Blog de Puree » life hacking

Protected: M’s First Composition

randye — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:41:09 +0000

Ikea Hacker – Life hacking with furniture

paul — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:40:21 +0000

Earlier this summer, I blogged about a simple life-hacking technique involving my backpack and traveling by car. I must say, the technique, used by a colleague of mine, went quite well and I was a new convert to life-hacking techniques. In today’s crazy hustle and bustle, any technique I can use to save time and make life easier, is a welcome thing.

Life-hacking has reared its wonderful head again, but this time Randye found it. She found a site called Ikea Hacker. It’s a brilliant blog about re-purposing Ikea products. What’s more, we had already done this with some broken Ikea furniture that didn’t survive our move a couple of years back.

“Hey, we did this!” Randye called out while she was reading the blog. “We hacked our Ikea cabinet!”

Here’s what we did. Some years ago, we purchased two Ikea stand-up Pax armoires–one a double wide and one that was regular width–to provide more storage space for clothes in our small apartment. They worked great. Well, eventually it was time to move and the small, skinny unit held up just fine. Unfortunately, physics was not kind to the wider unit and it broke during the move.

Not the type of people to give up on something, we decided that we’d reuse the parts. And reuse them we did. Soon after moving in, we realized there was a lack of comfortable eating space upstairs in our rumpus room. Sure there was the couch with the coffee table, but eating while watching TV was a bit messy.

So we came up with this.

Our answer to good old American-eating-while-watching-TV-goodness. The ultimate in entertainment hedonism. We have shelves on each side to hold DVDs, videos, napkins, coasters and such. There’s room for two chairs so we can sit and eat as well. It’s perfectly placed behind the coach, so our mothers should be proud that we’re not sitting too close to the television.

Some quick measurements, a circular saw with a wood blade, some brackets and wood screws–and we were good to go! The perfect life, or should I say, Ikea hack.

Caveat: Please ignore the carpet, which was not one of our conscious decisions, but came with the house. This will be eliminated. Hopefully within the next year.

Life hacking for travel

paul — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 01:59:06 +0000

I’ve heard of computer hacking and phone phreaking, but the concept of life hacking and work hacking was a new concept for me when I first heard of it a year ago. In a nutshell, it’s a bit if a geakier way to maximize your the time in your life or at work through streamlining and making how you do things more efficient. For example, when at work, e-mail can be a real pain when it continues to come in non-stop throughout the day. So you could set your e-mail client to check for mail and ping you every 30 minutes or hour, so you can concentrate on work.

A former colleague of mine, wrote about life-hacking while traveling in a recent blog post at churbuck.com. He’s on the road most of the week for his job and spoke about a great way to pack for the week to maximize his time at airports, hotels and ease of travel with the myriad of gear he uses in a typical day. Of course, packing and gear is right up my alley–heck, I have two buck departments in my wallet alone!

His post concentrates on the pros of packing with just a backpack and a duffel bag. So, for a trip to visit Randye’s folks in New Jersey this weekend, I decided to give his theory the test. All of my books, electronics, laptop computer, telescope lenses and things I might need readily were packed into my backpack, a Jansport pack with two large main compartments, a smaller book compartment forward of that, a side-entry pocket forward of that and two outside mesh pockets on the front and side. I can pack quite a bit in this bag and it makes for a great over-nighter or common day pack. It’s a sturdy pack which has given me years of service.

Everything else was packed into a small, wheeled weekender suitcase that can accommodate suits, sports jackets, dress pants and such without getting them too wrinkled. (Here’s where I differ from David as I have yet to experience the evils of wheeled luggage.) In that I packed my clothes, shoes, ditty bag, a fleece pullover if it became too cold and a rain jacket. This luggage is the perfect carry-on size for overhead space on planes, although it fits snugly in one corner of the trunk of the car as it did this weekend.

Minimizing space and maximizing my efficiency left me room for a few extra items, such as bringing my rather large Dobsonian telescope to do some star-gazing with Randye’s dad (I promised him a peak at the stars and didn’t want to wait until Thanksgiving or later. And summer is perfect astronomy weather) and my hiking boots so I could get some walking exercise in the mornings while continuing to break them in for the trail. But then again, there’s always room for the ever-important pair of boots because jeeze, a man never knows when the shit’s going to hit the fan and he’ll need to hit the wilderness in a tactical manner.

My life-hacking is working out so far. Yesterday, at about 15:30 (3:30 p.m. for you civilians) and I just reached into the back seat to quickly grab my iBook from my pack and I wrote this post as Randye battled traffic on the Garden State Parkway with the driving fury of Cruella DeVille in Disney’s 101 Dalmations. “Just keep your head down, don’t look up and mind your business Paul …”