How To: Prop and Cool Your Laptop with a Water Bottle

Blogger Ron Brinkmann doesn’t want to buy an overpriced laptop stand or build his own DIY laptop stand. Instead, he takes the cheap and easy route and uses a $6 hot water bottle as a water-cooled laptop stand. Brinkmann says:

Yup, buy a hot water bottle, fill it up with tap-water (room-temperature is fine) and insert strategically between laptop and lap. It’s comfy, acts as a nice heat-sink, and as a bonus it probably blocks a fair bit of the dangerous ‘electronic rays’ that are shooting out of the bottom of the computer straight at your important bits.

Brinkmann claims the water bottle works great on the table as well—just lean your laptop on the water bottle and the rubber surface grips the table and keeps your propped up laptop in place. Nothing beats this cheap and simple, and the cooling effect of the water bottle means no more burning laps.

Popularity: 15%

How To: Download Free Video Workouts for Your iPod

Men's Health magazine online offers four free workout videos that you can download, drag into iTunes, and sync directly to your iPod. The routines range in intensity from the at-home muscle plan—which suggests a circuit of exercises you can do at home—to more gym-focused workouts like the "Ultimate Strength-Boosting" workout. The videos are short and serve more as reminders for how to correctly do the exercises rather than 30-minute as-you-go walkthroughs. For even more free iPod video workouts, check out previously mentioned iPod Gym. The Men’s Health videos require a free registration with the site (or quickly stopping the page load before it hides the direct video links).

Popularity: 14%

How To: Edit contacts right from your chat list

Posted by Robby Stein, Associate Product Marketing ManagerWhen I add a new friend to Gmail chat, sometimes my friend’s email address is added as their contact name, such as hikingfan@gmail.com. I personally like to have the name of all my chat friends …

Popularity: 25%

With this ringtone, I thee complete

The folks over at LifeClever have gone where I have not dared to tread. Last August, in a post about the iPone commercials’ soundtrack, I pointed out that the ringtone showcased in the ads is actually—horrors—not available on the iPhone. I went o…

Popularity: 7%

Web Standards Design + Development group

From the fine pilots over at Airbag, comes news of a newly formed group of web professionals: “…to form a strong network of individuals who have taken the initiative to become craftsmen of their trade. Today it is a list of names, tomorrow it will be a force for good—or at the very least a good list to have when you’re in a financial crunch and the guy schlepping real estate is paying $50 per new lead.” Joined! #

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Amazon Ups Customer Review Usability

We talk about Amazon often here on Get Elastic, because you’ll always find some innovation, design or usability improvement to blog about there.
Amazon sometimes attracts more reviews than customers want to read. So Amazon provides tools to filter r…

Popularity: 18%

Starting with CSS and bug fixing tips

I receive a lot of e-mail per day and some of them are from people who want my help on CSS or if I know why certain things don’t work or show up in IE 6 or 7 etc. If I could help fix their problem? In a lot of cases I need to e-mail back that the cod…

Popularity: 18%

Pre-release version of iPhone firmware 2.0 reveals Import SIM Contacts feature

The pre-release version of Apple’s iPhone firmware 2.0 included in the latest Apple iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) Beta 4 (Build 5A258f) which is currently available only to members of the iPhone developer program has revealed a feature dubbed Import SIM Contacts.

Popularity: 7%

When it comes to the 3G iPhone, Fortune favors the bold prediction

Seems like every other day there’s some sort of rumor about the next-generation iPhone. This time around it comes from no less of a source than Fortune, which alleges that AT&T will actually subsidize the next model to the tune of around $200. Gi…

Popularity: 7%

iPhone vs. BlackBerry, round two

You like your iPhone? What do you love about your iPhone? As you may recall, ChangeWave Research did a study back in February to see how the iPhone fared among business users. The unequivocal answer? Pretty darn well. But that does not satisfy the numb…

Popularity: 8%