If you travel in Europe or Asia, many of the hotels use one of these slots next to the door to control power for the room. Put your room key in when you arrive and the power turns on. Remove the key and after a few seconds the power shuts off. Based on something I read recently, it saves the hotels about $10-12 per room per year because all the stuff you forget to turn off powers down. The downside is if you’re trying to charge your laptop the power is gone when you leave and the air conditioning stops cooling the room.

At both hotels I stayed at in China, the hack for this is to stick a business card in the slot instead of the key. I’m sure hotels will eventually catch on, but in the meantime, you can leave the room and still charge your batteries. Kudos to Lee and Sachi for giving me the idea in the first place.

With the fall lineup of shows sneaking up on us, I’m shrugging my shoulders with a big so what. All I’m interested in seeing is the next round of Doctor Who and maybe Family Guy. Over at the SnapStream company blog, they have another idea. Zack walks you through the steps required to record every single show on every major network during the season premiere week. Not just every show, but every show in High Definition. With this configuration there’s no chance you’ll get behind on water cooler discussion. Theoretically you could do this with SageTV or the beta version of Windows Media Center as well, although Beyond TV and SageTV have more real world testing with recording HDTV.

One of the many selling points on the house I’m currently renting in Seattle was the washer and dryer. We had them in while I still lived in Iowa, but I didn’t want to take up that much room on the moving truck with bulky appliances. A couple of months ago the cold water function on the washing machine stopped working. This effectively made the cold-only rinse cycle dead and made hot-only washing an unattractive option for dark clothes due to color bleeds and fading. The landlord opted not to fix the washing machine, instead suggesting we buy one we could take with us when we move out. At the time, I went shopping for a machine but the one I wanted was out of stock so I blew it off.

I hate laundromats, so in the short term I came up with a hack to solve the problem (the hack worked well enough I didn’t purchase a new machine until the one in the house died this week).

First I turned off the water and disconnected the hot and cold water hoses from the machine. Next, I got a Y-adapter meant for attaching to outdoor garden hose spouts and connected it to the hot side. I connected the hot and cold hoses to the Y-adapter.

I capped off the cold water side of the machine with a cap designed for outdoor faucets. Despite it not working - it still had a means of leaking water during cycles.

This provided three temperature cycles depending on whether I had hot on, cold on or both hot and cold on for a warm wash cycle. For rinsing clothes, I simply re-ran a shorter wash cycle with cold only and no soap. Spin worked as expected.

While I would recommend this for a fully functional washer, this solution will extend the life of a washing machine that costs more to repair than replace.

You’re probably wondering how to put motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking page. We figured it out! Go ahead, try snaking your favorite Web site here:

UPDATE: If you don’t want to use the form, simply replace yourdomain below with any url to see the motherfucking snakes:

http://lockergnome.com/diy/snakes/?url=http://www.yourdomain.com

The motherfucking result might not work properly if your motherfucking URL is built in Flash (or if the site kills frames automatically). We’re pre-caching the images below to make the motherfucking page load quicker. The motherfucking snakes will not begin to cascade until the motherfucking page has fully loaded.

What are you waiting for?! Put these motherfucking snakes on some motherfucking pages! Oh, and go see the motherfucking movie a few more times.

Found via Bain Books

PowerPoint gets the bad reputation as being the evil piece of Microsoft Office designed to create disinterest and loathing of all public presentations. That’s mostly because people simply use it incorrectly. Instead of complementing a presentation, people have a bad habit of using slides as notes they read to an audience, which translates to boring. Presentation Zen offers an interesting perspective on applying photography’s rule of thirds to PowerPoint slides by analyizing a number of promotional videos and looking at what makes them interesting. Peter over a blog.forret.com adds to the discussion Peter Forret’s Flickr stream.

Found on Lifehacker

1) Fake a phone call - nothing tells someone they don’t matter like picking up your phone in the middle of a conversation.

2) Check your watch repeatedly (or if you don’t have a watch, check the time on your cell phone) - the sense of urgency makes other people nervous.

3) Mention socially innapropriate topics - there’s nothing like an absurd medical condition to kill a party.

4) Read your email - you need a smartphone or Blackberry for this one, but it will get the point across that you have something more pressing than the current line of discussion.

5) If all else fails, simply walk away.

Next week, we show you how to attend anger management class.

Well, to completely mislead and frustrate me, to be honest. But it’s especially funny to anyone who’s played WoW for more than a few days.

Overexplaining this would only detract from the funny. Go have a look and enjoy this bit of what, in my opinion, is comedic genius!

[Thanks to Sean at Metroblogging Azeroth for digging this one up!]

If you ever go hiking, you know that one of the keys is keeping your pack weight down. All that gear adds up. Here’s a DIY solution for building the perfect stove for backpacking - compact, versatile, and most importantly - light. One of the key things that makes this useful beyond size is excellent wind-shielding around the heat area, helping to guarantee you won’t waste time re-lighting the stove with every small burst of wind.

One thing Jeremy doesn’t mention (that you should be doing in-flight anyway) is turning off WiFi. If you don’t need it, turn it off. Next to screen brightness it’s the #1 battery drain.

What’s your favorite way to save battery life on a plane or elsewhere?

Found via HSXDunbar

DupKiller - Duplicate files on your system can create confusion, waste space and generally reduce productivity. Instead of wasting brain cycles on which file is the one to keep - eliminate all those dupes efficiently with DupKiller. This is the best freeware duplicate file remover I’ve ever used. Just make sure you don’t confuse dupes with a backup copy (see Replicator below).

Free Accounting Software - The name says it all. With features on par with basic products from Quicken or Microsoft Money, you can easily manage your finances without ever needing to spend another dime.

FreeMind - Mind mapping software is the ultimate tool for free-form idea generation and organization. While some of the competing pay applications have a few more features (like Microsoft Office integration), FreeMind does an awesome job of getting you most of the features you might want to use mind mapping for.

Folder Marker - Keep track of projects, files and deadlines by visually marking folders on your desktop. For the Getting Things Done crowd or simply for those who want folders in more flavors than just Windows yellow, Folder Marker helps you quickly locate and act on information.

Folder Size - Add folder size information to Windows Explorer. If you ever run low on hard disk space, the detective work to find the culprit can be brutal without drilling down on every folder. Folder Size adds the all important folder size data to Windows Explorer to make locating file bloat a breeze.

Karen’s Replicator - Backup files, folders or entire drives on a schedule. While duplicate files can be a nuisance, having a backup of files is a must. There’s nothing worse than losing your work. Replicator is quick, easy, and the scheduling makes it a breeze to make sure you don’t forget to do it.

Kurlo - Contact management that actually works. While Thunderbird (and dare I say, Outlook Express) both support basic contact management, they still don’t hold a candle to full fledged PIMs like Outlook. Kurlo bridges the gap, giving you all the contact management you’ll ever need and making it portable on a USB keychain drive. Manage full contact info, get birthday reminders, receive event notifications and manage group lists all within Kurlo’s interface. The only downside is it doesn’t sync with cell phones.

SimpleOCR - Call it the hack for getting around the DRM that is paper; optical character recognition is one of the most useful reasons to own a scanner. From manipulating old printed materials to quoting passages from some long forgotten text, SimpleOCR is among the best free OCR solutions I’ve ever tried.

Stickies - Post-it style notes don’t really fit the Getting Things Done mold, but I can’t live without them. When I need to jot something down for future completion, a paper note or a digital equivalent is a must. Stickies replaces all those notes stuck to the side of your monitor with a digital version on your desktop, complete with live URLs, custom fonts and color-coded backgrounds.

WinMerge - Merge text files, difference two documents or simply compare the contents to discover similarities. WinMerge is a great solution for combining files to make the sum greater than its parts.

Found via Lifehacker

Judging by the revolving door of marketing materials I see at tradeshows, there must be hundreds of vinyl banners that find their way into closets or the trash over the course of a year. Instead of putting them in a landfill, why not make something useful (and unique) from a tradeshow leftover. Federico shows us how to make a messenger bag from a vinyl banner, complete with pattern and photos of his own progress.