This is a very simple charging station for cell phones, Ipods and other electronic gadgets. It’s simple because you don’t have to do anything complicated save for assembling a box made of carton. No cutting, hammering or other activities that require tools.

Grab a Kassett DVD-box from Ikea.

Get a non-slip dash mat and lay it on top of the lid. Those mats are meant to be put on the dash of your car so cell phones and other items don’t slide around. It’s possible an old fashioned mouse pad will do, or something made of neoprene. But the dash mat is fantastic, so if they have that locally (try a store that has car stuff), use that. You could possibly skip the mat, but be aware the gadgets could slide off.

Inside the box you could place two Glis boxes (Ikea), plus two smaller plastic baskets. There should be plenty of room for chargers in there. And that’s why I chose the DVD-box over the CD-box - I wanted compartmented storage, and the CD-boxes can’t fit more than one Glis box inside.

If you place a power strip next to the box (I don’t recommend putting it inside the box because the chargers tend to produce a fair amount of heat, and it could theoretically burst into flames), you could use adjustable velcro straps to tame the power cables. Take out the chargers you need at the moment, with the gadgets still on top of the box while charging.

I have my box at the back of my desk, but it could also be placed on top of a shelf or cupboard. The power strip is hidden behind my LCD screen. You could also fasten it under the desk or in other fancy ways. You’d use velcro with two hard sides, and cable ties. That’s how we fasten routers, so it works!

I made a Norwegian version as well

Her er en veldig enkel hjemmelaget ladestasjon for mobiltelefoner og Ipoder og andre elektroniske dingser. Den er enkel fordi du ikke trenger å gjøre noe annet enn å sette sammen en boks - ingen kutting, skjæring eller andre aktiviteter som krever verktøy. DIY blir ikke enklere enn dette.

Ta en Kassett DVD-boks fra Ikea.

Legg en anti-glimatte oppå. De pleide å ha denne på Clas-Ohlson, men jeg finner den ikke nå. Se på Europris. De har to litt mindre i bilutstyr-avdelingen. Disse er gummi-matter med et gjennombrutt mønster som er ment å legge på dasjbordet til bilen, sånn at du kan legge en mobil oppå uten at den sklir av. Jeg foretrekker en sånn oppå for at mobilen skal ligge litt stødigere. En gammeldags musematte kan kanskje gjøre samme nytte? Men du kan selvfølgelig hoppe over den - bare vær obs på dingsene kan skli av.

Inni boksen kan du for eksempel legge to Glis bokser (Ikea) for ekstra utstyr, og kanskje enda to mindre plastkurver (minste grå typen de har på Europris) oppå der igjen. Det er da god plass til flere ladere.

Om du legger et grenuttak i nærheten (anbefaler ikke å legge den inni boksen pga varmeutvikling på laderne), så kan du bruke f.eks. kabelbånd på laderne for å forhindre kabelsalat, og ta ut de(n) du trenger av boksen for øyeblikket, med mobilen fortsatt oppå boksen.

Jeg har min boks helt øverst på skrivebordet, men den kan også passe oppå en hylle i passelig høyde. Grenuttaket ligger bak LCD-skjermen. Du kan også feste det opp ned under skrivebordet eller på andre fantasifulle måter. Da bruker du borrelås med to harde sider, pluss buntebånd. Det er sånn vi setter fast routere, så det funker!

I’ve made an English language version of this post as well

Jeg laget nylig en side om rydding og oppbevaring, eller “organizing”, som det kalles på engelsk. Et forsøk på å dele mine erfaringer med opprydding, med produkter som finnes i Norge, med en del synspunkter om hva som er billigst.

http://www.annelisabeth.com/div/organizing8.htm

Det har forresten vært salg på Ikea en uke nå, og de har satt ned prisen på Kassett produkter. Det har vært en god tid å få med seg disse, siden prisen på dem har vært så god at de har vært billigere enn Samla plastbokser. Men om det fremdeles er salg til uka, ta en kikk på lagerbeholdningen på ditt varehus om morgenen før du drar. Det kan også tenkes å være forskjell på hvilke farger som er på tilbud. På Furuset har det stort sett vært rødt og svart på tilbud.

Om du vil legge igjen kommentarer på siden, gjør det her.

I liked Friendfeed, and wanted to add it to a blog (not this one). They have widgets you can use.

Problem is, the widgets don’t produce code that can be seen by spiders in your page source, unless those spiders are a bit more intelligent than I thought. Which also means the spiders won’t see the page as updated.

I wanted ONE page on a blog to have the feed from Friendfeed, I didn’t want it in my sidebar.

The only thing I’ve seen that works, easily, is Lifeline.

AND, it adds the welcome feature of stripping out Nofollow from the links you’ve added to your feed!

It’s not as pretty as the widget - no Youtube thumbnails, for instance, and the caption you add to the links aren’t included. So I think it’s a good idea to add a smaller widget below (without the feed) in addition to the spider fodder.

Solved: The site now ranks in Google. Don’t know why it behaved so weirdly, but I’m told it happens.

I found that Google sometimes doesn’t return text search results beyond the first few words on the page. Here’s my method and results:

I’m currently testing for the (removed) domain.

It’s a new domain registered in the beginning of October.

The first few days it was in the top of the Google results for the two keywords in the domain - found by freshbot following a link.

Then it disappeared. The only way to even get it to come up was to search for the entire domain.

After I put the actual design in place with some more pages (including pages with basically nothing on them), Google indexed most of the pages. The only page to have a cache was the index page, but all pages had a blurb.

Now I started to do text searches for phrases on the pages. Nothing came up.

I started doing the same thing, only with site:nameofsite.com in the search. And I found something curious. If I searched for phrases near the top of the page, I couldn’t get very far before it returned no results. The title of the page is 47 characters, and then there are the keywords. The Meta description was shown, and I could search phrases as long as the last word wasn’t further into the page than character 43 of the Meta description.

But I could search for single words further down the page, or even several words - it returned results easily.

But if I use those exact same search words without specifying site:nameofsite.com, the page is not in the results.

However, a blog I’ve had for a few years got a different treatment. I wrote a blog post yesterday, and it’s not only in Google today, I can search for phrases at the bottom of the post, and it comes up, no problem.

Update: Guess what, THIS post got indexed by Google within an hour of me writing it, and I can search for phrases far down the page, no problem. However, both the blog index and the blog post are returned by Google without a cache.

Update November 4:

I still sometimes see the old content in Google’s index, meaning there are datacenters that still have the old index. But even so, it appears the additional pages on the site are dropped from the index. On other other hand, I can now find the site by searching for the domain name, without specifying site: first. And if I search for site:www.domain.com and phrases, I can find them even far down the page, while site:domain.com still has the same behavior. I still don’t get any results from the site, though, even if I search for namerofsite. It’s pretty normal to get the domains first in the results if you search like that.

Update November 7:

The site is now searchable and ranking well in Google!

I had a harddrive fail yesterday. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d seen the signs for a day or so.

But I know from experience that non-techies tend to be completely unrealistic when harddrives fail, so I’ll describe what happened, so maybe others will be able to save their data before it’s too late.

This was a laptop. An old one, with an old harddrive.

The first thing that happened was that I was a bit less careful when moving the laptop than I usually am. I thought, hmm, that might not have been smart. In general, you should not shock a harddrive. An average harddrive will survive some shocks just fine, while another - much less severe - will kill it. It depends on the angle of impact, what direction it’s moving, whether or not it’s on, whether or not it’s accessing or writing data as you move it. The worst time to drop a harddrive, is when it’s writing to disk.

And keep in mind that laptops are moved about a LOT more than desktop computers. The more you schlep your laptop around, the shorter lifespan your harddrive will have. Expect to replace your laptop harddrive at least once in the life of the computer. And make sure all your data is backed up. As the harddrive nears the end of it’s life, some data may become inaccessible, but you may not realize. So checking the data is something that was done a lot in the past.

Get into the habit of listening to the harddrive, as it boots up and as you work on the computer. If it starts sounding different, it could be going bad, and you’ll need to do backup IMMEDIATELY.

What happened with this one, was that I was watching video on it, with the video file on the harddrive. And it would stop playing now and then. If I waited, it would start playing again, but I had to rewind a bit to get what I’d missed in the meantime. I didn’t know why in the beginning, this was a Linux machine, so I wondered if it was OS related, or if it was going warm. But then I noticed that the harddrive light (the light that shows you’re accessing the harddrive) was staying solidly lit while the video was stopped.

That’s when I knew the harddrive might fail.

The second day, again watching a video, after having jiggled the harddrive connection (in case it was caused by a loose connection), it happened again, and this time the video didn’t come on. I moved the mouse, and suddenly I’m met by a black screen with white error messages. I was in the middle of a video, and hoped I could get it to work again, so I tried to reboot, but got the message there was no boot disk.

Harddrive history.

Don’t feel bad for me, I had nothing on that machine I didn’t have a copy of, as far as I can remember.

I just wanted to share how that happened, and to be careful if it happens to you.

I’ve just uploaded a new design to the blog, and also to the front page of the website.  Feel free to give me feedback on it!

I’ve used Artisteer, a program for making Wordpress templates. The only item I prepared myself was the image of myself. I tried to cut out all the background and make it invisible. Not easy to do when you’ve got hair as fluffy as I do, and the background is White! I saved it as PNG, which preserves the invisible background, and then imported it into Artisteer as a photo that was floating on the header background. That way any embellishments on the header won’t be over the photo of me.

The rest is done in the program. All the color choices were made one by one - there’s no way to set a custom color palette. I would have liked that, because it’s a chore to change all those colors to my palette. But apart from that it’s really easy to do, if you choose a pre-existing palette, and don’t fiddle as much with the photo as I did - there are built in photos of generic people in the program, along with landscapes and cityscapes for the header background - it could take you ten minutes flat to build a template.

When I was done with the Wordpress template, I made a few structural changes, and saved the same project as HTML. I did a nondestructive edit, and copied the project file to a different name, just in case I wanted changes to the blog template without affecting the HTML version.

The HTML output needs a lot of work once you’re done with it. You need to change the menu choices - in HTML, and you should change headers here and there and content. But once you’re done with all that, you’ve got a file you can use as a template for other pages on your website. Just remember that if your site has a folder structure, you should use absolute links in the menu, or the links could easily break deep down in your site.

I also opted to move the css and js files to a subdirectory, as well as change the name of the folder of the images to layoutimages, to avoid any conflict with existing files in my site.

The really painful job is of course the cleanup of all the outdated stuff my website has accumulated in the course of the 10 years it’s been online (total, including before I bought the domain name), and also convert all the pages to the new design. I fully expect to make several versions of the design and do some fancy copy and paste of code to make it all work. That’s the beauty of it, you could have two columns on some pages, and three on others - the overall design would still be the same.

I’ve never used sub items to menu links before, and especially liked that. I had a lightbulb moment when I wondered what to put under the CONTACT menu item that was created automatically. Should I keep it? I realized I could put Facebook, Myspace and Flickr links in the sub items, and just point the main item to the front page. Brilliant.

I’ve finally gotten around to switching software from MT to Wordpress. This webserver doesn’t play too nicely with PERL software, so that’s the reason for the switch.

I’ve got loads of broken links now because of the switch. I really don’t care…

I think I’ll look through the old stuff and delete some and maybe clean up some of the Norwegian posts. This blog has now been migrated at least twice since the initial install, so there are some problems with the Norwegian characters.

I’m also going to switch templates. The basic one is hideous. Not that I’m disturbed by that, but I need the practice. Not for installing another template, but for hopefully doing one myself, or at least modifying a prebuilt one.

I needed to do a search for Eagle Creek products in Norway today. I knew there was a store in Oslo that carried probably the whole line, but I’d forgotten the name. So I needed a quick way to find that website. You can go to a country specific search engine, and ask for websites only in that language. But let’s say I needed to find Eagle Creek products in Denmark? I don’t know any country specific search engines in Denmark. However, there’s one thing you can do right in Google, that should get you what you want:

“eagle creek” site:.no

Or, for Denmark:

“eagle creek” site:.dk

Simple, eh?

Update: Even simpler is to use the country specific versions of Google, and then ticking the box for results only from that country.

For oss kristne er bibellesning viktig. Det er en av måtene vi holder vår tro levende.

Men mange har problemer med motivasjonene. I alt stresset i vår moderne hverdag, blir det lite bibellesning. En av årsakene kan være at man går trøtt. En form for utbrenthet.

Noe av det som anbefales når det gjelder utbrenthet, er å gjøre noe annet. Få andre impulser.

Om du er en av de som synes det er vanskelig å lese i Bibelen, prøv med noe annet. Og da mener jeg ikke noe annet enn Bibelen.

Men Bibelen er oversatt til mange språk, og den finnes i mange versjoner.

Prøv en lydbibel - på norsk eller engelsk. Prøv å lese i studiebibelen, og sjekk grunnteksten og hva som står skrevet om bakgrunnen for bøkene i Bibelen. Jeg hadde stor glede av en tegneserieversjon da jeg var tenåring. Og prøv en Bibel på et annet språk.

For min del har jeg fått øynene opp for en engelsk versjon: NIV. Den har et enkelt, godt og lettfattelig språk. Mens jeg studerte engelsk (en del klassisk litteratur, inkludert Shakespeare), likte jeg å lese King James Version (KJV). Den ble utgitt i 1611, og har et veldig gammeldags språk. Noen ord har endret betydning siden den gang, og det kan være en kamp å forstå enkelte vers. Men språket virker for oss i dag som vakkert og nesten poetisk.

Om du ønsker å sjekke disse og andre versjoner av engelske bibler, kan du finne de fleste på nettet, før du bruker penger på å kjøpe en (jeg fant en NIV versjon til 89 kroner, men de fleste er dyrere og har tynnere papir).

NIV - lydbibel, lese bøkene - og det finnes også vers- og ordoppslag