Lamp shade hack

[Buzz McCool]

Long time reader, first time poster. Needed Big Bad Bob's post as an
icebreaker.

Obhack:
We bought some new lamps for the family room. These lamps have the
bulb/shade assembly on swing arms to bring the light closer to the sofa
from the end table when reading. This seemed much nicer than having the
old lamps teetering on the edge of the end table with the lamp shade
cocked at a rakish angle to read with.

Unfortunately, the new lamps have drum lamp shades instead of the more
traditional cone shaped ones, so half the light went up to the ceiling
instead of down at my page. After futzing with various ugly pie pan and
aluminum foil kludges, I had a Eureka moment passing by a chrome
plumbing clean out cover on a hallway wall at my office. At a local home
improvement center, I bought a pair of "Oatey 7-in Solid Round Stainless
Steel Cover Plates" (less than $5 US each) and installed them, chrome
plated side facing down, on top of the lamp screwed down with the shade
finial. Now I have an aesthetic solution for much brighter reading light.

Buzz

[Saucy]

In alt.hackers, Buzz McCool <buzz_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Long time reader, first time poster. Needed Big Bad Bob's post as an
> icebreaker.

Glad to see someone new.

> I bought a pair of "Oatey 7-in Solid Round Stainless
> Steel Cover Plates" (less than $5 US each) and installed them

Branded even! I wouldn't expect such piping supplies to have a brand. I
know Oatey as a maker of ABS adhesive (suitable for various plastic
plumbing and also Lego).

ObHack:

Lots of sites will let you include a URL in message and then will the
source *site* of the URL as a way of warning you where the URL goes.
I made myself a URL redirector site, a la tinyurl or bitly, that uses
wildcard DNS and the label in front of the domain for the lookup.
This is also great for naming images from imgur (etc).

Domain: "on-a.pizza"; label for the redirect: temporary-redirect

https://temporary-redirect.on-a.pizza/

In Slack, eg, it will show the full URL and not the redirect to
another site to load an image. (Which in that example is from the
https://http.cat/ error codes. The https://httpstatusdogs.com/
is more complete, but doesn't have as cool a site URL.)

Another example for a news story:

https://reverse-block.on-a.pizza/

But it's not a public redirector, it's just for me. I've written myself
a phone connector so I can create named links on the go and a command
line version for desktop. (It's a simple API, and I could create a web
page, but then I'd an account management system better than an
"Auth: Bearer" header. Login pages, ugh.)

Saucy "top level domains are fun" Pizza