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DesignYourDorm Takes The Guessing Out Of Moving In [Back To School]

Posted on August 11, 2009
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If you’re heading off to college this year and living on campus, web site DesignYourDorm aims to alleviate the decorating guessing that goes on when moving into a dorm.

Just supply your school, residence hall, and room number during registration, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a 3D model of your room. The site doesn’t have replicas of every room in every university in their database, but they allow users to add floor plans, meaning that in time it’ll only get better. (If you don’t want to add your floor plan, you can also just select a generic floor plan.)

From there you start the designing process by selecting items from a pre-determined list. Using the 3D designer, you’re able to drag and drop (most items) as well as manipulate items to fit in the room layout. As you choose items to add to your room, they are also added into your cart for purchase, should you wish to do so (items can be shipped directly to the school).

If you’re looking for inspiration, DesignYourDorm also offers pre-designed “Cool Rooms” which you can select and modify. Or you can purchase the entire room to get the exact look shown.

Aiming to make your move-in day go as smoothly as possibly, DesignYourDorm also offers a handy printable checklist.





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HowPack Prints Packing Plans for Nearly Any Object [Printables]

Posted on August 9, 2009
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Whether you need to package a single fragile ornament or fold an elaborate gift box, HowPack has an enormous number of printable paper folding templates for every kind of object and configuration you can imagine.

There are templates for boxes, tubes, dispensers, papercraft novelties like trucks and planes, geometric shapes, and even historical buildings. Each template is available as a JPEG image. Although JPEGs don’t scale quite like a PNG file, since you’ll only be using it as a template to mark your folds and cuts, a few jagged artifacts on a large printout shouldn’t cause a problem.

The site lacks a search function but the way it is laid out makes it easy to quickly move through all the thumbnails of the templates. If you have an interesting papercraft site to share, let’s hear about it in the comments.





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3Banana Keep Notes Tidy with Hash Tags [Notes]

Posted on June 8, 2009
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If you’re looking for a simple way to take, store, and share notes in the cloud, 3Banana makes organizing your notes easy with notes based on in-text hashtags.

You can sign up for an account at 3Banana or use your existing Google credentials to jump right in and try it out. You can create basic notes simply by typing in the dialogue box, or enhance the note taking process by including HTML tags and images. 3Banana automatically recognizes pasted links and common formatting like phone numbers. You can categorize your notes by using hash tags like #tasks to tag your notes.

You can also easily share your notes by publishing them to your Facebook and Twitter account, or more traditionally by emailing or pasting the URL. There are currently apps available for both the iPhone and Android phones. For more great note-taking tools, check out the Hive Five on the topic.





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KeyRingThing Creates One Bonus Card to Rule Them All [Clutter]

Posted on May 19, 2009
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Thousands of businesses have loyalty cards that reward you with everything from coupons to free pet food if you display them at checkout. KeyRingThing creates one bonus card or keyring tag for all your stores.

We showed you how to make your own space saving card before, but it involved scanning, photo editing and maybe a little bit more effort than you wanted to put into the project just to shave a centimeter or two off your wallet’s width. Update: As Jay points out, you can get similar results from previously mentioned Just One Club Card.

KeyRingThing is a service that makes creating a space saving card a snap. Using their template generator, you create a double-sided card with up to three barcodes on each side. You can print and laminate the template on your own dime or you can pay $2.97 to have them mail you a higher-quality version printed on credit-card material. If you don’t have a printer and a laminate machine, you’ll likely spend nearly as much making your card at a copy shop.

You can select from a list of well known stores like Office Depot or Borders Books or, if you have less conventional shopping habits, you can enter your own business names. If the store isn’t in the database, it asks you to check the barcode style against the physical loyalty card to match it up. Loyalty cards that have just a number work as well. KeyRingThing is free to use, you only pay if order a heavy-duty card. If you have your own solutions for cutting down on loyalty and perk card clutter, sound off in the comments below.





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GuruLib Catalogs Your Media and More [Library]

Posted on May 11, 2009
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If you’re looking for a simple way to catalog your piles of movies, music, books, games, and software GuruLib is a handy tool for cataloging them all in the same place.

GuruLib is bursting with features in comparison to many cataloging websites. Not only can you set up a personal library for everything from your movies to your software and just about every media type in between but doing so is extremely easy. You can search by title, plug in the UPC/ISBN number, or even use your webcam or cellphone camera as a barcode scanner. There are wish lists and loan tracking tools to keep tabs on who has your stuff. GuruLib has widgets galore, you can set your library up as a cover-flow style screensaver, share your library with a Facebook plugin, create RSS feeds and integrate your Amazon habits into your library with a bookmarklet. Just as welcome as all the cool tools is the ease with which you can import and export data into GuruLib. If you have your own favored tool for tracking your stuff, let’s hear about it in the comments.





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Create a Note Card Task Board on the Cheap [DIY]

Posted on May 10, 2009
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If note cards are crucial to your organization system, you may have entertained the idea of getting a task board for them—and been shut down by the cost. Scratch that idea and make your own.

Brian, a programmer for organization blog Unclutterer, uses note cards for his work flow. He shopped around for a task board only to be surprised at how pricey they were. Could a board designed to do nothing more than hold 3×5 cards really be worth $40 or more? He opted to get crafty and create his own super-simple but effective display board for his 3×5 cards. Brian built his using nothing more than a piece of white artist’s board from an art store, some heavy duty rubber bands, and an inexpensive acrylic picture easel. A little label maker magic made it easy to see which rubber band holds which type of cards, and then he was done. It may not be made of exotic woods or hand-stitched leather, but it was a fraction of the price and does the job just fine. For more details about his project, check out the link below. If you’ve come up with your own ingenious way of managing your note cards, share the might of your 3×5-fu in the comments below.





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Get Your Shoes Off the Floor with a DIY Floating Shoe Rack [DIY]

Posted on April 4, 2009
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If you’re looking for a sleek and modern way to keep your shoes organized, a floating shoe rack is a rather novel way display and store your footwear at the same time.

Instructables user Nachimir was rather fond of a set of floating shoe racks he spotted, but they cost $75 each. Far more than he wanted to spend, he made a DIY alternative using little more than an Ikea shelf and some screws. The total cost for his DIY version was a mere $12. His version is an improvement over a previous DIY floating shoe rack tutorial we shared with you, as the hanging hardware is completely hidden away in this version. Have a thrify DIY knock-off of your own? Share it in the comments below.





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Declutter Your Home with a Detailed Inventory [Clutter]

Posted on February 23, 2009
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A detailed home inventory serves an important purpose, giving you something to show your insurance company in the event of theft or damage. As Apartment Therapy points out, a home inventory is also a great decluttering tool.

Photo by yenna.

The post provides a two-part guide to home inventory. The first part explains how to make a good inventory, from spreadsheet creation to recording items with your digital camera. Whether or not this is your first home inventory, we’d recommend trying out previously mentioned Know Your Stuff, a free application for Windows and OS X that dedicated to creating home inventories.

After you’ve inventoried your stuff, the post suggests that many of us, when faced with all of our belongings, realize we have way too much stuff. That’s when the decluttering begins.

Go through your list, room-by-room, and ask yourself how many of each item you really need. Highlight each item that can be reduced. You may realize that you only need five t-shirts instead of fifteen, two sets of sheets instead of four, or one frying pan instead of three.

Whether or not you get any serious decluttering done using this method, you’ll still come out on top with your new home inventory. Good on you!





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Automatically Clean Up Your Downloads Folder with Belvedere [File Management]

Posted on February 19, 2009
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Over at his home away from ‘hacker, the How-To Geek has put together an excellent guide to automatically cleaning your downloads folder with Belvedere, Lifehacker’s very own automated file management tool.

Of course, we gave you a cursory overview of how to use Belvedere on the download page, but the Geek’s guide suggests a few smart rules you can set up for cleaning old ZIP and EXE downloads, moving images to your Pictures folder, music to your Music folder, and so on. We’re obviously big fans of Belvedere (and so are you, it seems), so it’s nice to see a step-by-step guide to putting it to good use.

Of course, Download management isn’t all you can do with Belvedere. If you’ve got your own favorite use for the automated file manager, let’s hear about it in the comments.






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Fences is a Seriously Awesome Desktop Icon Organizer [Downloads]

Posted on February 5, 2009
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Windows only: Desktop icon organizer Fences arranges your cluttered desktop icons into containers so you can clean up the mess into useful groups of shortcuts—or optionally hides them altogether.

Once installed, Fences will run through a couple of first-time beginner screens asking if you’d like to use one of the built-in layouts, and will attempt to auto-detect which icons should be placed inside each fence. You can modify any of the fences by simply moving or resizing them around the screen, and then use the Lock item on the desktop context menu to fix them into place when you are done.

The thumbnail on the left shows my cluttered test desktop before, and the one on the right shows the default organizer layout generated by Fences—much cleaner.


Right-clicking on the desktop gives you a couple of new options, including quick and easy access to the settings panel, where you can tweak the look & feel as much as you'd like.


The best feature is the ability to double-click on the desktop to toggle visibility of the icons—but you can optionally exclude certain fences, a very useful feature for hiding clutter while keeping application launching icons visible all the time.


After only a few hours of using this application, it’s already a must-have for keeping my desktop clean and organized. If you aren’t worried about eye-candy and just want to organize your icons, check out previously mentioned Iconoid, or you can hide your desktop icons with a keyboard shortcut instead.

Fences is a free download, works on Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 7 or Vista in both 32-bit or 64-bit versions.

Fences [Stardock]






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