Roo’s View

Like many, I enjoy a clean house.  There are plenty of gadgets out there that help you keep on top of the various cleaning duties – Scrubbing Bubbles: Automatic Shower Cleaner being one of them.  While some of the gadgets you pick up are really gimmicky, this one seems to help reduce some of the heavy cleaning the shower needs with minimal effort.

Now this doesn’t eliminate the need to clean the shower, and I should be honest here – when it does need cleaning I manage to neatly avoid doing the dirty work, but I can say that the Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner seems to lengthen the time between shower cleanings.

The only bummer is that the bottles are not refillable.  We stretch ours out by only using it every 2nd day or so (instead of every day as is recommended).  It still would be nice to be able to refill with a concentrate and dilute with water.  The catch is – the caps do not screw off, so you can’t open the bottles.

Let’s take a look at how the cap works:

So on the left you can see a close-up of the threaded part of the bottle. Very sneaky, they’ve put a pair of small ‘ratchet’ nubs – there is another pair on the other side as well.  Looking at the cap, you can see the corresponding teeth.  Once tightened down, the cap is very solidly locked onto the bottle.

To hack this – you’ll need two of the scrubbing bubbles empty containers.  From one you will recover a cap, from the other the bottle.  To remove (destroy) the cap, I used a pair of wire cutters and a pair of needle nose pliers.  I started a cut up the side of the cap, then grabbed the edge of the cut with the pliers and peeled it back.  I used 2 or three cuts until I managed to free the cap from the bottle.  Removing (destroying) the bottle to recover a cap was easier, but I used the same basic approach: a small cut, followed by the pliers to twist the material away.  Go slow (and carefully with sharp tools!) since you want to avoid any damage to the part you are trying to keep.

The bottle must be modified to removing the nubs.  The plastic is a hard plastic which seemed to respond nicely to a coarse file I had in my workshop.  A few minutes of work and I had smoothed over the two pairs of nubs – the cap now opens and closes easily.  Now we’ve got a refillable container.

This is something I actually did back in February when we moved our computer room to make room for our new arrival.  This is one of those DIY tasks that doesn’t take very long to do (a couple of hours tops), but you can put it off for ages (sort of like writing this post).  Anyone dealing with a rats nest of cables behind / below their desk, maybe this will serve as a kick in the pants to do something about it.

The LifeHacker article inspired me, but clearly not enough to quickly leap on the idea and deal with my mess of cables.  They actually have a whole category dedicated to cable management which is worth a browse if you are looking for ideas.  The original concept came from a site which seems to be gone now, but can still be seen via the Way Back Machine.

So pictured above is my version of the peg board cable organizer.  I’ve got a 2′ x 4′ peg board mounted on the back of the desk (between the desk and the wall).  There are only 2 screws holding the board to the desk (upper left and right corners).  I’ve used a couple of washers between the peg board and the desk to give it a bit of room for the cable ties.  Everything is zip-tied to the board, power bar included.  Since I’ve only got 2 screws at the top, I can bend the board (gently) away from the desk to get easy access to the back side to help route the zip ties.

The view from the front of the desk is what makes this worth doing.  No clutter on the floor (ok, an errant ethernet cable and the USB to the printer).  Even for my desk (pictured is Jenn’s) – where I need to plug and unplug things like my laptop regularly, this setup works well.  I simply mounted the powerbar near the top of the peg board and that places the outlets near enough to the top of the back edge of the desk that its not a problem.

This project only took a couple of hours, it is very functional – and tidy too.  What are you waiting for?

We left our wheelbarrow out in a corner of the backyard all winter.  In the spring the tire had completely deflated, and as it is a tubeless tire (similar to car tires) it had come off the rim as well.  Simply sticking an airpump on the valve did nothing as the tire no longer touched the rim in a number of places letting all of the air out.

One solution would have been to simply buy a new tire.  I thought that being like a car tire, I could probably take it by a local garage and have them do it for me.  However, I had a nagging feeling there was some way to DIY so I finally got to searching for a solution.

It was very easy to find some good advice on the net (this is as you know, not always true).  So the value of this post is probably limited, but I learned something today so I thought I’d share.

Tools you need: rope, air pump, long screwdriver or sturdy stick, soapy water.

1. Use the soapy water (1/2 water, 1/2 dish soap) to coat the beads of the tire (both sides) and the rim where it will mate up.
2. Tie the rope snugly around the circumference of the tire.
3. Stick the screwdriver through the rope and twist, causing the rope to tighten.  This should help you get the bead onto the rim on both sides [in my case, it was not quite there - but close enough to seal the gaps]
4. Pump the tire.  This should cause the bead to set onto the rim.  Slowly release the twist while you pump.

That’s it – easy to fix with stuff you should be able to find around the workshop.