Category: Personal

Making a cheap bookshelf using milk-crates

A couple weekends ago, my fiance and myself came up with the idea to make custom bookshelf using milk-crates. We didn’t actually have any milk crates, so we had to scour sites like Kijiji and Craigslist to find people in our area giving them away, or selling them cheaply. We also aquired some from a small corner store we visit frequently, first for free, then having to pay small amounts for them until we cleared them out!

Making this bookshelf will be pretty straightforward, and you don’t need many tools or additional items to make it. And, all you really need for this design is a total of 6 milk crates. However, this can change based on your design or what you plan on extending it to. 

First we had to figure out how wide the two milkcrates pushed together would be, so my fiance decided to use a small lighter to visualize the width before heading over to the home store. Not sure if this is the best method, but it seemed to work – lol!

So, let’s get down to business and start building this thing!

Here’s the list of stuff we had to procure.

  • Box of 1.5″ by 1/4″ stove bolts, with nuts. We got the box of 100 total nuts and bolts.
  • Box of 5/16″ fender washers (small hole, big disc)
  • Drill + drill bit (depending on bolt location)
  • Vice Grips, Wrench or (ugh!) Pliers to hold the bolt
  • 1 or 2 bottles of spray paint of your choosing. We picked Gold cause bling!
Paint, Nuts/Bolts, and Washers
Here’s the washer and bolt assembly to see how it’s going to hold it together.
the three things that hold your milk-crate bookshelf together.

Now that you have parts procured and ready

So, now you’re going to want to lay out your shelf. Make sure to keep in mind that you may need to get it up, and down stairs or around tight corners. So, don’t make it too long, or, assemble it in it’s final resting place.

For our design, we chose to make a ‘staircase’ or ‘triangle’ out of the milk-crates, using 6 crates in total. This allows us to have it sitting in a triangle formation on the ground with shoe or other storage below, and 6 large spaces for books that will show up on an angle. You could also put it in a ‘staircase’ format up the wall, and have top shelves available for plants or other accessories.

You can do stepped shelves
Or, be fun like us and do a triangular shape !

So, once you have your design finalized (maybe you want to make an atari spaceship, or a rectangle, or whatever) lay out your milk crates in the design you want to get together.

Figure out where you want to put the bolts into the milk crates that will join them together securely, and easily. We chose to put 3 bolts per join, so in total we used this to secure ours (6 join spots):

  • 18 Bolts
  • 18 Nuts
  • 18 Washers

This is what we did to join ours together

First, we held them together and drilled a hole for the bolts.
Then, we tightened down with a screwdriver and vice-grips, or whatever they are called 🙂
Ended up looking like this, nice and tight!

What did it all cost?

  • Milk Crates – Free + $10
  • 2 Cans of spray paint  – $25.58
  • Fender Washers – $11.65 (50 qty) ($4.14 cost for the whole shelf)
  • Stove Bolts + Nuts – $15.61 (100 qty)  ($2.88 cost for this whole shelf)

Grand total of $42.60 with plenty of nuts/bolts/washers for more shelves!

 

 

Adding Speed Test and a Dark Theme to Pi-Hole Ad Blocker

Just keeping these notes here for anyone else that might find them useful.

First, install Pi-Hole as per regular.

Then, You’ll want to get the Dark Theme going with pi-hole.

  1. Open a terminal (or SSH if you’re remoting in) ( Ctrl + Alt + T )
  2. Type: cd /var/www/html/
  3. Type: sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lkd70/PiHole-Dark/master/install.sh
  4. Type: sudo chmod +x install.sh
  5. Type: sudo ./install.sh
  6. Follow the onscreen instructions!

Then, verify it is working (you might have to clear cache) and that you see the dark theme.

Now you can install the Speed Test Module for Pi-Hole.

sudo apt install python-pip

sudo pip install speedtest-cli

sudo apt install sqlite3

#Configure correct timezone for graph *Need for graph to work correctly

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

#select your timezone

Find php version 

if it is 5.x

if it is 7.x

Restart Pi

You can try run it using

If Everything is ok, proceed to next step

Get the new set of admin Code from github ( New method  or try old one here)

 

Then do this to test your installation, and then reload the Pi-Hole interface.

You should be good to go! Let me know in the comments if you’re not.

Just returned from Microsoft Tech Days 2008 in Ottawa

And I got a buttload of free stuff from Tech Days 2008. Including, but not limited to – a Microsoft sticker, a cool toque, a spoon that also functions as a pen, a technet 6 month subscription, tech ed dvd sets, vs pro 2008, expression web, and a bunch of demo software. All in all it was a great day, but, I didn’t like the fact that it started at like 7:30 am, way too early for geeky people.

Here’s a picture of the free stuff

tech crunch techdays 2008 o