Vihjeitä sisältävästä vyöhykkeestä: Free Coding Lessons, DIY Grid-it -järjestäjät ja vesipohjainen asiakirjojen hävittäminen

I’m a regular visitor to this site, and don’t know if I’m writing the right address but thought this info would be worth repeating. A group called Codeacademy is offering a program called Code Year. Basically, you send them your email, and they send a free programming lesson every week for the entire year (look like they’re starting out with JavaScript). I signed up as a New Year’s Resolution, and thought there may be people who visit this site that would like to know. Check Code Year for more details.

I saw the link you guys shared back in November on how to make your own Grid-It clone. The Grid-It inside an old book was pretty fancy looking, I have to admit, but I like things easy and with duct-tape involved. A few months ago I made a Grid-It clone following a tutorial I found on YouTube. You can check it out here. You won’t have a fancy old-school book cover on your Grid-It when you’re done but it will look more true to the original.

I never get around to shredding the papers that need to be shredded… I always end up throwing them in a plastic waste can under my desk with the intention of eventually shredding them. Last weekend we had an unseasonably warm day and I figured I’d haul the paper shredder and can out onto the deck and at least get a little sunshine while I shredded them all. I got the can out onto the deck, went back for the shredder, got distracted helping my wife with something, and forgot all about the project. A few hours later there was a huge rain storm and the can was completely filled with water. I just left it out there for the weekend and figured I’d deal with it later. Come Monday night, the water had so saturated the paper that it was just a giant pulpy mess. I laid the can on its side to let the water drain out and once it was all relatively dry it was like a giant block of wood pulp. There was no way to peel any of it apart in such a way that you could actually read the documents.

I did a little digging around online to see if other people had experimented with the water-disposal method and it turns out it’s an old Japanese method for destroying paper (in fact you can add powdered dish detergent to the water to accelerate the process). If you never get around to shredding or you hate the sound of the paper shredder, a bucket of water works just as well!