Category: top tip

  • No-sew quick fabric coasters

    When redecorating, it’s those little details that can really tie a room together and help you achieve a unified look with very little outlay.These coasters take only minutes to make and use inexpensive materials: cardboard and leftover fabric from cushions or furnishings.

  • HomeHack: fixing a leaking toilet cistern

    My toilet had started to have a perpetual leak of water from the cistern into the bowl. The valve on the water inlet was no longer sealing off properly.

  • N900 portrait keyboard for Witter

    Recently Nokia released the much awaited pr 1.2 firmware for the N900, and among the many bug fixes and tweaks, came the ability to easily rotate applications to portrait by hitting ctrl+shift+r, then closing the keyboard and rotating to portrait. 

  • N900 IM style notifications from python

    In the last couple of days I’ve spent several hours trawling the internet in search of an example of something I hoped would be fairly easy. How to trigger an IM/Email type notification event from python.

  • Advanced eclipse and Rational Team Concert (RTC) tips

    I spend pretty much most days working in and around RTC, an Eclipse-based tool for development and agile project development. Many of the great features are very obvious, others are not so much, but still really very helpful.

  • Fixing old mistakes

    I was making a little lidded box in spalted beech. All was going well enough but as I came to hollow the lid I managed a nasty catch which sent it flying and damaged the finished exterior. I gave up in frustration at having gotten so far and then irrecoverably screwed up.Or so I thought at…

  • Displaying a busy indicator on maemo python app.

    This is the post I wish existed when I was looking for how to do this simple thing. I spent hours reading around trying to figure out how to show my app is busy, but to no avail. 

  • Stripping paint from chairs – chair 2

     With the first chair I tried a couple of approaches to stripping off the black paint. First I tried a hot air gun. Which was not terribly effective. So I moved on to paint stripper and wire wool.

  • Dan’s top tip #1

    Today I had a realisation, something I wish I’d thought to do a long time ago would of come in handy today. Now maybe it’s obvious and I am the odd one out. But just in case I thought I’d start what might become a series of Dan’s top tips