Here’s the best part about those yellowed Legos:  You’re able to turn them back to their original color cheaply and easily!

I had just googled for a solution (pun intended) on getting all my discolored bricks back to normal.  All that playing in the sun really did a number on them.

As it turns out, all it takes is some Oxyclean and some hydrogen peroxide (H2O2).  I went to Family Dolllar, picked up 5 32 ounce bottles of 3% H2O2, and Kallie already had a box of the oxyclean powder for the laundry  (pro tip: oxyclean does wonders when your husband leaves chapstick in his pocket and cycles it through the washer and dryer).

Now, I’ve got a couple thousand of newly acquired white bricks that have been yellowed.  I sorted them by shape and then into shoe box sized plastic containers.  I poured in the H2O2, then a scoop of the oxyclean.  Give it a good stir and shake to start the reaction, and you’ll start seeing bubbles.  Now, let that sit in sunlight for a few hours.  I let mine sit for 6 hours total.  I stirred it around every 2 hours to make sure all the pieces got some sun light.   Depending on how many pieces you have, you might want to just get them to lay flat and leave space around them so you don’t have to stir.  The other obstacle to think about is that these plastic parts float!  I put enough hydrogen peroxide in so the whole clump of pieces floated about an inch above the bottom of the container, so sunlight could still get to those bottom pieces.

Here’s a before and after of some of the worst pieces I hand selected to test:

WOW, right?  No washing or scrubbing or anything.  Notice the 1×1 didn’t change much.  I realized afterward that it’s not a LEGO brick, but some imitation, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I’m super satisfied with how well they turned out!  Apparently, this can be done with any of those white plastic devices around your house that turn yellow over time, like printers, air filters, etc.

If you don’t like the results, add more oxyclean and let it sit in the sun longer.  It will work for all those discolored bricks too, not just white.  Let me know if you found this helpful and you end up doing it too!

The Dvorak keyboard is one of those examples of people not really knowing what’s good for them.  The Dvorak keyboard allows for more efficient use of the arrangement of keys on a keyboard which then improves speed.  It certainly has a strong underground following, but it would seem that there are power in numbers and people are resistant to change.  All major operating systems are compatible with the keyboard layout, it would just take getting one and learning how to use it.

Dvorak did a boat load of research on the keyboard to prove it’s significance, but it just hasn’t caught on over the past…80 years?  I knew a few friends online and in college that used one, but I’m willing to bet it was just a novelty and they’re back to their QWERTY now.

Here’s a little trick I learned from a friend.  There’s another way to tell how your meat is prepared other than color.  Take your hand and touch your index to your thumb.  Now feel that meaty part between your thumb and wrist.  That’s what rare feels like.  Middle to them will make it feel like medium rare.  Ring to thumb is medium.  Pinky to thumb is well done.

It’s called the Mpemba effect.  It’s a weird phenomenon that has been repeated, but not effectively recreated.  I had heard about it a long time ago, something like a friend told me to put hot water in the ice tray so that it would freeze faster.  It doesn’t seem like that’s entirely valid, but maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect

Let’s talk about the octothorp.  What is it?  It’s what you might call the hash symbol, or the pound sign, or the number key.

#

Kallie had read one of my twitter updates one day, and i tagged something at the end of it, and as she repeated it out loud to me she said “number”.  I laughed.

To be clear, the octothorp is different from the sharp symbol found in music (♯).  I’m not sure what that one is called…

Warning, you may not want to watch this.  You may not want to let your kids watch this either.  I’m going to talk about the genitalia of the duck.  Specifically, the male duck.  It’s crazy.  The claim is that female ducks have been evolving to prevent the male from impregnating them by forming twists in their…”tubes”.  In response, the male penis has evolved to “fill up” the tube and spiral around to make sure it gets to where it needs to be…  You just have to watch the video.   Or, read the Discover Magazine article.

Eversions in barriers / from blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

Typing 2 spaces after a period at the end a sentence is wrong.

Maybe “wrong” is too strong, but it’s not right.  Don’t believe me?  Go ask the experts, like the Modern Language Association – http://www.mla.org/style_faq3

It stems back to the old days of typewriters, where each character took up the same “space” as any other character.  Skinny letters like I and l took up the same space as M and W, which would leave sentences looking broken apart and disorganized.  So, the double space rule was implemented to make paragraphs easier to read.

I guess it’s up to you to follow the rules, but they’re there.  Let’s see people try to enforce them.

Brought to you courtesy of Slate.

If the royal family were to be outed tomorrow, for whatever reason, what would their last names be?

As of 1917, it seems to be Mountbatten-Windsor, which is pretty much made up any way.  Technically, any of them can chose whatever last name they want.  King George V created the name in the first place.

http://www.royal.gov.uk/ThecurrentRoyalFamily/TheRoyalFamilyname/Overview.aspx

Here’s a picture of what Deirdre’s white iphone 3G used to look like:

I won’t get into the discussions, but long story short, she gave me her phone, knowing full well that I was just going to fix it and sell it.

So, her screen was cracked, but the LCD was still completely operational.  I knew I could just buy the glass panel for ~20 bucks, but I found a nice kit at ifixit.com that came with everything I would need.  I highly recommend them!  They operate out of San Luis Obispo, Ca, which I visited in December, so I couldn’t help but envision some beach bum college kids running this operation out of their dorm room or something.

Anyway, the guides make this easy!  I had the phone all disassembled and put back together in under 30 minutes.  After a little charge, she was up and operational.  The home button was a bit wonky, you had to press firmly or just right to get it to work, but Deirdre said that is the way it was before she gave it to me.  I wish I knew, or I would have tried to fix that too, but since I already used the doublesided tape to get it all back together, I figured I may as well leave it alone, since there was no guarantee i could fix it.

So, with the phone looking back to normal, it’s time to jailbreak and unlock!  since it’s rocking 3.1.3 OS, a quick visit to Jailbreakme.com on the phone uses an exploit to jailbreak it in a snap.  no tethering or restoring ipsw files or anything!  Once cydia is on the phone, open it to record the SHSH for future jailbreaks, download ultrasn0w for the unlock, and BAM, you’ve got yourself a phone ready for any sim card you want.

It was really that easy.  take a few pictures for ebay, and away she’ll go!  This counts for #18 on my 30×30 list too!

after a botched update to some apps, Cydia would not longer launch completely. Cydia would crash when I tried to open it, even after rebooting.

First, I got DiskAid from : http://www.digidna.net/products/diskaid
Second, connect the iphone to your computer and using DiskAid, remove the numbered and tmp files from /var/lib/dpkg/updates/  – (This may be enough to resolve your problem.  Try a reboot and open Cydia again)

Third, I don’t have SSH installed on the phone.  These steps could also work if you don’t have WiFi to use OpenSSH.  I downloaded Universal Extractor:  http://legroom.net/software/uniextract.  That will let you extract .deb files

Fourth, download the latest Cydia .deb file from http://apt.saurik.com/cydia-3.7/debs/

Fifth, extract those files to your desktop and then copy them over to your phone in the appropriate paths using DiskAid  (you’re basically just manually extracting the files)

Sixth, reboot and try again.  Good Luck!

The disclaimer here is that you’re just overwriting files and not editing them.  SAVE BACK UPS OF ANYTHING YOU ARE OVERWRITING!