• Lamp shade hack

    From Buzz McCool@1:229/2 to All on Monday, November 05, 2018 10:22:54
    From: buzz_mccool@yahoo.com

    Long time reader, first time poster. Needed Big Bad Bob's post as an icebreaker.

    Obhack:
    We bought some new lamps for the family room. These lamps have the
    bulb/shade assembly on swing arms to bring the light closer to the sofa
    from the end table when reading. This seemed much nicer than having the
    old lamps teetering on the edge of the end table with the lamp shade
    cocked at a rakish angle to read with.

    Unfortunately, the new lamps have drum lamp shades instead of the more traditional cone shaped ones, so half the light went up to the ceiling
    instead of down at my page. After futzing with various ugly pie pan and aluminum foil kludges, I had a Eureka moment passing by a chrome
    plumbing clean out cover on a hallway wall at my office. At a local home improvement center, I bought a pair of "Oatey 7-in Solid Round Stainless
    Steel Cover Plates" (less than $5 US each) and installed them, chrome
    plated side facing down, on top of the lamp screwed down with the shade
    finial. Now I have an aesthetic solution for much brighter reading light.

    Buzz

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)
  • From Saucy@1:229/2 to buzz_mccool@yahoo.com on Tuesday, November 06, 2018 21:26:57
    From: +@on-a.pizza

    In alt.hackers, Buzz McCool <buzz_mccool@yahoo.com> wrote:
    Long time reader, first time poster. Needed Big Bad Bob's post as an icebreaker.

    Glad to see someone new.

    I bought a pair of "Oatey 7-in Solid Round Stainless
    Steel Cover Plates" (less than $5 US each) and installed them

    Branded even! I wouldn't expect such piping supplies to have a brand. I
    know Oatey as a maker of ABS adhesive (suitable for various plastic
    plumbing and also Lego).

    ObHack:

    Lots of sites will let you include a URL in message and then will the
    source *site* of the URL as a way of warning you where the URL goes.
    I made myself a URL redirector site, a la tinyurl or bitly, that uses
    wildcard DNS and the label in front of the domain for the lookup.
    This is also great for naming images from imgur (etc).

    Domain: "on-a.pizza"; label for the redirect: temporary-redirect

    https://temporary-redirect.on-a.pizza/

    In Slack, eg, it will show the full URL and not the redirect to
    another site to load an image. (Which in that example is from the https://http.cat/ error codes. The https://httpstatusdogs.com/
    is more complete, but doesn't have as cool a site URL.)

    Another example for a news story:

    https://reverse-block.on-a.pizza/

    But it's not a public redirector, it's just for me. I've written myself
    a phone connector so I can create named links on the go and a command
    line version for desktop. (It's a simple API, and I could create a web
    page, but then I'd an account management system better than an
    "Auth: Bearer" header. Login pages, ugh.)

    Saucy "top level domains are fun" Pizza

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)