They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, which is clearly nonsense. My mother’s family photos, for instance, are worth three (Flash. Too. Bright). But this simple photo, from LifeProTips on Twitter, really does explain everything…
Lifehacker’s Adam ”never seen without a beanie" Dachis has come up with an ingenious solution for the gadget-laden traveler. Instead of messing around with travel chargers or any other gadget-by-gadget solution, he built a mobile charging station out of a giant portable battery and a USB hub.
I always thought the handiest thing I could do with a pizza box was to toss it in the trash and use the little three-legged plastic widget (the one that stops the lid from touching your cheese) as a milking stool for my Barbies [1] .
But I was wrong. Assuming that you can keep the cheesy grease off the box, then a few cuts and folds will turn it into this awesome MacBook stand.
You could easily make your own iPhone amplifier dock from a shoebox. Or better, an old wooden wine case. Or best of all, you could get out your clamps, drills, router and hot glue and go medieval on some pile of wood’s ass. If you choose the latter route, then you should download the plans (totally SFW) from Renee at Red Bird Blue – her amazing creation is what you see in the picture above.
What’s wrong with this setup? (Hint: track the blue cable from end to end.)
Our fearless commander-in-chief Leander Kahney is a strange cuckoo. He is, of course, a dashing and famous technology journalist par example, while his family is inexplicably a bunch of Luddites.
So check out what happened when Leander tried to coach someone in his family how to set up an extra Airport Extreme base station over the phone. No matter how many times he explained how to do it, it wouldn’t work… so Leander drove over to see what the problem was. This is what he saw.
What’s the most ridiculous tech support problem you’ve had to solve for a family member? Let us know in the comments.
You know those cool old waxed canvas bags which used to keep things dry before miners discovered nylon in a cave in Papua New Guinea1? Now you can make your own! Well, technically you could always make your own. But now Photojojo has provided a guide for you. Spoiler: it’s dead easy.
Just a few weeks back we brought you the then-cheap $100 ring-light for the iPhone, a cheap way to shoot flat fashion photos and videos with your favorite camera. Now, though, you can achieve the same thing for just $10.
Bonus: It’s a DIY project, so you have a great excuse to ignore your family this Christmas.
The iPhone 5 screen comes off like Brad Pitt’s shirt: fast.
After boarding a plane to Melbourne, Australia to be one of the first in the whole world to get their hands on an iPhone 5, the folks at iFixit have torn it apart and found that — surprise — the new iPhone seems to actually have been designed with easy repair in mind. Partially, at least.
Here are two things that are probably true: you don’t smoke, and you own an old, disused iPhone dock. Here are some things which are almost guaranteed to be true: You own a dock connector cable and a 3.5 mm jack cable
And if you live in the U.S, and you haven’t yet achieved enlightenment and switched to a bike, then you almost certainly have a car. Put these things together and what do you get? Jalopnik’s neat DIY in-car iPhone dock.