Rain Gutters as Cable Management Tools

We're all about creative cable management here at Lifehacker, so we were instantly drawn to reader Seandavid010's rain-gutter cable management setup. Granted, you can find other cord-wrangling solutions, like the one Adam used when he made his cordless workspace, but the rain gutter approach yields impressive results. Sean was nice enough to send in his entire step-by-step, check out the full post to see it.

$5 IKEA Coat Hanger Offers Solid Cable Management

Weblog BitsOfMyMind shares a very simple idea that turns an inexpensive coat-hanger rack into a simple and streamlined cord management solution.

Back when Adam detailed how to go cordless in your workspace, he championed a $10 cable management add-on from IKEA. Many readers wrote in and said they couldn't find the IKEA wire-manager he used, so this clever hack is a welcome addition to our cable-wrangling bag of tricks.

Open a Bottle of Wine with Your Shoe

Got a bottle of wine on hand but no corkscrew to get it open? You can argue all you want about whether or not the guy in this video really needs more wine, but you can't argue with the results.

Make Cookies in 90 Seconds with Your Waffle Iron

Baking cookies in your oven is fine and all, but if you want to turn out some tasty cookies in a very short time, consider turning to your trusty waffle iron. Turns out you're only 90 seconds away from crispy, chewy, cookie-goodness.

Create a Cat Haven from Ikea Shelves

The climbing trees at pet stores are ridiculously expensive and take up tons of floor space. Help your kitty jump to a royal view, Super-Mario-style, without cluttering your floor or wasting money.

Remove Splinters Using a Banana Peel

Bananas are a good source of potassium, but turns out the peels can do more than just store the fruit. Apartment Therapy outlines seven ways to put used peels to work, including removal of those inconvenient splinters. Photo by keepon.

Get More From Cheap Vodka Than a Hangover

Sooth headaches? Clean razors? Kill bees? Vodka is handy for all sorts of uses besides the traditional one. The clear and high-proof alcohol can be used for all manner of tricks. Photo by Carsten Lorentzen.

Coke Can Clean Your Toilet in a Pinch

When your toilet's got rings and lime scale stains and you've got no cleaning gear on hand, grab a can of Coke out of the fridge.

Turn IKEA Cabinets Into a Cordless Desktop Stand

The new iMacs, and similar all-in-one LCD desktop systems, make for a mostly cordless computing experience. Using two pieces of IKEA furniture meant for laptops and modems, you can hide the remaining wires and up the elegance.

Disposable Mugger's Wallet Gets You Off Scott Free or Gets You Beat Up

A mugger's wallet is a disposable second wallet that you're more than happy to give away to a mugger. It contains a few bucks, a non-essential ID, but not much else that would endanger your identity.

DIY Car Dash Camera Mount

Ever wished you had some high-speed chase footage after you finished tearing down the freeway after crooks? Of course you have! You need a quick, cheap DIY camera mount.

Remove Stubborn Batteries and Other Cool Magnet Tricks

As if the sheer magnetism aspect of magnets wasn't magical enough, weblog Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories points out 17 very cool tricks that put your magnets to great use. For starters, a strong magnet can be the perfect tool to remove batteries from the grips of a stubborn spring.

Use Vicks VapoRub To Cure Toenail Fungus

We've heard that Vicks VapoRub can cure toenail fungus before (it's also helpful when you've got a cold!), but the New York Times recently put it to the test. The results: The thyme in VapoRub can in fact do the job.

Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug with Zip Ties

We've all been there at some point: You've got a perfectly functional Ethernet cord that somewhere along the line had its tab broken off. Don't buy a new one or re-terminate the cord. Fix it with zip ties.

Open Beer Bottles with Bic Lighters

If you lack for a piece of paper, a ring, or just don't want to risk bursting another bottle, Wired explains the time-honored tradition of popping the top with a Bic-type lighter.

Outlet-Hanging Charge Station For Your Small Gadgets

If a full-sized charging station is overkill for your single cellphone or iPod, try this smaller gadget cradle that mounts neatly on a wall outlet. Craft blog Zakka Life put together a simple tutorial for making a cradle that's perfect for single, regularly-charged items—the kinds of things you dump out of your pockets upon returning home.

Have a favorite post from 2009 that highlights a clever use or novel way to repurpose an everyday object? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Level Green opened on June 4 this year, and was built by Berlin architects, J Mayer H, and designed by Art+Com. They took design cues from the PET recycle logo, and built the complex structures using wood composite sheets reinforced with steel, and sprayed with acrylic-based car paint.

The installations include touch-sensitive screens mounted on vertical surfaces that provide info on the various displays and models. [Autostadt (translated) via Deezen]

The 1323-pound, $95,000 machine can produce around two rolls an hour from 1800 sheets of A4 paper—not particularly efficient or cost effective if you ask me. Still, I love the idea. With some fine tuning over the years, this could become a viable green option. [Mainichi via Crunchgear]

The build looks simple enough for someone with a working knowledge of circuitry, and the Arduino allows for lots of customization with sequencing and dimming. If you want to try this Earth-friendly project yourself, the complete instructions are available at Instructables. [Instructables]

The gadgets are separated into categories, and then ripped apart for the valuable or recyclable parts, like glass, steel, aluminum, and more valuable metals like copper and gold. They use a special machine with teeth to separate copper from steel and aluminum, and then magnets to separate the latter two. As expected, the batteries are placed in hazardous waste containers, since they're by far the most environmentally harmful piece of any given gadget, and are shipped to specialized outposts who deal with them.

Factories like this are a big step up from our previous recycling protocol, which was to mail our junk overseas where the restrictions are much more lenient (and harmful). Check out this link for instructions on how to responsibly recycle your dead toys. [Wired]

The lamps were made by Alan Lishness over at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The round bulbed one was made from a water-cooled dual processor yanked from an Apple G5 desktop, an hour meter, an aircraft compass and 40W LED bulbs.

The other one is the child of a signal switching relay manufactured by the General Railway Signal Company in 1924. The perforated cylinders used to be ink canisters designed for high-speed fabric printing. Don't they make you want to raid your garage and see what you can create? [Lishness - Thanks Alan!]

It's not nationwide (yet) and the 32-inch restriction on TVs is bogus. Other than that, way to be responsible, Best Buy! The key to getting people to recycle e-waste (or anything) is to make it convenient and free—if Wal-Mart started up a free, nationwide e-waste recycling program, we'd really be in business. And they should as a basic responsibility, given how much of it walks through their doors. I just hope Best Buy isn't using one of those super shady recycling outfits that poisons their workers. [CEPro]

Other ED coverage impressions by category...

Useful
G4 teams up with Earth 911 to provide a gadget recycling search engine called Gcycle. You enter your zipcode and the electronic you want to recycle. They tell you where to go.

Clever
LAPTOP instructs us on how to make a keyboard into a wallet, and gives us four other ideas to find new uses for old gadgets that aren't bad at all.

Provocative
WorldChanging takes a stance against Earth Day.

The biggest problem with Earth Day is that it has become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity. Small steps, we're told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well. The strategy of recycling as a gateway drug — get them hooked on it and we can move them on to harder stuff — has failed miserably.

We all know that changing a lightbulb is meaningless if we are building coal fired power plants like mad. The issues at stake will be dealt with at the government level, not in our chandelier... [but] small steps lead to education and awareness and that leads to votes and votes lead to change.

How are you celebrating Earth Day? – Mark Wilson

Black Cloud [neatorama]