That’s why I love MrsFixit. The brainchild of a woman who decided she’d had enough of paying for fixing things and rolled up her sleeves to do things herself. After sharing her tips with her friends, she put them online to share with other people, especially women.

MrsFixit is full of do-it-yourself solutions for getting things done around the home. From female oriented subjects like alternative uses for common substances and kitchen tips to installing a lighting system or a guide to plumbing, the site ahs tips on pretty much everything, including working outdoors.

The instructions on MrsFixit are fairly easy to follow. Every project includes a note on the tools you need for the task as well as detailed stepwise instructions on how to go about the job. The site also has its own newsletter, and a store to let you make purchases where you can often get discounts on products. In addition, MrsFixit has her own show, which is broadcast all over the USA.

Although the site is primarily aimed at the female gender, these tips are handy for just about anyone. I don’t know many guys who can install a toilet bowl and I’m the kind of person who believes that everyone should know how to do basic repairs irrespective of their gender.

What do you think of the tips on MrsFixit? Have you tried any of them out? Do you know of any similar sites? Let me know in the comments.

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Videos are archived in categories like Tech, Food or People and can be played without having to register an account at the video portal. The website offers the usual “social web” features like rating videos, leaving comments, embedding videos and bookmarking them.

The videos on the main site have about the same resolution that Youtube provides but the player provides additional functionality like zooming in, slowing down or increasing the brightness of the video. Even more interesting than that is the so called Smart Player which opens the video and controls in fullscreen mode.

The resolution of the video is increased in that mode. It pretty much looks like a standalone video player in that mode. The functionality in that mode remains the same with the exception that it is a tad easier to browse related videos, add-ons and external links all without having to leave the page or stop the video from playing. Access to additional videos is given on that page as well which means it is entirely possible to stay in that mode and watch many videos.

Registered users can upload their own videos to the website. It is possible to edit video details while uploading the video which is another interesting feature.

The contents are extensive, lots of videos to chose from. Most videos have a playtime between 1-5 minutes but there are some that have a longer playing time. 5Min is a specialized video portal that provides enough videos to put it in a top spot of the Do It Yourself video portals. The player surpasses the players of most video portals by a mile and is reason enough to check the site out.

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A laptop sleeve is a protective cover for a laptop. It is usually constructed of a thin durable material and fits snugly over the laptop. A sleeve not only keeps your laptop safe when it’s in a backpack but also allows you to carry it openly, without having to worry about dust and water affecting it.

While laptop sleeves are useful and some would say even essential, they don’t come cheap. Basic sleeves start from 30$ and special ones can go up to 100$, depending on what you choose. So while a neoprene sleeve may cost 35$, a leather sleeve costs around 110$. Your laptop model and size also affects sleeve pricing, with sleeves for the MacBook Air being notoriously expensive.

While most folks would grudgingly pay for an expensive sleeve, there’s a whole group of people who decided it wasn’t worth it. Instead, these people build their own laptop sleeves, out of a variety of materials. The best part about this is that many of them post tutorials so even other people can do it.

For sleeve-building tutorials, Instructables is your best bet. The site has tutorials for building sleeves out of sweatshirts, wetsuits, jeans, Fedex envelopes, binders, etc. One of my favorites was a quirky, reversible ‘monster’ sleeve that would cost 65$ if you bought it from a store.

What’s good about these sleeves is that although they’re homemade, they’re fully functional and just as good as a store-bought one. Plus, you build them for a fraction of the original cost since most of the materials are things that are lying around in the home. An added bonus is that you can build two-three sleeves and switch between them if you get tired of using the same sleeve over and over.

Have you ever built your own laptop sleeve? How do you think a homemade sleeve holds up against a readymade one? What’s your favorite laptop sleeve material and why? Let me know in the comments.

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Once when messing with command-line features a bit, I found out that a simple 1-line code can bring my CPU to 100% load in a second for as long as I want. If I really wanted to test the reliability of my CPU fan or water cooling system, I would run this tiny code for pretty long time like a few hours to make my CPU sweat a bit. Now to that simple code – bring up the Run window by pressing Win+R and start command line by putting cmd in it. Here comes that simple loop:

for /L %i in (1,1,#) do help
(replace the # with a number determining how many loops will be executed and also how much time it’ll take to finish the task, depending on your CPU’s performance)

Pretty simple, huh? It does nothing else than to repeat displaying command-line’s built-in help which should raise (according to my multiple tests) every single-core CPU load to 100% and maintain it at that level for the time the script is executed. That’s all folks !

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