration and CVV. If you don’t want the guy who finds it in the trash to go on a spending spree on you, here’s some better way of getting rid of the card.

Ideally, a card shredding machine, such as the one banks have, would be great, but those are too expensive for the home user. Many regular SOHO shredders can also shred credit cards, and that’s good too. If, however, you don’t have one, or prefer manual control over this, I suggest this simple technique from the kitchen.

The idea is similar to how you chop onions. 1st, use scissors to do multiple cuts in the card from top to bottom, but not all the way. You would end up with a sort-of “comb” pattern. Then, use the scissors to cut the card multiple times from left to right, so that the card shreds to small pieces. I strongly recommend doing the 2nd stage above a trashcan, as the cut pieces can fly. Here it is in pictures:

If you want to add one more layer of security to all this, you might want to spread the pieces between several trash bags, or better yet – take half of the debris and dump it somewhere completely different, like at the office or at school. Congrats! You’re safe!

Ambiance

A few decades ago, someone discovered an interesting fact – placing a light source behind or to the side of a TV enhances the viewing experience significantly. I’m sure there’s some interesting explanation for this, but I’ve experienced it myself, and I can attest to its truthfulness. Philips, the well known Dutch electronics company, is also on to it, and a few years ago developed a line of televisions with what they call “Ambilight”. This is based on a special light source that’s embedded in the TV’s side, and lights the wall behind the TV. The Ambilight TVs cost a pretty penny, of course, but you can have a similar effect for much cheaper, and without replacing the TV.

The trick is simple – buy a set of two elongated light sources, like a small CCFL (Fluorescent) lamp, and hang them behind the TV so that they are pointing towards the wall. A better option is a LED-based light, which you can buy at your local store for around 15$ per light. With most TVs, you can use double-sided tape to stick it behind the TV. Other sets will allow other arrangement, like screwing the light on the back at the proper height, or even hanging the light from one of the screws on the TVs back. The technique is not that important, as long as the light is pointing towards the wall.

In my case, this is the way my TV looks now:



One thing still makes the Philips TVs a little better than my $30 setup...their ambilight actually changes color based on the content displayed onscreen. Is that worth it...you be the judge.

Move your S

This week’s post is dedicated to tips and tricks about moving…a topic I’m handling this week as I’m moving myself.

Now is a particularly good time to move, as market prices have dropped by as much as %35, but many home owners and apartment managers rely on your laziness (to scope the market or to suffer the agonizing task of moving) and will not reduce the rent significantly for lease renewals. It often requires you to file an intent-to-not-renew notice to get them to crack, but I say that you should just send the letter, and look for a new place anyway. My wife and I have been living in a 1300 Sq Ft apartment, and now for the exact same price, we are getting a 2500 Sq Ft house, less than ½ a mile from where we are now.

Assuming you are moving indeed, the 1st thing you’re going to need is a moving company. Even if you can carry most of your stuff by yourself, you would probably still need help carrying the couch, cabinets and your books. Make sure you have an estimator from the moving company come look at the place before the move, and don’t rely on your own estimates. If you get too few movers on the job because you forgot to consider the stuff in the garage, not only will you end up paying more, but the movers will work more, be tired, and more likely to break things. Also, it’s very important to schedule the move as the 1st job in the morning, and preferably on the 1st day of the week. That will guarantee that the carriers will be as fresh, strong and alert as possible.

You would need boxes for your stuff. It’s not always easy to estimate how many you’ll need, so if you had a moving company estimator come in, you might consult him/her, but don’t wait too long – you should start packing the non-essentials a month ahead of the move. You might find free moving boxes from your colleagues at work, if you’re lucky, and you should also ask your I.T. group – they often store the boxes computers come in. If not, this website offers an interesting service: http://www.freecardboardboxes.com/ . You open an account, and can give or get free boxes from others. If this does not work out, the two other best options are buying the boxes from u-Haul or Home Depot. I’ve found that Home depot are the cheapest – less than 1$ per medium box. U-Haul sell the same box for 2.35$, but they also promise to buy the boxes back from you. I don’t know how much they pay back, but I doubt it will come down to cheaper than Home Depot. Some moving companies will sell you boxes at reasonable rates, and some might even give them for free, so that’s worth checking out too.

Another thing that’s very important is to mark the boxes, so the carriers know where to put them. Most people write on the box with a felt-tip pen, but that’s the hard way. U-Haul also sells packing tape with room names printed on them – they have Living room, Bedroom, Kitchen, Family Room, Storage, Bathroom and a few others, and even a “fragile” tape. The tape sells for $2 a role that has 30 yards. They intend for you to use the tape to close the boxes off, but I recommend getting a tape-dispenser gun at the USPS (cheap, high quality tape) and cut single words off the u-Haul tape. I tape the room name once on every side of each box, and so a 2$ role will cover about 60 boxes. When you do make your boxes, make sure you prepare several “open first” boxes. The last thing you need is to have to start hunting for a screwdriver, a towel or a coat through 100 boxes. Also, get a floor plan of the new place, and carefully plan where you plan to put the major things. Designate the target location for every piece of furniture, and mark them clearly. The point of this is to prevent a situation where the carriers placed the sofa in your family room, and you have no way of carrying it to the living room without hiring more help. You can, of course, try to be around and tell them what to do, but if there are 2 of you, and 4 of them, that might be confusing and frustrating.

If the boxes you have a lattened out, as most come, there’s not much point in running multiple lines of tape under the main seam, but it’s important to run two cross lines at the bottom left and right of the box. This is what gives the box it’s tensile strength, and especially so for heavy items such as books.

Another thing that might come in handy is a moving dolly, which lets you carry around 2-4 boxes in each go instead of one, and saves some back pain as well. U-Haul will rent you a dolly for 7$ a day, but keep in mind that you can buy a new basic dolly for about $30 (http://www.amazon.com/Magna-Cart-Personal-Hand-Truck/dp/B000HVVSDU). The above link is a folding dolly which you can keep around the house for later on. This could be a good investment.

Happy moving!

Pens envy

How about this unique pen holder for your desk?

This requires very little work, really – the pen plastic holder piece can be found in places like Michaels, or you can just buy a cheap desktop holder and take it apart. The processor I’m using is an original Pentium Pro, which can be found on eBay for less than $20 (personally, I would have thought they would be cheaper nowadays), but any other processor can be used. The advantage of the Pentium Pro in this case is that it’s quite heavy and holds the pen nice and stable, but you can use any other CPU, and if it’s too light, you can just glue it to a piece of wood, glass or metal.

The next step is to just glue the pen holder to the processor, and you’re done!