A Great Weekend Project: A Turntable Stand/Shelf

So I needed a place for all my records and turntables…but didn’t want to spend a fortune on buying something at Target or Wal Mart.

So my girlfriend and I built one ourselves. The project started out as a shelf for clothes…I wanted 9 14×14 inch squares so that the several plastic mail carrier boxes I have would work as drawers. But as we were trying to optimize the amount of wood and lower the cost we ended up on a 2×3 setup with 16×16 inch boxes.

So the 2×3 16×16 inch size works well because you can get almost all the pieces out of one standard 48×96 inch piece of plywood. We found a cheap piece of wood at Home Depot and they cut it to our specs…for free!

All in all the total project cost was under $70

Wood: $15
Drill: $20
Screws: $4
Bolts + Nuts + L-Brackets:$15

LightMate Gedit Theme and now for TextMate too!

Ok kids, finally got the themes available up on my website: http://ubermajestix.com/uber/themes.

Check the screenshot below for the gedit theme or hit up my website for screenshots of Textmate.

I really hate working in dark environments…well lights off yes, but a bright computing environment is a must. Thus when customizing gedit to work like TextMate for rails work I really hated the DarkMate theme – and the default lightish theme I didn’t like either.

So I made my own based on some colors from DarkMate. Take a look:

• rhtml:

• ruby:

UPDATE: Theme is for GTKsourceview-2.0 and later (this is installed with Gutsy Gibbon). This theme will not work with Feisty or earlier releases.

download the theme here!

I heart icons.

In a digital age….blah blah blah, icons are sweet.

I love icons, computer icons, weather icons, or any symbol confined to a small square canvas.

Icons are an interesting form of art, and it is interesting to look at them as such.  I just found a great page of major newspaper/television weather icons: http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/trivia/weather-icons.html.  When confined to a theme its great to see all the different interpretations of weather and the stylistic choices each paper/channel makes with this confined set of symbols.

another format that i like to compare is the computer/desktop icon sets.  Iconfactory.com has lots of free sets to choose from (i think i downloaded half of them last night).

I don’t think most people care, but icons make up a very large portion of our aesthetic lives.  This seems to make a difference in computing.  I’m talking about the Apple vs. The World battle.  What is the main component that visually makes mac os x and windows different, the icons.  Sure, there is the menu/layout/user interface usability differences, but visually its all about the icons.  Something about windows makes it feel pedestrian, middle class, not cool.  Anything Apple feels expensive, clean, clear, cool.

Anyway, that’s enough I might nap under my desk now.

LePeep Site Redesign

LePeep is a great restaurant.  I get coupons from one of the managers each month for the one in my neighborhood.  He makes these coupons from clipart and does them in MS publisher – and even has enough balls to send out a .wps file as an attachment.

I looked at their website and its circa ’97.  I want to do a redesign that also allows for email blast integration on the backend as well as a nice easy to look at/navigate front end.   We’ll see what happens…I may just do some mockups and send them along with my proposal.  I could even do this as a portfolio piece.