DIY fruit fly trap

adriennes:

With an apartment somehow inundated with fruit flies, I decided to take matters into my own hands yesterday. Thanks to suggestions from wikihow, I set up the following trap:

• Fill bottom of wide shallow bowl w/balsamic vinegar + apple cider vinegar
• Cover tightly with saran wrap
• Stab saran wrap all over with fork to make holes they can get into, but can never, ever, escape from
• Watch as they accumulate in the bowl and out of your entire house.

Just consulted my 2009 archives for this one after seeing 10 too many fruit flies in the kitchen.

Absolute BEST locksmith in New York City: Lockbusters

Put this in your phone right now: (212) 960-8585

I’ve been nervous about locksmiths in NY for years, and grew even more nervous after reading this account a few months back, but Yelp helped me find my dream locksmith yesterday.

Jay has a sparkling reputation on Yelp (57 reviews that are all 4-5 stars), and an appealing web presence, and lived up to my expectations. We got a deadbolt installed within hours, and were charged via Paypal the reasonable price as advertised. So easy, and nothing scammy about it. I will definitely call him if I’m locked out at 4am.

Life lesson #452,891: Don’t ever brush your teeth while wearing earplugs

Just don’t. It’s so terrible.

My Backup Plan

Recently a friend asked which kind of external harddrive I use to backup my laptop, and my answer became so extensive that I thought it could be beneficial to share here. I’ve heard too many horror stories of people destroying computers and phones lately.

Computer:
Macs come with an amazing backup software, Time Machine, which makes it incredibly easy to backup regularly. You just need a dedicated external harddrive, and I have one that’s 500GB ($70 from newegg) that can hold quite a few backups. I backup this way about once a week. This is layer of protection 1.

Layer 2 is another external harddrive where I have copies of all of my files, as well as photos/videos/music that I have moved off of my laptop to make more room. To easily sync files from my computer to the folders here, I use a great $30 software called Forklift. It only copies files that have changed since the last time, and is able to move large files that would give me an error message if I were using the Finder.

Layer 3 is another drive that also has copies of everything on my second drive, particularly the files that have been cleared off of my laptop so they are in more than one place.

On top of this, I keep the first two drives in a fireproof safe ($20 from Amazon).

Crazy? Yes. If you aren’t doing any backup whatsoever, using Time Machine with one drive is a good way to start.

Phone:
Every several weeks there’s someone on Facebook asking for everyone’s phone numbers because they have lost or damaged their phone. This would never happen again if everyone got hip to Google Sync. Free and easy, it automatically keeps your calendar and contacts synced to your gmail/google calendar through the air. It’s so great! 

Tumblr:
If you have a Mac, you can also use Tumblr’s free backup software to backup posts.

How to Make Animated GIFs from Multiple Still Photos

What you’ll need:
* Photoshop
* Several photos that make a sequence 

1. Open the first image in Photoshop. 
2. Open the Animations pane. (Window/Show All Menu Items/Animation)
-View “frames”; if it says “timeline”, click the button with the three squares in the bottom right of the pane to switch to frames view
-Select “forever” for the looping at the bottom left

3. Open the 2nd image, select all, copy, and paste on top of the 1st image. Open each additional image (as many as you want) and copy and paste all of them on top of the 1st image.

4. In the layers pane, click the eye next to each layer to turn it off [see above], leaving just the background image visible.

5. In the animation pane, click the duplicate frame button [see above] to create a second frame. Adjust the visible layers on the second frame to only show the second image; in my case, “layer 1”. Continue this for as many images as you have, with one frame per image/layer.
6. Adjust the length of each frame as you see fit; I generally choose .2 or .5 seconds per frame. The more images you are combining, the shorter you may want each one to be. 
7. Click the Play button in the animation pane to test how it flows.
8. To save as an animated GIF, click File/Save for Web & Devices and choose GIF

9. For Tumblr to play it, the size must be under 400K, so to achieve this, I adjust the Image Size (bottom right), and colors (top right) until it’s small enough.

Enjoy!

Pro Excel Tip #2: Text to Columns

To follow up on my CONCATENATE post, another tip that I got from CR that has changed my life when dealing with Excel is the Text to Columns Wizard. This is helpful for separating data from one column into multiple columns, which has been a time saver for me in mailing lists and metadata sheets.

Let’s say you’ve got a whole column of names in Last, First formatting, and want to separate this into two columns. First, copy the entire column into a new one, so it doesn’t mess up the original column.

Highlight the entire new column and type Alt + D + E. This opens the wizard.

In Step 1, choose delimited, since we have the comma in each box at the point that we’d like to make the column break.
Step 2, check COMMA as the delimiter.
Step 3, just click FINISH.

It works some magic, and you are left with this:

Kablamo. Now it’s ready to use as-is, or can be CONCATENATED as “first name last name” if necessary.