A couple of weeks ago, Mike and I went on a trip to Yellowstone. We stayed in West Yellowstone, and some of the hotels there were quite old. I snapped a photo of an old motel sign, advertising that every room had a color television by RCA.
This is not a unique sign. If you do a simple search on Flickr, you’ll find hundreds of hotel signs with the same RCA advertisement.
These signs must have subsidized hotels somehow. Did RCA provide free or discounted television sets to motels that proudly displayed these signs? Maybe the hotel owners actually had to PAY to advertise for RCA just to compete. In the Fifties and Sixties, families saw the U.S.A. in their Chevrolets and they all had to sleep somewhere. Holiday Inn had first dibs, but I’m sure a hotel with the sign, “Color TV by RCA” was a good second choice.
Now, hotels and motels are quick to announce that they have free wi-fi or free high speed Internet. They are doing the same thing as they did fifty years ago to compete, just using a different gadget. When you plan your summer trip this year, remember the Color TV by RCA sign and laugh at the hotels that won’t give you Internet access without charging you ten bucks a day.
As great as looking at photos on the computer can be, sometimes, I just want to look at pictures in a book. I can sit on the couch with family members and we can turn the pages together instead of crowding around my computer desk and trying to look at the photos together on the screen.
Unibind offers a way for you to make your own books with their MyBook kits:
It costs $99 for the Photobook Creator and then $19 to $25 dollars for the MyBook kits. After looking at the cost for comparable Blurb and Qoop books, the Unibind system seems like a pretty good deal if you like to make books often (i.e. for each vacation or family event).
The Photobook Creator reminds me of the UniBind Binding Machine that I used when I worked at the engineering firm. It heat up the glue in the UniBind Steelback Spine and make a great book that stayed together. It was a great gadget and we made MANY reports with it, but it cost them a bunch of money just to buy the machine.
Those steelback spines came in a WIDE variety of sizes and we could make reports that held over 350 sheets of paper, but we had to add our own plastic sheets and covers to the reports, whereas the MyBook kits come with what looks like a hard cover book instead. I suspect I could use the smaller spines with the Photobook Creator gadget and that would make it affordable for normal human beings (instead of engineering firms).
I enjoy having a book that I can pull off the shelf and show friends, so I think this would be a good thing for me. It looks like Digital Scrapbooking 101 likes the Unibind system and even has tips on how to get the printing exactly right using the Photobook Creator software.
One thing she didn’t mention is that if you put more sheets of paper than are supposed to go in the book, the papers won’t be bound correctly and the middle sheets will fall out. You MUST follow their guidelines about how many sheets of paper that they can hold, otherwise, you’ll be sorry.
If you notice, she holds the book right on the heating element instead of letting it sit like they show in the official Unibind video. That’s because she has learned, just like we did, that the books MUST be fully on that heating element in order to melt the glue correctly. Otherwise, it just won’t work. At the engineering firm, we were making 10 or 15 books at a time, so we would just put them all in the Unibinder and they would be held upright by the plastic holders on the side. Based on this video, it looks like the Photobook Creator is big enough for the larger steelback spines from UniBind, so I would feel confident in using it for them as well.
Whether you’re creating photo books, reports, or even journals for writing with beautiful pictures, the Unibind system is a great way to make books that stand up to many viewings.
I can just imagine what was said before the photograph was taken.
Dick and Baby Judy, go over and stand by the new refrigerator. I want to get a picture!
Imagine being so proud of your new fridge that you want to take a photo of it. That’s how it used to be. Maybe they had some old ice box from way back when and when that photo was taken, they were FINALLY able to have a REAL fridge.
A few weeks ago, I retweeted a message in Twitter about unboxing photos. I have never really understood unboxing photos. They are just pictures of someone opening the box to their new toy. What’s the fun in that?
The fun in that is GRATITUDE. When people are so excited about their gadget that they take photos of it while they are taking it out of the box, they are GRATEFUL for the toy they just got. It’s the same reason people take pictures of themselves next to their cars.
This HotPoint Refrigerator was a LOVED gadget. So valued that it was included in the family photos. THAT’S gratitude.
If you haven’t noticed, I love watches and have too many to really keep nearby. My favorites were thrown in a drawer, which made it difficult to find them and easy to scratch their crystals. I decided to create a watch drawer so I could easily store my favorite watches. Here are the results.
This is a fairly easy project and the watch holders can also be used for bracelets. It took me one day to complete the project from start to finish.
Tools and Materials:
PVC Pipe (cut to the proper length at the home improvement store)
Foam Pipe Insulation
Scissors to cut the insulation
Closet bar holders (one for each watch holder you want)
Screwdriver with a short handle (to fit in the drawer)
SHORT screws that will fit in the closet bar holders (the ones that come with them are WAY too long)
Directions:
Measure the inner width of your drawer so you know the length of PVC pipes you need. Decide how many watch holders you want. I filled my entire drawer with them, but you can a few or many as you want.
At the home improvement store, buy a length of PVC pipe that is enough for as many watch holders you want. They can cut the pipe for you at the store and I HIGHLY recommend that you use that service. At first, I tried to cut the pipe with a hack saw. It worked, but the edges were so rough that it wasn’t pretty, so I went back to the store and bought some MORE pipe and let them cut it for me. The edges are much cleaner.
I used 1″ diameter PVC pipe and the corresponding 1″ insulation, which was the perfect diameter for my watches, but you might want a slightly larger diameter if you are a man or prefer your watches to be loose on your wrist.
The foam pipe insulation should be in the plumbing aisle as well. Choose the insulation that is the same pipe size as your PVC pipe. It is meant to be slit open so it can be fitted over existing piping, but you shouldn’t cut along that mark. If you keep it intact, it will look very nice when it is slid onto the PVC pipe.
The closet bar holders were in the closet section. You can get them in plastic or wood. Since my PVC pipe was white, the plastic matched very well. The watches aren’t going to be heavy, so you don’t have to worry about getting something that sturdy.
When I got back home, I cut the foam insulation to be almost as long as the PVC pipe (see photo above) and slid the pre-cut pipes into the insulation.
Make sure you measure where you’re going to put your watch holders carefully. If you notice, I have an extra hole in my drawer where I screwed up the first time and didn’t leave enough room for the watch holder AND the watch. I measured about an inch below the top of the drawer, so there would be room for the watches to fit when the drawer is closed. If you are going to have more than one watch holder, make sure you leave at least one inch between them as well.
Attach half of the closet rod holder onto the side of the drawer. I had to buy short screws that would fit in the closet bar holder holes because the ones that came with it were LONG and made to hold up a closet rod, not a light watch holder.
On the the other side of the drawer, I attached the other closet rod holder. Screwing in the screws was difficult for me because my drawer was so narrow that my normal screwdriver wouldn’t fit. I had to go back to the home improvement store to buy a stubby little screwdriver to use instead.
Add watches and place the watch holders into the drawer.
This set up has made it SO much easier for me to choose a watch each day. I hope it helps you as well.
I saw this month’s Reader’s Digest and my blood boiled to the surface. The headline screamed in big red letters:
Is Your Child Sexting?
Worse still, the headline was photoshopped onto an iPhone, as if it were the iPhone’s fault.
I’m pretty sick of the fear mongering that EVERY avenue of Old Media is using to make technology the bad guy. Blaming a cell phone for sexual texts between teenagers is like blaming pencils for sexy notes passed between teenagers. The fact that some teenagers are obsessed with sex has NOTHING to do with cell phones or SMS messaging. Unlike most adults, I REMEMBER what it was like to be a teenager. All I could think about was sex all the time. That wasn’t my Trapper Keeper’s fault. It wasn’t my Rubik’s Cube’s fault. Blaming the cell phone for sexual behavior among teens is just shoddy reporting and fear mongering. Bad form, Reader’s Digest, bad form.
I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything more from Reader’s Digest. Ever since its inception, it has pandered to old people. With jokes and quotes from a nearly extinct era, it won’t be long before Reader’s Digest becomes extinct as well. And when they do, they’ll probably blame it on cell phones.
I switched over to a Mac a little over two years ago. I have used iCal for that long and it has always bugged me that the calendar didn’t show my holidays. Since computers are used all over the world, it’s a little egocentric for me to expect the built in calendar program to have U.S. holidays, but I had no idea how to get the holidays into my calendar without putting them in myself.
Fortunately, there IS a way. When you’re in iCal, you choose Calendar and then Subscribe. It will ask for a URL to subscribe to. Finding the appropriate calendar for your country is DIFFICULT, so I looked at our traffic and found the calendars for the top five countries that access The Gadgets Page:
Once you’ve subscribed to a calendar, all your holidays are there for you. If there is a holiday that is continually moved with no rhyme nor reason (like the Daylight Savings fiasco in the U.S.), then you might want to have your calendar check for updates. To do that, highlight the calendar, right click on it and choose Get Info. Once you’re there, choose Auto-Refresh and change the setting appropriately.
I thought that I could live without having the U.S. Holidays on my iCal until last year when I scheduled a geek event on Easter weekend. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized that we wouldn’t have anyone attend because of the overlooked holiday. If the lack of holidays on iCal had caused you similar troubles, you can now add your country’s holiday to your calendar.
Faux wasp nest: Fake out wasps and yellow jackets to build a nest somewhere else.
There are so many garden gadgets on the market today to help make keeping your property looking good with less strain on yourself. Get out and enjoy your yard today!
I absolutely LOVE this little video clip of what fashion designers thought we were going to be wearing in the year 2000.
The most gadgety outfit is the one for the male. Here is what he is wearing:
As for him, if he matters at all, there won’t be any shaving, colors, ties or pockets. He’ll be fitted with a telephone, radio and containers for coins, keys and candy for cuties.
They actually got this one right. Ties are a rarity, except in the business world. Every guy now has a cell phone in his pocket, along with an iPod. The belt pack for money, keys and candy hasn’t really caught on yet because fashion designers are still giving men pockets to put them in.
I love to see how different our vision of the future is to what it eventually becomes.
The most gadgety outfit is the one for the male. Here is what he is wearing: